London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

A walk in the woods

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So, where were we? Oh yes, Sunday.

Well, as I post shamefully little of other people’s music on here, start off by taking a listen to this:

https://allwillbewellrecords.bandcamp.com/track/the-garden

Which is the track by superb Oxfordshire folk-originals trio Little Red that I was shooting the video for.

The single oddest thing about it is probably doing a load of stuff in the knowledge that no noise you make will be recorded, even though the images are being faithfully taped! I’ve written about this before, but it’s probably the closest mainstream modern equivalent to silent film recording. Of course the result is a fair bit of speaking anyway, because people don’t just get highly worked up in silence most of the time – but with very low pressure on improv dialogue skills. (I’m really hoping no one with excellent lip-reading skills gets their hands or rather eyes on a couple of key moments. Fortunately the deaf are unlikely to watch music videos.)

The other oddity was that the ‘cast’ – namely myself and the multi-talented Jess Law – were also musicians; a product of being recruited through local muso networks but ironic given we were there to act in silence and make no music whatsoever! At least we sympathised with the discovery for the band performance shots that it’s much easier to actually play and sing than try to mime …

I’m going to keep details of the video up my sleeve but teaser photos from director Ant Appleby are atmospheric, intriguing and seem to manage to avoid me looking like a clown, so keep your eyes peeled for release info …

I’ve also discovered that waltzing on a leaf littery (and occasionally brambly) forest floor in hiking boots is a lot more difficult than I would have allowed for.

A very long weekend

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I was going to write about Sunday today.

But then this video from Saturday popped up in my news feed and I thought it was too good to pass up. So, ladies and gentlemen, your attention please, for, their first time on camera – The Filthy Spectacula!

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10155191451830296

Enjoy – and let it tempt you to come and see us live – in Camden this month, Liverpool at Easter or one of our various festival slots over the summer!

At the Thunderbolt, Bristol. Video by Mel Cook.

Get up to much at the weekend?

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This is the inevitable first theing on a Monday colleague question (even if, like me, you don’t get into the office until about 1pm). So here’s part of the answer …

Well, on Saturday I got a lift from a brewery to Bristol (continuing the alliterative theme, the brewery’s called Bingham’s and it’s where the Filthy Spectacula’s bassist works). This was to play at a birthday party (more alliteration! my life is turning slowly into Piers Plowman!).

I can’t remember the last time, if ever, I played for money at a private party (well, unless you want to count string quartet at weddings, which is a bit different, especially if you’re playing during the ceremony rather than the reception). Nor the last time, if ever, I came across a birthday party at a music venue – not a bar or a pub function room, but booking out the whole of a bona fide gig venue. It’s also quite unusual as a band to be the only live act playing a given night.

Despite all of which novelty, and it being only our third gig, and having been asked to provide an hour set (and we just about managed it!) when we previously hadn’t done much over 30 minutes, it was an absolutely cracking gig and the bits of the audience we could see appeared to love it (most importantly, the birthday girl!) – in a testimony partly to being a very visual band, Facebook seems to have been flooded with photos since, in most of which my bow at least is blurred from how fast I was playing. All right, and long exposures due to low ambient light helped. Don’t mess with my act.

Three gigs in, a certain amount of my stage persona with the Spectacula is taking shape already. There’s the weaving around, power-lunges, ‘riding’ chugging strings of notes, ‘firing’ the fiddle on stab chords, elbowing the lead singer out of centre stage for solos – all more or less copped from daft heavy lead guitarists. There’s also the intermittent bits of knock-off clog dancing (well I wear hiking boots onstage with these guys – what other dancing can you do in those?!), mostly when I’m not playing … and the wandering into the front of the audience for some of the longer or flashier solos. Further proof, by the way, of the solid dependable value of the Headway Band pickup – I’ve never had any trouble with it feeding back even well in front of front-of-house speakers. Crowds evidently love it (there’s usually some bloke doing the Wayne’s World ‘We are not worthy!’ reverence!) but it’s trickier than it looks.

Firstly, there’s the matter of getting on and off. The arrangements are fixed enough in these songs that I’ll generally have a very specific amount of time to wrap up before the next verse / chorus / whatever. And the odds that I’ll have to sing backing at least at some point in that section are fairly high, though it’s not guaranteed by a long chalk. That means I have to time getting back on stage and behind a mike stand. Secondly, so far I’m sticking to a straightforward jack lead from the fiddle pickup. So I have to judge how far I can get on it before being yanked back or suddenly finding myself playing acoustically. I should probably try walking gently forward around setup / soundcheck so I know where’s safe, but I haven’t got round to it yet. Then I also have to try not to get the wire round my legs, particularly when jumping on and off stage. The stage last night was about two foot off the floor – low still, but more than the mini-risers that were all the obstacle at the first two gigs. You don’t want to trip and go flying, in mid-performance, with about £700 worth of fragile musical equipment in your hands and no spares, however good an insurance deal you got with Musicians’ Union membership.

The logical solution is, of course, a wireless belt pack. 10-metre range, nothing to get in the way, if you do go too far you’ll lose signal and fade out rather than ending up on your back or unplugged and you can just jump back into range. But of course they’re not free. Somewhat oddly, I would probably have gone for it if I was still purely amateur – not so much because I was earning more as because of less literal ideas about return on investment. But at this point, when I can gig reasonably with what I’ve got, and music is tending not to pay for itself plus its share of living costs (certainly not bands, with the cost of rehearsal rooms and forward investment in recording and merch to be made back out of fees split), RoI seems like it should be quite black-and-white and I shouldn’t buy the radio gear till the band gigs have paid for it. I’ll have to stick to jumping off stage carefully, like a responsible and clear-headed rocker. Er …

So that was Saturday. Sunday can have another post I think.

Inside jobs and outside interests

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So there’s a very useful Facebook group called ‘Need orchestral / session players? Ask here!’. It’s got me quite a few of my orchestral dep jobs and generally probably more work than any of the other dep / muso needed groups I’m in or websites I’ve joined. All of which said, of course, there is a high level of stuff that’s irrelevant or uninteresting to me (like everyone looking for a French horn player, or based north of about Birmingham, for instance).

The other day I logged in and there were two new adverts there. One was for string players for Tchaikovsky’s first piano concert and the Bernstein Symphonic Dances from West Side Story. Apparently being promoted solely by the (student?) conductor, as there was the disclaimer ‘I can’t afford to pay anyone a fee, but drinks will be on me in the RAM bar afterwards’. Now this, with minor variations, happens fairly often, and he did say he was looking for ‘probably music students, but solid amateurs also welcome’ – in other words, there was no pretence this was a professional gig. But I’ve read through the Bernstein, admittedly several years ago, and they would be very solid amateurs to perform it on presumably one rehearsal on the day. It’s just plain hard to play, for lots of reasons. It seems a tall order, and almost a piece of vanity, to decide to do something so difficult (and I don’t imagine the Tchaikovsky is a piece of cake either) when you know you can’t pay anything out for musicians. I suspect the choice has more to do with a conducting career and CV than anything else – and as a jobbing musician rather than a career-launching student, I find it sad when performances are driven by ‘I want to have conducted/played/sung that in public’ rather than ‘audiences would like to / should have the opportunity to hear that live’.

The second advert was for a new marketing / management agency, with the usual spiel about being musician-run and focused on getting the best possible talent and performances first and foremost and so on and so forth. The interesting bit was that having been initially started and road-tested in I think two or three of the London music schools, they were now expanding to another nine conservatoires across England. Yes, you guessed the implication correctly – they recruit solely from among current conservatoire students, and by the look of it by application not (or at least well before) by audition.

Now someone with an Oxford First would be definitely letting himself in for accusations of hypocrisy if he acquired a habit of inverted snobbery about people having impressive qualifications versus having marketplace ability. But it sticks in my throat to have idealistic music-for-music’s-sake pure-performance-priority values proclaimed and then the cold policy: You want to be with us, you need to be heading for getting a conservatoire degree. I’m not saying they should start talent-hunting rappers and acoustic guitarists off the Tube busking pitches; but is it really answerable to their supposed goals to exclude any good classical performers who may be able to present a convincing CV and do a good audition but don’t have the ‘right’ background?

What it does achieve, of course, is keeping costs of recruitment (or at least selection) down, in a context where the agency probably anticipate having an oversupply of useable talent applications as it is and an undersupply of either inhouse resource to process them or opportunities with which to place them. Flicking through the MU handbook the other day, I came across a reference to many young UK classical musicians going abroad for initial orchestral experience and then returning with much better employment prospects. This suggests that in the orchestral world at least (and perhaps others?) the UK flooded market for musicians is a geographical exception (how else would it be easier to get work overseas?), something I had not at all expected.

I don’t think I’m quite ready to sacrifice a reliable if dull and draining part-time day job to a European symphony orchestra post yet (even if I was able to bag one of the latter). But every call for unpaid musicians or for conservatoire students and graduates only pushes me a little closer to it.

Popularity contests

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So last night The Filthy Spectacula had a gig, first support at a venue in Brick Lane (hipster central, I’m assured) for a slot on a mini UK tour by an Austrian indie rock (their description) band with a first album to promote.

After the fairly red-blooded rock-n-roll atmosphere of the Good Ship in Kilburn, it was actually a little bit of a shock. Firstly, a fair bit of the audience space was taken up with leather sofas. Very nice but not very live gig to my mind unless it’s going to be sort of vocal-lead downtempo jazz or something. Second and much more surprising, almost all the audience stayed seated on those throughout our set, which I think counts as an act of self-control with not just our musical style but us barking at them to drink and dance at intervals! – some apparently engrossed in their phones and one in the front couch row pulling out a magazine.

The second support were more or less the full band version of a singer-songwriter, very earnest young man stuff, not particularly striking to me but probably very much in tune with the venue and location. They certainly seemed to have brought a moderately substantial following. Shock number two: by a couple of numbers into the following set, the entire second support band and almost all of their fanbase had left, seemingly choosing an early night or at least an early exit over getting their money’s worth on the door charge or actually hearing the headline act of the night.

This was a shame, as I personally thought the headliners Charlywood were a lot more fun, more stylish and generally better. Their initially fairly straight-down-the-line indie sound moved quite quickly to incorporate large chunks of funk/soul and glam/cock-rock, and was all the better for it. Nonetheless they played their closing couple of numbers to the sound guy, the bar girl, their frontman’s girlfriend, and the rump three of the Filthy Spectacula entourage (me, our bassist and his wife). Which was a shame.

One of the real problems of live music at the moment is a difficulty getting people out of their homes away from Netflix, cable TV and supermarket-price booze and into music venues with a door charge and expensive beer in plastic cups (on any night, never mind a Wednesday). The lure of live music and loyalty to the idea of going to a gig don’t tend to do it unless it’s to see an act who were big stars when you were in your teens or at uni; the stronger bond of going to support your mate’s band is often what tips the balance. This is only reinforced by logical and practical but not very artistic commercial practices like demanding each punter declares an affiliation to one band on the bill when they arrive so that the door take can be split accordingly. But of course the result is that the mentality is not so much ‘I’m going to a gig’ as ‘I’m going to see Jack’s band’ – and the interest in getting there before Jack’s on or staying after he comes off is correspondingly reduced, as is the engagement with any other acts you may be around for. Evidently east London was a bit far for anyone to come from Austria.

I was going to go on a rant about how the Brick Lane experience indicates most gigging bands (and in fact a lot of other musicians, as profit share arrangements are increasingly common in barely-money-making classical music as well) are paid not according to their musical ability but their marketing skills. But actually that’s in the right direction but not quite on target. Since getting people you don’t have a personal link to into your gigs is so difficult without real reputational pull, marketing activity can be very low return on investment. All too often, the real aspect of an act that determines the size and enthusiasm of the audience for their set, and probably the financial take (depending on the arrangement for the event) is simply how many of their friends are within range and sufficiently emotionally dependent …

Please will you be my friend? … :-p

Instrument swapping

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There was a period – probably a couple of months – where the music ‘work’ (in a fairly broad sense) I was doing kept me doing a quite neatly balanced amount of playing violin and viola. Broadly, I was doing one-off classical jobs on viola (lots of practising orchestral parts!) and band practices on violin (using the pickup, quite a lot of writing my own parts, playing from memory / by ear / improvising, a lot more emphasis on the looks of the thing). Not an even distribution as such, but a division of labour that kept me in training on both.

That’s changed this month. Partly because I happen to have a period of a lot of band gigs (four in the course of February) and not much orchestral work (nothing between last weekend and mid-March at the moment); also because the freelance work I have picked up has temporarily swung to violin – both the just gone opera job and a St Patrick’s gig doing solo Irish folk and sitting in with a function band. At present the only viola job I’ve got in the diary is a choral/orchestral concert six weeks away which I won’t have the music to for probably five weeks.

So what’s the big deal with that? I hear you ask. Well, between you, me and the whole of the public internet, I tend to be rather reactive about music practice. Most of the time, I practice almost exclusively for the upcoming performances / recordings. Just working on technique or polishing up a solo repertoire rarely grabs my attention – there tend to be so many other things to do, like updating my blog, and doing laundry, and my part-time desk job, and sleeping …

And while violin and viola are similar (compared to the difference between, say, guitar and flute), they’re not so similar as to be able to leave one on one side for two months to play the other and then come back to it without a drop in standard – particularly if I want to play sympathetically to the inherent qualities of the instruments, rather than just produce the right notes. (As my viola-playing father always insists, and I entirely agree, a viola is not a violin transposed down a fifth!)

The frontman (if he’s human – I’m not sure) of the Filthy Spectacula asked me in a recent practice ‘What can you play?’. I reeled off various things that I can get a tune or some chords out of more or less, then pointed out that the more important question might be what do I own: I can make a passable fist of mandolin, for instance, but I’ve never owned one, so it would be a big ask to want me to play it in band gigs to change the sound up!

It’s fashionable to talk about the ‘time-rich’ and the ‘money-rich’ as if it was a zero-sum, and those with no money to spare must have time on their hands. That’s not a good principle, and nor is the reverse that the wealthy have no spare time or effort. But while I certainly can’t afford the money to own all the instruments I can sort of play (‘Hello. I’d like to buy a bass guitar, a mandolin, a mandocello, a ukelele, a bouzouki, a double bass, a djembe and a tambourine please … oh, and a melodica. Is credit card all right?’), I think I will need to muster the time to make sure I can really play the instruments I own good examples of. (The cheap tin whistle can probably deal with staying neglected in a drawer for a bit longer.)

Like buses

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I remember when a couple of December bookings had been cancelled on me sitting thinking ‘this is the busiest month for musicians; if I’m ending up with not much now then the January slump’s going to be about enough to assure me I can’t do this professionally.’

Well, from the 1st of February … this week was pretty much non-stop: band practice Monday evening, band practice Tuesday evening, band practice Wednesday daytime, opera rehearsal Thursday afternoon / evening, opera rehearsal Friday afternoon, opera performance Friday evening. The coming one is shaping up interestingly: band gigs Wednesday and Saturday, then music video shooting Sunday. My favourite, though, is in three weeks’ time, when my weekend runs: Friday 20th – gig with The String Project; Saturday 21st – gig with The Filthy Spectacula; Sunday 22nd – completing music video shoot. All I can say is, the video company had better have good coffee and a good makeup artist after gigging two nights running and the second one in London!

I’m not complaining really, of course. Getting a steady supply of gigs is half the battle of staying the course semi-pro (the other half, so far still somewhat shakier, is getting paid a good amount for them), and at least that seems to be working on about a 4/5 jobs a month level for the moment – and let’s be honest, that might well be the most I can easily fit around my part-time day job. And it can certainly only be good that the trend’s upwards from 2014 into 2015; whether it’ll stay that way it’s too early to say, but here’s hoping for not too many more anxious waits for anything suitable to come up!

On expression

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So, last night I was leading the orchestra for a concert opera performance (ie all the music, but not staged as drama, just performed as a concert programme for orchestra, choir and solo singers (and in this instance organ and offstage brass … )). In the interval I was buttonholed by an opera and I think more specifically Verdi enthusiast – a conversation in which I had to a lot of flying by the seat of my pants as I’m really no opera buff and Romantic grand opera all too often sounds just plain silly to me, but which also included her saying that the first violin part seemed to be quite difficult and I seemed ‘to be very into it’.

I didn’t have the heart to say to her that the main reason I was playing in such a visual and physical manner was to give as much lead as possible to the rest of the strings, given we’d had two short days’ rehearsal (about 12 hours in all probably) for a 2-hour opera! The interesting bit for me was trying to help with counting and entries (a) while being sure enough of being in the right place to actually improve the result and (b) without completely sacrificing the quality of my playing to the sort of conducting-with-both-hands-full activity that is usually thought of as leading an orchestral string section.

The sting in the tail of all this for a non-classical buff is that I was doing it while sitting down. One of The Filthy Spectacula asked me in all seriousness earlier this week ‘can you really play violin sitting down?’ – which I’m going to take as an indication of how thoroughly I put physicality and movement into playing with that band, as its idiom clearly demands (I should really get a radio belt pack for amplified gigs. The moment in the last gig I thought I might have pulled my lead wandering into the crowd during a solo isn’t one I’m keen to repeat). Personally, I think it is easier to play better standing up when I can, largely because my back seems to hold out much better that way; it’s obviously impractical for orchestras unless the conductor’s podium is going to be about 4ft high!

However, you do what you can with the circumstances, and it’s surprising how much rhythm and even dynamic information can be conveyed moving from above the waist only – and, apparently, how much emotion can be perceived by the audience, even if it was very largely artificial!

The question of sacrificing sound to movement, especially if the latter is thought of primarily as expressive, is an interesting one though. Biomechanically, a stationary instrument is a better starting condition for precise bow control, trouble-free left hand movement, a constant and good resonating context for the soundbox, and basically everything that enables better, more varied, more precisely controlled and more expressive sound production. But, ‘biomechanically’ deliberately implies that there is more to the situation than that. In practice, a better sound may well paradoxically be produced by a player who physically ‘gets into’ the music in terms of moving with phrasing and rhythm, using whole-body gesture to emphasise particularly loud notes, mimicking dynamic and mood with posture, etc. Presumably because the psychological engagement rather than detachment pays off more than the extra technical difficulties of near-constantly altering the physical relations and orientations of body to instrument to bow. Certainly being frozen to the spot so as to stay a constant distance from a recording mike is a constraint on me, though I’m used to being restricted by needing to see sheet music and perhaps a conductor, or even by a chair.

There’s a further point which would be very difficult to prove without scientific lab studies though, which is that for most audiences a slightly less well-played but much more visual and physical performance of the same music will be more convincing or enjoyable than a musically better one with total poker-faced technical concentration. And I mean this even of classical audiences, before anyone suggests snobbishness about rock gig crowds. For most purposes, the risk to tone, control and perhaps even tuning to moving at a level of energy and complexity significantly below that of ballet, breakdancing or rhythmic athletics is well worth it live. Beyond that it really depends on your abilities in all the fields concerned …

This is probably the best defence for the String Project’s gradual but determined move to minimalise use of sheet music onstage. I certainly would, and I think we all would, ultimately play better with parts there to fall back on, despite the extra ensemble engagement possible with clearer and more flexible lines of sight. But from video of our performances, it’s quite clear that doing away with the folders and music stands massively ups the game in terms of engagement and how easy it is to keep concentration on the band.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Even in music, the looks of the thing can be underrated.

Is anyone listening to the words?

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So, this Friday I’m leading the orchestra for a concert performance of a Verdi opera. It’s being sung to the original Italian libretto. Now I don’t speak Italian, but I do have good French, a moderate amount of Spanish, a smattering of Latin and a fairly good idea of what happened with Joan of Arc. Despite all of this, in the course of studying the score fairly thoroughly and listening to a couple of different recordings, I have acquired very little idea of what the plot looked like once Verdi or his librettist had finished with it – except that it seems to involve the French getting battered by the English, Joan / Giovanna having some kind of religious experience, arming herself, showing up unbidden and turning the military tide at least once, then her ending up a captive of the English and dead (so far, so predictable from general historical knowledge); and I think that she spends most of the stage time in love with King Charles of France (whaaat? somebody made that up). The chorus presumably may have little more idea of exactly what they’re singing some of the time, given as often happens they’ve been supplied with a phonetic guide to the libretto, which implies somewhat sketchy knowledge of the language!

Friday gone, The Filthy Spectacula were the third of five acts on a fairly mixed bill. I only remember hearing much of the words of the second act, Tony Black and the Collectors, who mixed a 50s rock-n-roll-ish musical sound (lots of two- and three-part harmonies, twangly archtop guitar, complex drumming on snare and floor tom alone largely with brushes) with wryly accurately observed lyrics of everyday contemporary England, somewhere between the Divine Comedy and Philip Larkin. The opening solo act may have been actually fairly lyrically clear (there was only electroacoustic guitar to block out the vocals after all) but I remember finding his being voice a bit too grating and tending to go out of tune, the need to change open tunings apparently between every song and all of his material being too alike to stay interesting for a half-hour set between them successfully obscuring whatever he was singing about. Fourth up were Tamuna, a bunch of five Sicilian expats who bill themselves as folk-rock but I’d suggest mix more funk with their native song tradition. Either way, their following of lithe, olive-skinned young women may have understood every word being sung as they danced enthusiastically, but as mentioned above I don’t speak Italian, and I think about half the audience were with me in not following a word of the songs. The headline act, Victor & the Rain Dog, were another power trio with more emphasis on subtlety than power. They had a fantastic rhythm section, with one of those jazz-trained drummers that annoy rock floor-shakers by making the most complex tricks look like they’re barely awake never mind breaking a sweat, and a virtuosic bassist. Credit where credit’s due, the Good Ship’s sound guy gave them excellent amplification as well. But while they certainly sounded stylish, neither their melodies nor their lyrics have stuck with me (the latter perhaps partly because the frontman’s very slightly Morrissey-esque vocals didn’t seem any of the clearest, however evocative).

I obviously don’t know how clear our vocals were, though the crowd seemed to pick up most of the words to the chorus Mr E got them singing along to. But then again it doesn’t have many words. I do know he blanked on one verse of one of his own songs and had to ad lib his way through it, and that the crowd seemed not to care in the least as long as we kept making tons of noise and I kept flailing around the stage and the front of the crowd like a cock-rock parody lead guitarist accidentally transferred to a violinist’s body.

I’ve always been down on engineers who mix bands with the guitars and drums drowning out the vocals and on vocalists who vaguely bawl the words six inches off the mike so even if you could hear them the words would be incomprehensible. Largely because the songwriters I’ve worked with have almost always written lyrics that deserve to be heard by the audience. But sometimes I wonder if it actually makes any difference to the audiences …

Return on originality

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So, last night’s Filthy Spectacula debut gig was pretty darn good performance-wise, though I say so myself. We certainly did a decent job of getting the crowd – previously fairly reserved, though energetic for the act immediately after us – jigging, cossack dancing, toasting and generally making almost as big and sweaty fools of themselves as us. And I think there was only one point where it was obvious I’d got a couple of bars out with the rest of the band …

We also managed to make £120 out of it, which if you’re not familiar with this world is a lot to get out of one set as an originals band. However, the fact that it also happens to be about the going rate for one orchestral pro musician for a concert set me thinking about contrasting income rates in different kinds of music, and some of the likely conclusions look fairly bizarre.

So, sticking to gigging bands for a minute. The higher pay is generally around for covers, function/party bands and tribute acts. Granted they probably play longer sets, but they certainly put in less creative effort than originals-focussed groups. Whether it’s actually easier, or more difficult, to write your own material or learn someone else’s more or less note-for-note is a decidedly equivocal area and I think it must depend on the musician(s) concerned; either way I’ll leave it on one side. What’s evident is that unless you rise very high in the profession, beyond the jobbing musician level entirely, there is effectively a premium on non-creativity. If you write your own stuff, you largely play for the fun of it. If you need or want money out of music, you’re going to have to do stuff that’s popular in a fairly slavish way and obey the whims of the audience.

So far, so reasonably clear, and perhaps not surprising. (Few covers or function bands would be realistically likely to write better songs than Chuck Berry or the Stones, and would presumably not play them quite as well if they had to give more practice time over to writing and arranging.) But where it gets really interesting is if you throw in classical music work.

At almost the bottom end of the orchestral scale, I can get a fee for a concert that is similar to what a good-ish function band might be getting per head for a couple of hours’ entertainment – on New Year’s Eve when prices are up by something like 50%. But it’s not so much that that is striking. Classical concerts are long compared to a lot of band gigs, 90 minutes to two hours of music because (a) there’s only ever one orchestra on the bill and (b) there isn’t backchat between items in the same way – or as much time spent getting on and off and changing things around.

The more important thing is how much unseen work is involved. A gigging band, whether function or originals, is likely to be rehearsing once a week, for a couple of hours or so, to play maybe once a week but for an originals band more likely once or twice a month. If you’re gigging much more than that you’re probably rehearsing more often too. And there will have been an initial build-up period, quite possibly months, of learning repertoire, gelling, getting things ready for the off. So whichever way you cut it, you’re looking at non-classical musicians doing maybe 4 or 6 hours’ rehearsal per hour of gigging, on an ongoing basis, which certainly changes the apparent pay scales.

Most of the classical one-off / dep jobs I do (or even see advertised) have rehearsal on the day only. Probably about 3 hours, though I’ve done less. In other words, at most twice the amount of performance time spent in rehearsal. Admittedly, it’s advisable to have some familiarity with the music before showing up, but it’s fairly rare for practice parts to actually be sent out, and conversely most gigging musicians will spend time away from practices learning songs and parts or tying down what they’re going to do in a new original.

I’m not for a moment suggesting classical musicians are overpaid. I would be willing to suggest that non-classical ones (always thinking of the ‘blue collar’ level, not U2) are generally underpaid. But the whole situation smacks more of being a bad example of free-market economics. There are a lot more competent gigging vocalists and drummers out there than there are competent orchestral bassoonists and violists. Scarcity keeps classical freelance pay high while so many bands have come to accept barely covering their costs that it can be extremely difficult to get any more. Most organisers, in a still-slow economy and a particularly grim period for getting people out of their homes to events of any sort, will probably hire a mediocre band for half the price rather than a really good one for double. It may be a false economy, but it’s an understandable one. The real oddity, of course, is that most people who get paid anything for classical music have taken some form of it up by the age of 12 – and not given up entirely in between, though it’s by no means a given that they’ve pursued academic music, conservatoire training, etc. Guitarists who started at 16 or 20 are fairly common, but seemingly by their teens most people have developed a horror of both the sound of classical music and the idea of reading dots (which is very odd when you think about it). The result is a selection for people with more self-discipline, richer or pushier parents, and quite possibly less adequate social lives, during the ages about 8-21, to be probably able to monetise their musical ability rather more lucratively.

I’m playing devil’s advocate to some extent of course. Classical musicians are partly paid good wages for one rehearsal and a concert because they are expected to be at performance standard after a couple of hours rehearsing. There is a technique to sight-reading and performing well at little more than second reading, and I don’t think it’s inherently inferior to playing confidently and reliably from memory, though video evidence of myself shows removing the ever-present music stand can make a musician much more engaging to watch and hear and I passively accept the prevalent gigging prejudice against having written prompts of any kind on stage as a result. Nonetheless there’s more to this whole situation than original creative people getting paid better than derivative guitar-thumpers.