London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

Busy busy busy

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Anyone who thinks musicians get paid a lot for a couple of hours on stage really has no idea.

In the course of this week, I’ve been doing festival applications for The Filthy Spectacula; organising gigs for The String Project; catching up on recording and filing music expenses (joys of self-employment); going through my part and the score to Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco with a fine-toothed comb so that I can lead the orchestra for it a week tomorrow; learning new Filthy Spectacula songs so we can go from a half-hour set tomorrow to a one-hour set a fortnight later; keeping a close eye on music job/dep adverts because they won’t stay unfilled till I ‘have time’ to apply; joining the Musicians’ Union; getting a network railcard to reduce travel costs; trying to help keep up band social media/comms presence; going to rehearsals … and somewhere in the middle trying to make sure I sleep, eat, wash and do my desk job, seeing as even with all this hustling the lion’s share of my income doesn’t actually come from music.

The observant among you will have noticed there wasn’t much practice in there. This is an irony I’ve written about before, that trying to get paid to play music in public is a fairly good way to spend less time actually playing (especially in private).

On the plus side, having so much music work to do is at least good excuse for having less time to write about doing music work. Sorry it’s been a while!

Traditional(ist) music

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I think it’s because I’m coming back to doing fairly standard classical (often orchestral) concerts after a period of doing very few, but I was struck again at Friday’s gig by the sheer force of unexplained tradition when it comes to art music performance. I think I’ve written about it before, but it bears some repetition.

Why do audiences clap when performers walk on, having not done anything to be applauded on? Does anyone else get the temptation to bow and walk off, as merely arriving on stage has apparently been an adequately satisfying performance? Equally, why do many audiences applaud the orchestra off stage at the end of the concert as well – when they have usually just been applauding all the performers generally and in as many different permutations as the imagination of the conductor can devise? (Got to love the stand-up, sit-down routine, especially when various wind and brass are clearly not sure whether they are meant at a given point.)

The dress codes. Seriously. I think I’m unusual among male musicians in recent decades in having managed to get some wear out of my black tie gear between the ages of 18 and 28 other than at concerts, largely because of going to an Oxford college where they have black tie balls every 3 years. At least women generally get to wear almost anything black and not too revealing – but if they don’t reckon black suits them, it will still be an essentially unnecessary expense. It’s not like ‘orchestral black’ is the only conceivable way to achieve a smart and reasonably coherent appearance.

OK, this one really gets me. A standard part of an orchestra leader’s job (even if a sometimes quite unnecessary one) is supervising tuning in rehearsals. And yet in concerts, at least the more traditional ones, the leader will delegate this role to their desk partner, and then walk on (to a separate round of applause, of course) after the orchestra have tuned – having presumably either tuned offstage or decided to chance it. Surely this just drags out stage business (which no one came for) at potentially the expense of musical quality?

It was a bit of a relief when Friday’s audience applauded fairly freely between movements. If this is going to be destructive, it’s usually pretty obvious (the players and, most visibly, the conductor won’t relax between movements, but rather carry on more like a long rest than a stop and start of something new). As I’ve more or less written before, if it doesn’t interrupt the musical construct for the players to relax, shuffle, turn pages, stretch their shoulders and possibly even retune, then it won’t interrupt for the audience to clap. And a lot more than a few seconds’ applause separated symphonic movements until into the nineteenth century, after all.

I find this an ironic contrast with so-called ‘traditional music’ (in Britain). Not least because most of the norms around the latter have sprung up in the last 60 years or so (whereas classical norms, while still very arriviste compared to most of the music they are applied to and certainly more recent than most people expect, were mostly approaching their current form by about 1920). When was the last time you saw a British folk band with no guitar? And yet I am assured by well-researched histories that no-one thought of accompanying British folk songs or tunes with guitar until into the 1950s. Guitar was for jazz, American music of various kinds, or the classical repertoire – using it for folk was no more instinctive than playing folk with drumkit, saxophone or tuba. With that goes the whole notion of approaching folk song (particularly; but also dance tunes) through vertical set harmonies – guitar chords – whereas as far as I understand it most secular folk pre-WW2 was harmonised in a very ‘horizontal’ way with semi-improvised supporting lines that could all be considered counter-melodies to some extent. (There is a separate issue of those musicians, like church band-choirs before the hegemony of the organ, and marching bands, who used sheet music in general but arguably belong more to the folk ‘world/tradition’ than the classical one.) And of course giving ultimate balance and level control to sound engineers has become so prevalent that more folk performances than not are actually fully wired, even while mostly carefully sticking to (electro-)acoustic instruments. But all of this is a rambling coda to the original thought …

Hello Neil Hannon

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Well, I know what’s going to be stuck in my head today. In a couple of hours I’m off to Birmingham for an orchestral concert, and because there’s hardly any money involved, I’m going by National Express. Cue expectations of overpriced crisps and tea sold by a jolly middle-aged woman with a rump the size of Luxembourg, prams and calorie-counting students, all inspired by the Divine Comedy’s biggest hit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3NVPOedkEk

See you tomorrow!

Lead the music

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Organising musicians is said to be like herding cats. Leading musicians is presumably then an effort to repeat the Pied Piper of Hamelin’s trick, but on creatures much less gullible and much more independent-minded than either rats or small children. Nonetheless it is a feat surprisingly often required …

I was a little surprised and highly gratified to be asked to lead the orchestra for #OperaCo’s Giovanna d’Arco, which I’m playing for in a couple of weeks. Now in classical orchestral terms this has a more or less defined meaning, some parts of which make sense and some don’t. For starters, it’s tied up by convention with sitting at the front of the first violins. Now while certainly you want to lead a section, let alone all the strings or notionally the whole orchestra, from where you can be seen, I don’t think there’s any reason why the principal violist or cellist shouldn’t be in just as good a position to head up the string section. And what do you do when you’re there, I hear some of you ask? Well, partly (thanks to convention that orchestral string players playing the same thing are all supposed to move the bow in the same direction at the same time), rule on bowings for the first violins, which are then passed down to the other sections wherever the rhythm is the same, in principle. And with this goes a certain amount of stuff about phrasing and delivery, which ought to be more important than the sacred bowing – but in practice isn’t. Must sharpen my pencil so I can scribble on my part and pass it around the other strings … It’s also common (and, if you can keep your place at least as well as the other string players, often useful) to ‘give’ entries and sometimes some points of rhythm (changes of long held chords for instance) by a sort of minimal conducting with the instrument, shoulders and head – being only able to move above the waist as orchestras almost always play sitting down. This does have potential to look and feel just as strange as it sounds, although it can help keep an under-rehearsed section together a lot. If another section (usually the second violins, being closest in role and position) tries to follow the overall leader and it turns out they’ve lost their place in, say, a fugue, it can of course not help at all!

The slightly more unexpected bit, though, is that quite often (though it depends on the egos of the conductor, leader and where applicable soloists) the leader is also cast as sort of assistant musical director, keeping an ear on the general orchestral sound and advising / flagging things up if necessary. (Here, the question of why this should be done from the first violins expands to why it should not equally well be done from the woodwinds or even the horns – though up until the late Romantic period most writing uses the strings almost all the time and the winds much more sparingly, so that a string player may – only may – have slightly more sense of what’s going on overall. That said, the timpanist or the trumpeters will have much more time to listen without zoning in on playing their own part … ) The obvious performance token of this is the leader usually supervising the orchestra tuning; though (as very often with conductors) whatever real work is involved is done in rehearsal and finished by the start of the performance.

I’ve been gradually settling into a sort of assistant-director role in The String Project for a while now as well. Here, there’s really no perceptible change in rehearsals or gigs at all, although I have run a couple of practice’s when Ben’s been away and we’ve had a gig coming up or new people learning parts. The significant differences are being much more involved in practical planning and organising (sometimes in collaboration and gradually slipping off the leash), and arranging a lot more music for the group, where until fairly recently Ben would compose or supply everything. (I haven’t set myself the job of writing anything from scratch yet, though it’s an appealing idea … ) With the first half, of course, goes needing to get the rest of the band-cum-collective to respond to diary emails and the like from me as efficiently as ones from Ben.

Actually, that’s not saying much. We’re back at herding cats again. And perhaps if ‘leaders’ are chiefly deputy organisers, then that makes me the sheepdog in the metaphor, trying to corral and direct animals not naturally given to herding together, but not in charge of creating the strategy or even direction. You know what, this might be a good point to drop this image.

Filthy lucre

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Taken from an advert for an extra band member:

Unpaid at start. Once we get some money, we’ll split.

Of course I know what they mean. But a significant number of musicians alone, let alone anyone else concerned with musical organisation, seem to think it’s terrible to want, or need, to make, or indeed make at all, money out of playing music. Recently someone left a Facebook group for dep/session musician adverts in a bit of a huff, after being told the group was there for paid gigs rather than seeking extra members for his amateur orchestra (which I think is a fair distinction, and there is not a shortage of facebook groups where unpaid gigs and amateur orchestras can be advertised), with the wonderful words:

In that case I’ll leave. I enjoy playing whether I’m paid or not.

Now I enjoy playing whether I’m paid or not. But I have yet to find that bus and train companies will accept my enjoyment in lieu of hard cash when I wish to buy tickets to, say, travel to a rehearsal or concert I’m playing. And I have yet to find that enjoyment will enable me to do without food for protracted periods of time (in fact, being type 1 diabetic, if I tried to do without food for more than a day or so I would probably be in a coma not enjoying anything).

Of course this is partly the English embarrassment about talking money being vulgar. But it’s also to do with some vague notion (actively supported by people that want musicians to play for free) that practising an ‘art’ is its own reward and therefore there is no need to pay for it. I asked a showcase organiser recently (whose ad was a bit vague) ‘Any fee?’; he replied ‘No, no fee, just the chance to play your music in front of a great audience for free!’. It is frankly bizarre that any performer or craftsperson should be interpreted as meaning ‘Will I be charged to do what I do?’ rather than ‘Will I be paid?’

I don’t say this often, but I do somewhat respect hip-hop culture for not pretending its artistic ideals (somewhat odd as they may be) are compromised by earning high incomes from music or considering commercial considerations when creating. If you’re minded to argue that this is not the pure flow of the art that compels you to create whether you wish to or not and that nothing should detract from absolute godlike creativity, please consider that the vast majority of Mozart’s entire collected works were commissioned (and he miserably failed to make a living without some kind of musical day job); and that Bach was always employed as master of music to one aristocrat and his chapel or another, even the Brandenburg concertos being written as an application portfolio (he wasn’t hired).

Give us a break here. Lots of people have hobbies that look similar to jobs, from builder-like DIY on upwards. It doesn’t usually compromise the expectation that if you get a skilled, experienced professional to do work for you, you pay them as a professional not a hobbyist. Most of the explanation for why it’s difficult to get paid as a musician is down to market economics in a crazy imbalance of supply and demand (which is why, if you want to make money, learn the viola); but let’s none of us try and pretend that’s justified by late-Romantic ideas about music being different to any other craft or trade that can also be a pastime.

By the way, ‘filthy lucre’ is also what we’re going to call the Filthy Spectacula merch stall. Of course …

A Modest Proposal

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– for the making of life easier for chronically anxious lonely young adults:

Do you remember the media furore when it turned out Prince William wasn’t going to wear a wedding ring? If you’re not from the UK this probably passed you by completely. Anyway, for collectors of legal trivia, it is a necessary part of a British wedding ceremony for the groom to give the bride a ring; the other way round is optional, but increasingly heavily enshrined in tradition.

Conversely, a few male celebrities (Johnny Depp, I think?) have recently popped up wearing engagement rings, traditionally confined to the other side of the relationship.

I think life would be easier for people with massive neuroses about the footings on which knowing someone are started, about failing to read hints and signals, and about confirming negative stereotypes of single heterosexual men (so, like me then), if the following became normal:

  • Engagement rings for both sexes. It’s just equal and progressive frankly.
  • Relationship rings. These might have to be worn on a different finger, as the options for differentiation are getting booked up otherwise, and could be abandoned if and when you chose to proceed to something more formal, but would be a useful indicator on about the same level as listing yourself as ‘in a relationship’ on Facebook, and for everyone who objects in one way or another to the institution of marriage (or just doesn’t want to go there themselves).
  • Similar or possibly identical to the above, what I think of as the ‘bugger off’ ring. This might be worn regardless of actual relationship status, but indicates without having to actually discuss the matter that being chatted up, flirted with, asked out on a date, attempted to be had a one night stand with, etc. etc., is completely off the table and any interest shown in you is purely friendly (or feigned for professional or networking purposes, to avoid falling out with your friends’ friends, or to keep the peace).

Wouldn’t life be so much better if people with clever ideas could legislate for the instant and uniform changing of social norms and behaviour? Umm …

Hebdomadal complexities

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To some extent, yes, I’m belatedly bandwagon-jumping as everyone else in the blogosphere has already written about the Charlie Hebdo shootings, apparently. But, there are some things that appear to a mind like mine a few days after the initial shocking event as further information emerges, events caused by or linked to the original continue and people start to reflect beyond knee-jerk emotion. The really important one of these, I think, is that the situation that briefly crystallised in twelve deaths a few days ago is very much more complex than it has been made to appear, perhaps particularly concerning whether being destroyed by evil people with an immoral goal makes you or your actions good. By way of response, I don’t think a unified argument essay like most blog posts (including mine) and opinion/comment articles will do; anything I could produce would only oversimplify and I think the situation is too important to make hack writing fodder out of. Here, instead, are some individual reflections, roughly ordered, that may or may not be coherent or consistent – like pretty much any position about Paris’s still ongoing crisis.

  • I do not think killing civilians has ever been either an ethical or an effective response to anything.
  • It is part of the essential makeup of what is known as something like Western liberal democracy that if people choose to make and distribute cartoons mocking pretty much anything, then they are allowed to do so; they cannot be punished for doing so, though the material may be restricted on age grounds and other parties may seek to insist on apologies or even withdrawal of the material on grounds of their being misrepresented or upset.
  • The right to freedom of expression is primarily about the freedom to state the truth, however inconvenient, and opinions, however eccentric, without fear of punishment or retribution. It will need to end up covering indiscriminate mockery that does not present a point of view or critique as such, because it is not feasible to draw a line between the two, but it is not primarily a statement about the latter.
  • Charlie Hebdo specialised in indiscriminate mockery of anything in the news, from funerals of French ex-presidents to the girls abducted by Boko Haram. It does not, and does not aim to, produce credible political, ethical or religious viewpoints or critiques. It constitutes an unlikely martyr to freedom of speech; more to freedom of frequently insensitive ridicule.
  • Multicultural societies, or probably in fact all societies, require means of negotiating accommodation between conflicting desires about what is and is not done in the public sphere and differing standards of what is and is not permissible. Shooting cartoonists certainly does not constitute an adequate means of such negotiation, though I rather think neither does banning all large or overt religious symbols (including religiously-sanctioned dress codes) in the public sphere including state educational establishments.
  • Arguing from the Charlie Hebdo attack to the ‘inherently violent’ nature of Islam is as inaccurate, logically bankrupt and counterproductive as arguing from the Breivik killings to the inherently violent nature of the Norwegian people, from George W Bush to the inherently imperialist nature of Christianity, or from the Crusades to the inherently violent nature of all religion.
  • Crime suspects being shot in a gun battle with police is never a victory for justice. The only victory for justice as we (I) understand it is the finding of suspects guilty by fair and open trial and their proportionate and legal punishment. The next best approach to that is the finding of suspects innocent by fair and open trial and their unconditional release.
  • Declaring war upon Muslims, or even specifically upon jihadists, is exactly the sort of polarisation that terrorists want to achieve. If they are dignified by being treated as opponents rather than merely criminals, they can crystallise the world into those for them and those against, and rally ‘their side’ to ever more open conflict.
  • Vigilante justice is an oxymoron, particularly when the vigilantes wear masks. Yes Anonymous I’m looking at you.
  • The discussion cannot and must not end here. Or anywhere.

Working weeks

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So, this is stacking up to be a fairly busy month for weekend music jobs.

On Friday 30 January, I’m playing for a concert performance of Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco. If, like me, you struggle with the way Italian transmogrifies names, it’s about Joan of Arc; and apparently rarely performed (which I always wonder about as a description: does it mean you need some exorbitant stage gear (like the helicopter in Miss Saigon); or that it’s hard to cast (like the large number of principals in Utopia Limited); or just that it’s not actually that good? I guess I’ll find out). So this outing in a church in Clapham might be something of an event if you’re a Romantic opera aficionado.

The Friday before that, it’s the gig debut of The Filthy Spectacula, at the Good Ship in Kilburn. Still possible to buy advance tickets here for cheaper than on the door, and all of it counts towards how much we actually get paid! A fair bit of this week has also been spent finalising merch details (well, the first batch – who knows where it might run to?), besides hustling for other gigs of which more later …

And just a week today, 16 January, I’m popping up to Birmingham to play for this:

concert poster 150116

Which should be fun too, though the National Express journeys (no budget to cover train fares) there and back may be less so.

After that it might slow down, although of course I’d rather be working every week at least. Though there is a question over how much any of these three jobs will actually make me, which I’ll go into when I’m less tired …

Practice practices

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No one denies the importance of practice. Including me. I do quite a lot and I try to keep it varied to reflect the performance I’m doing – I need to keep my folk fiddle in shape as well as my Romantic rich vibrato and projection and my classical cleanness of line. If I was properly dedicated I’d practise with the pickup and an amp, and practise rock soloing over riffs as well as jazz improv over changes. Haven’t quite got there yet, though I do try and do some improvising on a regular basis – whatever you practise at, you improve, and that includes the ability to make it up as you go along! Actually, the freer your compositional structures are, the more you probably need to practise and rehearse individually and together, so that you can produce a good result without having to tie down material note-for-note.

But I digress. Returning to music with more or less fixed notes, there is a great emphasis in most advice about practice and effectiveness on breaking down very small units. Don’t play what you can play, just pick out the bits you can’t; don’t play through whole movements in one go, focus on the eight bars, four bars, whatever that trip you up and work on them slowly and in detail till you’ve mastered them; don’t try to learn a whole piece if it’s hard by your standards, set targets to do bits at a time.

Well, yes. That works. Particularly for getting over very much technical hurdles. But it can leave you buried in a morass of individual notes, four-bar chunks and technical hurdles, having mastered producing the right notes in the right places – but not with any idea of how the whole thing fits together or is art. I would suggest that if the performer doesn’t have an integral artistic overview of what they play, the odds of a listener achieving one are almost nil, and if they do so they will be frustrated with the performer for obstructing it.

So, here’s my B-side to breaking music down for technical practice: yes, do it, do it rigorously, use small units and focus points to untie the bits that leave your fingers (lungs/tongue/whatever you play with (whaay!)) in knots. But both before and alongside doing that, play the whole movement. Even if it’s badly. If you can manage to, play it with the other parts (if it’s not a solo). If you can’t do that, try and find a recording – though don’t be a slave to the style and interpretation of that version.

And shocking as it sounds, you may need to do this quite a lot. You may need to keep coming back to it as you gradually get on top of (whaay!) the difficult passages if at first you can’t see the wood for the trees. You may have to spend weeks, seriously, on getting the hang of what a piece does, where it’s going, its musical outline and character. And it is possible to thoroughly misjudge those things first time round!

Some people like to sit down and make notes, even mark up their copy, concerning themes and who’s leading at what point and what’s tune as opposed to accompanying figuration that happens to be sharing the same instrument … I’ve tried that approach and it tends to leave me more bewildered than I was before. I know a fair amount of theory for someone without a music degree, but in order to grasp, comprehend a piece I usually end up applying it only after having listened and played repeatedly and ‘felt’ what’s going on; then I can go ‘oh yes: introduction; exposition; second subject in the dominant; development; recapitulation’ or whatever it may be, but also have a less theoretical and more ‘gut’ grasp of the flow and narrative of what I’m playing.

I don’t think it matters how you achieve this as long as your method works for you. What I say in all seriousness is that it may be as much effort to learn and master the overall aesthetics and architectonics of a piece as its most technically demanding passages; and there is as little point performing without having succeeded in the one as in the other.

Perfection and performance

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In the autumn, I did a string instrument performance workshop-course thing run by Oxford University’s adult education department. The musicologist, composer, cellist and pianist teaching the course had a real bee in his bonnet about ‘classical’ string playing becoming both technically fixated and highly conservative and homogeneous within the last 80 years or so. As far as I can recall from the two or three times he gave this vent, the argument went something like this:

In the 1920s and 1930s, music recording goes mass-market for the first time ever. This means individual performances can be replayed and scrutinised over and over again in the minutest detail; not just by musicologists and academics but by audiences, performers and teachers. It also mean it is possible for the first time to really compare your own (or your student’s, or your rival’s) performances with those of the leading professionals of the day.

At the same time, Heifetz was the reigning genius of the violin, one of the most admired art music performers of any instrument at the time, and making full use of the career potential of recording (something that could not be said of all musicians at any time, but certainly not between the world wars). And while he certainly had style and originality of interpretation, he also had an astonishingly, rigorously perfect technical mastery that was perhaps easier to imitate or to grasp.

As a result, players (initially students, but the students of today are of course the career professionals of tomorrow) started to focus more and more on technique being absolutely right and dependably so. Technical slips became more and more taboo, whatever the other virtues of someone’s playing. But the result of making such great efforts to achieve dependability was of course a reduction in risk-taking – both in spontaneous modifications to interpretation (if you haven’t practised exactly how you’re going to play, you might not quite get what you try to do right), in individuality of style (what if a deliberate but unexpected effect is taken for a mistake?) and in pushing your own envelope (better to stick with what you know you can do without errors than try something that’s only just within your grasp and risk making a mistake). The process, of course, gathers momentum from being gradually more and more universal, but also particularly from the increasing access of players to recording themselves and playing the recording back without hiring studios, from the cassette recorder onwards.

Last night I was chatting to one of my bandmates in the String Project about this, and it struck me that this phenomenon coincided fairly well with art music ceasing to be viewed as exciting. The original musician rumoured to have sold his soul to the devil was the violinist Paganini back in the early nineteenth century; Romantic pianist-composer Liszt was considered little short of terrifying by audiences and older musicians alike (Clementi, by this point elderly, asked after hearing him play ‘Does it bite?’) and art music seems to have had capacity to shock, dynamise and inspire well into the twentieth century. But the idea gradually fades, whether by the diminishing returns of ever more jarring modernist and postmodernist composers, or by lessening musical conviction and communication.

Now there are a couple of fallacies it would be easy to fall into. Technical mastery and emotional effect, or effect of any kind upon an audience, are not straightforwardly mutually exclusive. Indeed, at both extremes of the range it is fairly evident that one cannot do without the other. But, as with any other choice of priorities, focusing more on one means to some extent focusing less on another, and in general what you work at is what you will achieve. So if you focus entirely on playing a piece right, and once you can do so move on, never having worked at its mood, expression, effect or style, then you will play it correctly, but it is really only chance whether you play it in a way which is engaging, enjoyable or moving to listen to, or in any way genuinely craftsmanlike, let alone artistic.

Secondly of course, communication and engagement do not mean that every piece has to be a channel for the direct pouring of the performer’s most extreme emotions out to the audience. That may be a good approach to a considerable amount of 19th- and 20th-century music, but it would be murder to most Classical (sensu strictu) pieces and should be treated with real caution in the Baroque. There are excellent pieces of music which, played with style, should be light, entertaining, balanced, perhaps with a satisfying sense of structure and completeness. Played purely with attention to notes, they will most likely be dull as ditchwater, an interminable row of unremarkable little notes. Attempting to make them into heart-wrenching storms of passion would be rather like trying to do symphonic thrash metal covers of early Beatles ballads – it just ends up wrecking or even satirising the original.

A classically trained musician in gigging bands, and a lot of non-classical music in general, is likely to encounter a lot of the opposite extreme to this in both playing and audience expectation and evaluation; the ignoring of such technical details as singing flat or speeding up through a whole song provided the ‘feel’ is right. And of course that can be grating and can lead me to want to lash back. But, having encountered the effect that can be achieved by prioritising performance over perfection, there is certainly a case for going back to the classical tradition and looking to play with conviction, with style and with genuine performativeness. The technically-fixated classical performer all too often plays on stage as if in a practice room, rather than actually and clearly to the audience. Art music performance didacts may hate it if I fluff the odd run or have a couple of unsettling slides into tune because of the speed I think a movement has to go to be fun enough, or because I’m trying to look like a performer (rather than a stuffed shirt) as well as sound like one; but audiences are likely to welcome the trade-off with open arms.