London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Realmusik

Another Prom-inspired post today; this time, from Daniel Barenboim and his East-West Divan Orchestra’s version of Ravel’s Bolero. Remarkable I think for demonstrating both social and musical awareness of reality even if opposed to tradition.

The non-musical side first: I think the first conventional ‘classical’ Prom I have seen where colour was allowed onstage other than for soloists. The men, in fact, were in suit and tie rather than white tie or all black (black tie seems to be the amateur uniform in general), perhaps acknowledging that in practice hardly anyone wears evening dress of whatever monochromicity on any regular basis.

Then as to the performance: a few introductory notes might be required here for some people (skip them if you know the piece). Bolero is based around a single snare drum pattern that goes on for its whole quarter-hour duration, over which is placed basically a single tune, one variation on it and innumerable different orchestrations and accompaniments, and then a very brief coda at the end. There are no changes of speed or rhythmic pattern. I could write about the historical and stylistic significance of that but it’s not really important here. It was written I think about 1920, I can’t be bothered looking up the exact date, do it yourself if you want to.

Now the main role in performance of your typical orchestral conductor (choral conducting is usually a little different) is to act as a silent human metronome, giving the pulse in standard patterns of arm-waving. What they do in all the preparation phases is another matter, and most conductors indicate a lot more than the beat as well, but that is the basis. Barenboim, on this occasion, probably only did that for about a quarter of the piece in total. If your snare drummer is good, then why bother duplicating? Better to avoid potential discrepancies and just get the orchestra to follow his (it was a man on this occasion) pulse instead. Barenboim did fully conduct some sections, particularly the ending when there must be about a hundred musicians playing all at once, did do a certain amount of indicating mood, volume etc., and did cue a lot of the more important entries (there are some very very long rests in Bolero!). But nonetheless he spent a fair amount of time just waiting for the next point where his involvement might actually add something, at least security. At one point the live director decided to cut to him, showing him leaning against the rail around the podium and with his arms folded. Hardly the image of artistic reverence usually expected of renowned conductors!

As well as being deliberately recruited from across the Arab-Jewish divide in the Middle East, the East-West Divan Orchestra are a fairly young ensemble by classical pro standards. This may be involved with the more relaxed dress code, at least one visibly heavily pregnant wind player and openness to musical experiment. Which brings me on to jazz and Ravel.

Ravel definitely listened to early jazz as well as its ragtime and other precursors, though whether through bands travelling to Europe, the early recordings that were made in the US from 1917 and gradually became available across the Atlantic or both I don’t know. For my grade 8 exam, I played the middle movement of his Violin Sonata, subtitled ‘Blues’ and involving a lot of suitably crunchy major-minor chords, slides and banjo-style strumming (which I once practised for so long in an effort to nail down the rapid alternate-picking rhythm patterns that I got a blister on my finger. No picks for violinists sadly); it sounds a lot more like a trad jazz number with ‘blues’ in the title than what we would probably think of as early blues, but the influence is unmistakeable.

Bolero has some decided jazz influences in some of the harmonies, melodic shaping and chromaticism. But it’s often not taken much notice of by performances usually more interested in Spanish influences or proto-minimalism. The orchestra involved is huge, but there are some parts which can be missed out or transferred to other instruments; this is often done with the (apparently) three saxophone parts. Barenboim opted to include two of them, soprano and tenor, which isn’t bad out of three; and perhaps in line with that, relevant players notably in the reed and brass sections had clearly been instructed – or at the least permitted – to play up the inter-war jazz potential of their solos. The principal trombonist was certainly hamming it up to heaven with thoroughly undignified slides and vibrato (hardly ever used by orchestral brass nowadays); and the soprano sax player’s blue notes and glides from one note to another drew a wonderful grin from the principal bassoon sitting next to him at just the same time that my face did something similar. There’s also a long chunk of writing where the strings pluck chords in rhythmic patterns rather like a harp or even a minimal guitar part; where normally the only acceptable mode of pizzicato playing is with the instrument in the position used for bowing and the first finger, the East-West Divan violins and violas were certainly holding their instruments across their knees like undersized banjos, though I didn’t get enough close-ups to see if they were using their thumbs as the position would suggest.

All of which, in my view, constitutes a look at what is actually there in the music, with accretions of tradition largely about orchestral music performance in general stripped off. It’s a process classical music has been going through in a lot of areas in the last generation or so, discovering in the process that a lot of the music it plays (basically anything written before about 1900, possibly even later) wasn’t actually conceived with the sort of interpretation and context it now gets, or used to get in the first half of the twentieth century, in mind. Never mind applauding between movements, Beethoven’s symphonies were premiered with whole other pieces played in between the sections. Mozart probably expected keyboard continuo throughout, even though there’s no figured bass in most of his scores; Haydn and Beethoven certainly both conducted from the keyboard. Even as late as Wagner or Brahms, orchestras would not have been using continuous vibrato (which I was trained to do around the millennium!) or synchronising their bowing.

Perhaps, if the burden of questionable tradition were less universal upon the people that interpret earlier people’s music – in any genre – there might be less worry about curious details of performance and more focus on the material in hand; and we, the audiences, might find that material more striking and less uniform and unchallenging than we had thought.

Memory (without AL-W)

Lately, besides furiously, desperately and mostly frustratedly househunting and trying to ruffle as few feathers as possible staying in a communal house with a wide variety of people (including two under-sixes), I’ve been doing a lot of work without sheet music, or aiming towards not using notes. This might be because I intend to be filmed doing it, for the showreel which is starting to come together; or because there never has been anything written down, in the case of material from bands I may be joining / forming where I’ve got demo recordings and if I’m lucky a list of chords; or it might be because I expect or hope to be gigging the relevant stuff within the foreseeable future in contexts where music stands are usually considered unprofessional (or just uncool).

And frankly, it’s making my head hurt. At least two days this week I have literally hit the apparent end of my ability to memorise stuff (mostly Irish ballads and drinking songs) and had to stop because I wasn’t actually taking in any more tunes. It’s demoralising.

There’s a story that writing was opposed by at least some classical philosophers, on the grounds that once people could as it were store knowledge outside themselves, they would no longer bother to remember and would become lazy and foolish. Perhaps all the more so when you can call up more or less any information at any time with your smartphone? It is noticeable that the people with repertoires of two, three, five hundred songs, all of which they can genuinely perform on request without going away and revising them, are in traditions where at most you might write down chords and lyrics, but generally you learn by ear and play by heart, and certainly you never have in front of a complete transcription that lets you play something without remembering any of it.

Then again, it’s still normal (though not as universal as it used to be) for classical concerto soloists to play without music. Opera singers, of course, don’t hold scores onstage. And one of the legendary English conductors of the early twentieth century – possibly Beecham – always used to conduct without a score, which implies memorising all the relevant aspects of pieces of music up to an hour long with hardly any repetition of material completely unchanged and perhaps as many as thirty different parts.

Well either way I don’t know how they do it. I have noticed the odd thing that something I’ve struggled with one day, I may actually be able to play – without first looking back at the dots – and with a better sense of the shape of it rather than just a succession of phrases the following day. So maybe there’s hope for those Irish pub gigs yet.

Demonstrations

Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos must be the most accomplished demo EP ever. This set of 6 concerti grossi (so scored for a then-normal strings-and-continuo orchestra plus a group of at least three soloists, who are employed more like a second, smaller ensemble) are each, it is pretty universally acknowledged, unique not only from the rest of Baroque music but also from each other, a staggering achievement. They were written to accompany Bach’s application to a chief musician post – which would have involved composing to request (mostly probably for the royal chapel or state occasions), but also and probably more importantly acting as day-to-day director of music at court (secular and religious), running the musical establishment and being main organist. Bach didn’t get the job (!), and we only have the scores to the Brandenburgs because the German minor princes he was applying to didn’t have a good clear-out between when they received them (and probably never even had them played) and when Bach became fashionable for really the first time (he was thought rather old-fashioned in his own time) about 100 years after his death. If he kept copies himself they were lost.

As my hard drive starts to fill up with not just solo demo recordings, but home overdubs showing what I could do with/on other people’s material – tailored collaboration / band demos if you will, the no-travel-costs postmodern equivalent of being asked to audition on a band’s core repertoire – I’m starting to know how Bach might have felt. And in the early 18th century printing music was a relatively very expensive and elaborate and fairly rare process – quite a lot of performers played largely music written in-house, as it were, rather than buying items out of catalogues or renting them from libraries. There had to be a large guaranteed market to make it profitable, and it wasn’t assumed to be a core part of a musician/composer’s work.

The 60s folkie title character in Inside Llewyn Davies says to his sister, ‘You don’t put your rehearsals out in public.’ And a lot of people have historically been keen to restrict what’s actually being sold with their name on it to what was produced for that intent, avoiding publishing technically lower-quality and possibly musically inferior ‘demos’ which were only intended to secure investment from music industry companies. But that was when publication of all kinds was owned by corporate entities and reserved almost exclusively for highly polished professional product.

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and music can be distributed for free if that’s what you want to do, either as sheet music or recordings. And information overload has produced a substantial ‘more is more’ attitude, particularly to getting noticed. If I don’t blog for a few days (or strictly speaking if my website remains static for a few days), it starts to fall down Google rankings. Facebook, which I remember in the early days without a news feed (!), now pretty much bases its activity around feeds and timelines – which means you’re shown everything starting with the most recent; only what’s new is really visible.

So there’s a case to be made for trickling stuff out, even if in dribs and drabs, in order to stay in the public eye (however small your public – and also if seeking to expand it!). And maybe if you’re using it to build up attention towards something bigger, there might be a case that it doesn’t matter if it’s rough and unfinished – people will listen to it once if that, so it’s hardly likely to destroy your reputation. Webcam footage of rehearsals is increasingly common band teaser material.

But I don’t think I’m quite ready to run the risks of putting other people’s demos, with my overdubs, out in the public domain. It raises all sorts of questions about ownership and control that aren’t really settled for the internet / citizen publishing era yet. So maybe those collaboration demos should stay in my hard drive, whatever else I release. After all, I don’t think they’re quite the Brandenburg concertos.

Interesting times

So this is shaping up to be at the least a busy and interesting month. So far tryout practices or similar with an understated alt-folk act from Surrey, a steampunk / goth / dark cabaret bunch starting up in Watford and a roots/Americana band from North London (possibly a tryout gig with them as well!); plus playing fiddle for an Irish gig on Sunday in Ruislip, starting work on a video showreel on Friday and lots and lots of other things I’ve sent off messages about that probably won’t go anywhere. Oh, and of course there is still the matter of finding somewhere permanent to live, preferably before my fortnight at the current place expires!

Just one thought: there really ought to be airmiles for trains (railmiles I suppose). And coaches, or preferably both. Either that or the invention of teleportation is overdue.

e-makeover

So the Gallery now looks rather more like it belongs to someone who gets paid (or even who gets invited back for a second paying job!). Check it out!

Unlike Blairite playgrounds

There are a lot of events in life in which there aren’t really any prizes for coming second, let alone any further back. Job interviews, for instance. Room / house viewings. Bidding for dep / last-minute gig openings. One person gets it, some others might be assured their details will be held on file in case of another vacancy / dropout, but that’s nearly always a dead letter. The most you can do is try and use the experience to improve what you do (or at least do less things wrong!) next time – and in a lot of cases that is sheer guesswork. I can’t really email one of Stornoway back and say ‘OK, so you picked someone else as your new housemate and I respect that, but what things would have made me more likely to get the room?’ It’s OK for long-term job applications and I often do it, but you can’t really do it as a freelancer or outside of work.

The thing is, despite me previous post on being only as good as your last gig, there’s no necessary connection between how the last one, twenty, a thousand applications went and how the next one will go. Likely, but not necessary. It’s like flipping a coin: on average, you get equal numbers of heads and tails eventually. But within any finite observable number of experiments, it is possible to get any combination of results, up to and including all of one and none of the other. And however many heads you’ve had, it doesn’t make getting a tail next time ‘inevitable’; in fact, it doesn’t change the odds of getting a tail next time at all: 50%.

Now, you can rightly argue that none of the situations I’ve mentioned above, some of which are really frustrating me right now, are random and invariant in the way that flipping a coin is. Surely the better and/or better-promoted musicians get hired; surely the more likeable people with more compatible interests and schedules get picked as housemates. Which is true of each instance. But the pools of applicants in each case are so large and potentially different that you can argue there is a large element of randomness involved. And in the meantime, my standing in most of those stakes does not significantly change. In the house case because my work, personality and interests aren’t changing from one room viewing to the next (!); in the music one as much as anything else because new promo material is slow to come through and my experience is the same until someone hires me, which isn’t happening. So if you consider the pools to average out similarly, then I’ll be in a similar standing relative to them and the situation is replaying only small objective differences (except perhaps taste of the person getting to choose).

As I’ve already uncovered a certain amount of my old maths studies in this post, let’s grab another one: Fibonacci numbers. These occur in lots of places in nature, they have relevance to flowerheads and spiral shapes and numbers of petals and they’ve been used as inspiration from music to architecture. The underlying principle is very simple: you get each next number by adding the last two together: so 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 2+3=5, 3+5=8 and so on.

Did you notice how I started there? Of course, for most advanced mathematicians you don’t start anything at 1. You at least want to be able to trace back what it would be at 0. But 0+0=0, and 0+0 carries on being 0 to infinity. The way you get the sequence started is to arbitrarily sling in a 1; so the normal version of the Fibonacci sequence goes: 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 etc.

I think this freelance music lark may be a little like that. Someone will have to more or less arbitrarily sling something (or more likely there will need to be a handful of somethings – the metaphor is creaking here) my way, in order for me to list the experience and look more like a pro where it counts, in order to make contacts and be taken seriously and get hired more, etc. etc. And until that happens, arguably all the effort – even the hundreds of pounds and tens of hours I’m anticipating putting into a showreel, and all the time, money and effort I’ve already put into the website, demos, photos and sheer hustling, is only trying to very slightly imbalance the coin my way – like rubbing at it on one side with a cloth.

So much for independence and autonomy.

Rubbing shoulders – nearly

How close to (in some sense) ‘the stars’ do you have to get to feel like you might arrived ‘in the same circles’?

The six degrees of separation theory – based on somewhat dubious original studies but which successively longer-distance and to be honest less rigorous experiments have only tended to support – does of course pack extra weight within a relatively small and close-knit community – like, say, acoustic instrument-oriented non-classical musicians in the south-east of England. So it’s not that much of a surprise, perhaps, to find myself at only a couple of removes from name-droppable pro bands: the last time I was in a studio with a band, Mumford & Sons had left their drumkit set up the night before (honestly, they don’t even have a full-time drummer, why make so much mess? the bass drum only style seems to work pretty well live … ); I’ve just had to shift a planning meeting for a professionally made video showreel because the slot I originally had has been gazumped by Steeleye Span. Slightly more surprising was last night’s house viewing, but I think I’d better not jeopardise a not-yet-made decision on someone else’s part by scribbling on the open web about the situation.

The difference is, of course, these groups can expect to make money out of their time in the same place I’ll be in afterwards. In fact other people who run businesses can expect them to make so much money that they will lend them the cost of the project (I’m really really not looking forward to paying outright for this video) on the presumption it will turn enough profit for them to get their loan back.

So it comes, in a sense, down to marketing again – or in this instance sales. Anyone (that can find the cash) can go and record material in a pro quality studio, even do music videos and proper album packaging and duplication. There’s no quality / popularity / success bar (people might ask not to be credited to avoid embarrassment of association I suppose!). The separator is, can you get enough directly or indirectly back from it to be able to pay up to do it again? Or to not have to do another job? Or to only have to do your other job part-time? Otherwise it’s just an elaborate vanity project to make yourself think you’re a professional when you’re just an overproduced amateur.

Video killed the radio star

So sang and mimed the Buggles (?) in the video that launched MTV. These days MTV may have found there’s more money in reality TV than music videos, but the statement is truer than ever, though the musicians with good faces for radio tend to be stillborn rather than ever becoming radio stars before being killed off.

As I’ve repeatedly commented here and elsewhere, and as emerges from my earlier post on gendered musician recruitment and the very interesting comment on it, image really matters to musicians now. Live music makes money; records don’t significantly; video streaming via YouTube (mostly) is arguably as important as radio play at the top of the professional game. And at the bottom of it (where I am!), it comes down to one of my key ideas about music as a career:

However good you are, no-one will hire you unless they get to hear how good you are.

And in order for them to hear that, you have to first get them to notice you and bother listening. And you will mostly get that done through the strongly visual media of websites, emails and letters. As Matt’s comment points out, people make advance judgments about your music based on visual, non-aural factors like (apparent) age, gender balance, visual style etc. If they don’t (semi-subconsciously) think you look like you sound right, the odds are they will never click through to Soundcloud and find out if you actually do. (And this is assuming a client not explicitly recruiting to fit a specific ‘look’.)

Don’t assume this is restricted to bikini-clad pop/RnB singers or glossily produced boybands; even classical musicians need to play this game, they just have to project a different image.

Well, I can’t do much about my actual face or body, but I can and have or will shortly deal with the following:

  • promo photos, taken in a studio by a professional photographer with all the associated fancy lighting and plain backgrounds (and very conscious clothing choices!)
  • since I have to submit some audition extracts as videos, getting someone with a proper video camera and who knows what she’s doing to do the filming, and dressing almost as I would for a desk job interview for the purpose
  • putting together a video showreel

And I suspect if I had known in advance really what I was doing, I would have focused less on recording a succession of demo tracks and got started on these (well, the first and third anyway) earlier.

Art in performance

‘Classical’ performance practice has become a lot more varied lately. Traditional aspects – white tie, not applauding between movements of a long work, etc. – are not showing any signs of actually disappearing. But in the last perhaps five to ten years, other possibilities have become credible. Applauding after the first movement of a symphony or concerto is no longer necessarily a faux pas. All black, or even colour worn by non-soloists (gasp!), can be seen even on the professional concert platform.

It is, of course, Proms season. And this is often a good chance for the rest of us to get some snapshots of the current state of play in the top-end professional world. I’ve been making heavier use of the TV coverage (mostly via iPlayer) this year than ever before. And it strikes me that there is a slow change of mood going on which says that great music will speak for itself, even if not surrounded by an almost religious seriousness. I think the latter probably took hold as a reaction against the emotional extremes of 60s and onwards pop gigs (seriously, the screaming at Beatles live gigs is terrifying in recordings. The fans must have supplied the next general of metal screamers with throat haemorrhages pre-made). But one of my favourite moments of a very moving performance of Mozart’s Requiem was the conductor mouthing ‘Bravo!’ to the Scottish National Youth Choir at their first significant break from singing. And tonight I was watching Julia Fischer in Dvorak’s violin concerto (a new piece to me, incidentally), and this prompted several reflections on how musical performances are treated in this particular world.

Violin concerto soloists are in quite an unusually privileged position as classical musicians go. They don’t have to sit at or with their instrument (unlike, say, pianists or cellists), and tradition demands that they perform in general from memory (unlike the orchestra or, today, the conductor). Therefore, they are actually at liberty to move and perform visually as well as aurally. This notwithstanding, tradition (which, incidentally, in art music almost always goes back only about as far as the first world war) has seen all soloists positioned effectively behind the conductor, facing out into the audience (unless pianists, who face sideways because the instrument is easier to fit on stage that way) and unable to so much as make eye contact with any of their fellow musicians. Fischer had, I am very glad to say, decided to forego that. She didn’t have much space – maybe five feet by eight – but she certainly made use of it in a manner that would befit many a rock lead guitarist, swaying with her phrasing, at times playing almost under the conductor’s nose when particularly wishing to lock in on timing, emphasising mood with gesture and posture, and even in the second half of the piece allowing herself an occasional unconcealed smile of satisfaction.

The notion that the visual aspect is part of classical music performance would probably actually upset some older aficionados. There was a very substantial period when it was assumed that audiences did not watch but listen, and any visual interest was really a distraction rather than an enhancement. This period of playing arguably optimised for radio or record may have coincided with the some decades where musicians made the backbone of their money recording … However, for classical musicians as for anyone else in music, the money has gone out of recording and into live performance. The music industry may not have fully caught up with this, but essentially the position has swapped back round to what it was in about the 1920s: recordings are a means of promotion of the live performances that make people’s bread and butter, not the other way round. And this does mean, for classical musicians as all others, that there has to be something about being at a concert that is distinct from listening to any of half a dozen recorded versions of all the same repertoire for free and at whim (albeit compressed and interrupted by adverts, which is another story). The notion that it helps, rather than hinders, to engage with the audience, visibly be emotionally engaged with the music you’re playing, and be interesting to watch as well as listen to has arrived back after what is really, in art music history scales, a very brief period out in the wilderness as disrespectable.

Some closing thoughts: I’d rather Beethoven symphonies didn’t have to go back to being interspersed with sonatas for violin held upside-down and using one string only (as the premiere of no. 7 was). But I’d love to see an orchestra with the unselfconsciousness to mosh along to the last moment of said symphony as it clearly deserves. And I feel bad about myself for being put off by one violinist’s diamanté mute in one of the Proms performances I was watching this week …

Priorities

A long-standing rumour has it that professional classical guitarists don’t do washing up because the warm water would soften their plucking fingernails too much (presumably destroying their carefully-honed tone and precision, to say nothing of upping the risk of the ultimate fingerstyle guitarist’s nightmare – a broken nail … ).

My first attempt at a practice session today was scotched by my hands shaking too badly to do any serious work on audition excerpts clearly chosen largely for speed of notes and factors that combine awkwardly with that. I wonder therefore if professional violinists and violists avoid using strimmers and hedge-trimmers (this seems, to be honest, quite likely) in order to keep their fine finger-control? Rather more hypothetically, do they avoid stressful situations such as *ahem* having nowhere to live in eleven days, and perhaps going cold turkey on any addictions they have acquired (caffeine and alcohol included), in order to keep that precision and shake-free hand movement? I mean you want to be able to do rapid and wide vibrato, unless you’re a real early music specialist, but unless you’re a real late-Romantic specialist you also want to be able to turn it off …

I’m aware I’m revisiting dead ground here, having written about focus and priorities before, largely to do with technical music practice and househunting. But whatever the specifics are, I don’t think life is ever as straightforward as ‘I put [x] first, and everything else has to come second’ – even if we ignore how you might rank everything else second, third etc.! Some things are simply necessary though undesirable and in a sense unimportant to us – like finding somewhere to live that we can afford, actually has a shared living room of some kind and hasn’t already been nabbed by someone else.

It’s quarter to ten on a Thursday. I guess I’m not really going to get more emails about houseshares tonight. I should probably go to bed and see if I can get up early tomorrow without having the shakes again.