It’s Cold Out There... but I’m still walking

28/2/2012

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We’ve been discussing marketing and “self-promotion” in college this week. We’ve had lengthy discussions about music careers, the different job strands, from the typical (teaching and performing) through the unexpected (transcriber, score librarian or lyricist).

I recently received a letter, officially informing me that my retirement age has been delayed to 62. I must be among the first to be affected. I’m nearly at the end of my working life, and I can see that I’m never going to make a living from my music. I’ve had good careers, good jobs, good opportunities. I started working when there was nearly full-employment and a plethora of opportunities. It’s much harder for young people today in the current financial recession - there are fewer opportunities and fewer full-time jobs. Personally, I think it’s more important for the few jobs there are to go to younger people - it’s their time. 

There is still room for self-promotion though!

I’ve done some instrumental teaching in the past - on a voluntary basis. More supporting really - I taught trad tunes to an Argentinian AFS student during her stay in Scotland. I’ve had the odd request to teach adults. While I worked for years teaching IT to adults, I don’t feel qualified to teach music professionally. It’s such a responsibility - you hold a person’s musical journey in your hands. Great teachers nurture great musicians, bad teachers groove poor technique, indifferent teachers at best miss opportunities to be better. I think I’ll leave instrumental teaching to the great, and so won’t need to worry about reapplying for disclosure clearance, newspaper adverts or repolishing my CV.

Similarly, while I play in bands that do community gigs, I don’t see myself working as a gigging musician.  On a sliding scale I may be closer to the top than the bottom in musicianship, but there few opportunities to make serious money performing. Nevertheless, I do have aspirations. I’d love to play in an Edinburgh orchestra. I’d love to play in, or even create, a baroque ensemble. I’ll look for more opportunities to perform trad music such as Shindiggery, the Beach Band and a great informal group I play with, Baguettes. I may still need to audition, I may still need to rework my CV, but I won’t need to worry about creating publicity materials, sending out press releases, putting together a demo cd or creating a myspace page.

One of the most unexpected things about my music course has been creating and maintaining my website and my public blog, the ultimate in self-promotion! It’s been hugely satisfying to have a vehicle that reflects my “public face”. I love the fact that people I don’t know read my blog, and that I’ve had “conversations” about music with people I do know but don’t see on a regular basis. (If you’re the reader from google.se and you’re still reading, know that you are appreciated, as are all the rest of you.) So that’s where my self-promotion efforts are going to go. I may redesign my business cards and add the website address to them. I may add my web address to the flute and concertina forums I participate in, and I may go out busking and post my web address on my music case. 

I am going to keep blogging, and listening to loads of varied music. I am going to keep on playing, developing my technique, my expression and my musical “voice”. I understand now that the sort of music I play may change over time. That’s a good thing, because there‘s so much to learn and so many things to experience. 

Music is such a journey. I’m just happy to still be walking on that road.

PS If you're looking for a session musician - flute or concertina, or you've got a vacancy in your orchestra or ensemble... please, get in touch!

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Land Without Music - the Value of Vernacular Music

19/2/2012

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The BBC has outdone itself recently with it’s classical musicology programming. Simon Russell Beale’s “Symphony” series was shown at the end of 2011, and Charles Hazlewood’s “Birth of British Music” , originally produced in 2009,is being shown again  on BBC 4. This series looks at four 17C - 19C composers, Purcell, Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn. Perhaps the irony of the German view of Britain as the “the land without music”* is not lost in the fact that in “The Birth of British”, only Purcell was actually British.

I only managed to catch the “Revolution and Rebirth” episode of Symphony, in which Beale looked at the symphonic works of Shostakovich, Ives and Copland. Wonderful music especially, for me, because all three composers incorporate their sense of culture and country into their music. I first heard Charles Ives’ Fourth of July (from the Holidays Symphony) when I was in secondary school, and I remember laughing out loud at the accuracy of the portrayal of one of America’s most “sacred” holidays. I listened to it again today, and while it starts darker than I remember, the later section still makes me laugh.
We were very fortunate, at Stevenson College in the early part of February,  to have the opportunity to hear Tim Paxton (cello) and Simon Coverdale (piano) perform a Shostakovich cello sonata. In his introduction, Paxton referred to Shostakovich’s ability to be "everything for anyone", a technique that enabled him to surviving the totalitarian regime under which he spent his entire life.  Much of his work was double-edged and ironic, embodying the requirement to be a good proletarian composer, his own struggle for identity and his alienation from the regime. The cello sonata was a very dark work, such despair, and though the mood lightened somewhat by the end, the music held no assurance that everything would be all right.
While the concept of the ”land without music” looks at the dearth of formal, classical composers in Britain, it also reveals a snobbish ignorance of the plethora of vernacular music throughout the British Isles.

Ordinary people have enjoyed vernacular music all over the world since time in memoriam. Scotland, Ireland, England and  the Nordic countries, in particular, have rich folk musical traditions which have been woven into the music of formal composers such as Handel, Vaughan Williams, Sibelius and Grieg. Others, such as Mahler and Shostakovich, have written big, gorgeous works incorporating folk melodies at the heart of the music. Even in young countries like Canada and the United States, the melodies of the developing communities have been captured by such as Charles Ives and Aaron Copeland.

In all things, labels can be used either to gather together, or to separate. It’s not uncommon today to hear classical musicians say, “I’m not a folkie”, with the implication that folk music is something too informal or too primitive to have value. Folk music is about melody - usually simple but extraordinarily beautiful melodies. Those folk melodies have found their way into bigger, more complex music - and where would that music be without them?

* "Das Land ohne Musik" - “The earliest source yet given for this rather persistent German generalisation – for the French, I believe, have never concerned themselves much with English musicality at all – is Carl Engel's book of 1866, which Oskar Adolf Hermann Schmitz in his Das Land ohne Musik : Englische Gesellschaftsprobleme quotes as a reference. In fact the prejudice held by the Germans in this respect must be adjudged of rather earlier origin than even that.” http://www.musicweb-international.com/dasland.htm
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Music Genres and Social Identity

5/2/2012

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I was watching the BBC’s Imagine programme, Simon and Garfunkel - The Harmony Game recently. Well worth watching for the discussion of how the album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, was recorded and the musical influences that went into it. The thing that stood out for me the most, however, was the furore that was caused by their “humanistic” ethos during the making of Songs of America, a CBS TV special about the duo, filmed in 1969 and originally funded by one of the major telephone companies. Apparently millions of Americans turned to a different channel because of their unhappiness with political content of the show. Songs of America was criticized for being biased towards the Democrats, because it referred to the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, while Coretta King’s comments on child poverty were dubbed out. Yet, the reaction to the programme makes sense if you look at the social identity of the two. SImon and Garfunkel were two middle-class jewish boys from New York, key players in the  American folk music scene of 60’s - 70’s. They were listened to by scores of other white, middle class, educated liberal young people. 
After the Revolutionary and Civil wars, Americans are used to referring to their society as “classless”, and yet social background has always played a huge role in the music that people listen to. The Blues grew out of destitution of ex-slaves in the south. Jazz had it’s roots among  African Americans in more urban areas, influenced by the blues. 

Folk music, as played by Joan Baez, Judy Collins and James Taylor from the late 1960’s, was embraced by the anti-Vietnam war movement, and embraced the end of segregation by supporting the civil rights movement. You wouldn’t have found many white collar workers or Ku Klux Klan members listening to folk, which they viewed as “pinko” (leaning to the left) music.

Similary, country music grew out of the folk instruments that had been brought to areas like the Appalachian mountains by poor white European immigrants, and spread through southern and south western white communities. You didn’t find many Country Western musicians in Boston or Woodstock in the 70’s.

Numerous research projects have looked at the sociology of music: “..the relationship of youth to music was found to differ significantly along a number of dimensions, particularly those of social class, gender, and ethnicity.”* Numerous books have been written on the subject: “The music industry daily invents and redesigns labels to market musical products as new  and / or authentic.”**

So how do you know what genre a particular musician belongs to? 

You can look at the classifications of music shops such as itunes, amazon or play.com but that may tell you as much about the business goals of those websites as it does about the musicians. 

You can look at the music’s harmonic structures, but there’s a big overlap between folk, country and rock. You can look at the social strata of the people who listen. You can look at the genre of the radio stations that play the music.

You can ask the musicians themselves for a more valid definition. Canadian Neil Young’s early music leaned towards folk, he had a period of anti-establishment protesting embodied in the cd Living with War Today, but some of his later work he himself refers to as country rock. Or you could ask the listeners what genre they would given a particular musician. 

Over time, people’s perceptions of genre change and the genre themselves are influenced by other musical influences. Jazz turns white and country turns popular.  

Does it really matter, anyway? Well, I can think of more than a few Scottish traditional musicians who would object to their music being referred to as Morris tunes - even though there’s a large overlap between Scottish, English and Irish music. I just think you have to be aware of the power of cultural insensitivity... and try to avoid it, if you can.

*/www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/MIE/Part2_chapter03.shtml
**Fabian Holt, Genre in Popular Music. Also Edwards, Leigh H., Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity, and Eyerman, Ron, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century.
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