Music on the 21 Bus... and Kickstarter.com

29/10/2011

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It’s been a busy week - back to back rehearsals for the Wind Band (loving the Holst), String Band (Handel on the concertina is like yoga), Folk Band (Jenn Butterworth’s guitar playing is phenomenal) and Choir (an unexpected addiction - all that breathing is amazing for a flute player), as well as theory and a private lesson.

Behind the scenes, though, I’ve discovered another world - music on the 21 bus! It takes well over an hour to get from Portobello to Stevenson College. There are other bus routes that may be quicker but involve changing in town, but the timings of the 21 have worked better this week and the 21 has the added advantage of providing a long unbroken period of listening. During our first week, Tommy Composer urged all of us to listen to music for at least three hours a week, and I’ve taken that to heart. 

Access to music has changed fundamentally since I was younger. As a teenager, I listened to the local radio and occasionally bought an LP, but records were too expensive to experiment with. The music of the 70’s - 80’s pretty much passed me by - I listened to the radio on the way to work, but it was a busy time, too busy to spend time just listening, and by the time the 90’s came along, the music I heard was likely to be “The Wheels on the Bus” or the theme song from Spot the Dog. Since then, though, access to music of all kinds has been revolutionised with ipods, mp3‘s, myspace, spotify, itunes, to name only a few.

What determines what we really like, or what’s okay but doesn’t make us want to listen to again and again? I've subscribed to Spotify and am trying to find out. Besides having access to all the music in the Spotify library, there is also a "Related Artists" feature which connects listeners to similar types of music.

I started out in September listening to blues and pop - Honeboy Edwards, Eric Clapton, Ian Anderson, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppeling and the Rolling Stones. Nice...interesting... but doesn’t really rock my world.

Alasdair Fraser’s two new cds with Natalia Haas contain some nice sets, but only Rob Fraser’s Welcome to San Francisco gives me the shivers every time I hear it. I don’t know why, but for me beautiful waltzes are the ultimate pleasure, and I plan to be playing this tune myself soon. 

For my flute private lessons, I’ve been listening to Chris Norman’s wooden flute playing across the range of his cd’s. Keeping his sound in my mind is helping my own playing, but the style of his traditional tune playing is not what I’m trying to find in my playing. So that always brings back my endless internal discussion about what I want my own “voice” to be.

Habbadam’s new cd, Still Young, is as lovely as I hoped it would be. Habbadam is a young Danish trio, from Bornholm, an island closer to Sweden than Denmark.  Their first cd was a delightful collection of 18th century tunes, with a familiarity to traditional Scottish music of the same period, and the new cd continues in this vein with the addition of some new tunes.

I’ve dipped my toe into Valkyrien Allstarts, Paolo Nutini, Bob Dylan, Suzanne Vega and Chuck Berry (they took me back), Vivienne Long, old John Martyn songs, The Shins, Philip Glass and Michael Nyman, among others. I may be back to listen to some of them, but none have made it to my “top priority listening” list.

The pleasures have turned out to be Ray LaMontagne, Catie Curtis, Ane Brun, Damien Rice, Kris Delmhorst, and my “guiltiest” continuing pleasure over the past year, Antje Duvekot.
I stumbled across Antje Duvekot, a Dutch-American folk singer, after reading a review of her last cd, The Near Demise of the Highwire Dancer, in one of the  Sunday papers. Since then, I’ve acquired all of her previous recordings - she has a unique voice, her songs are personal and they remind me of growing up in the midwest, in a good way. 

Last summer, Antje notified  everyone on her emailing list of her www.Kickstarter.com fundraising project for a new cd.  Making a cd is expensive, and often beyond the budget of talented but not yet megastar musicians, (and really, how many folk singer songwriters ever become megastars?). Kickstarter.com is an innovative website initiative that provides musicians, artists, and entrepreurs with the opportunity to fundraise for new ventures. Antje Duvekot offered  supporters options, from just giving $1, donating $25.00 (£15) and receiving a copy of the cd as soon as it’s available by post (which I and 188 other backers signed up for), through donating $5,500.00 and receiving a cd and a private acoustic concert in your own house (two backers bought that option). Her goal was to raise $20,000 by 29 July - in fact, she raised $33,018, and the cd is due out by Christmas!
 
Kickstarter ... yet another great opportunity from the internet!
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There’s music... and then, there’s Victoria Mullova

19/10/2011

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Last Thursday, Victoria Mullova appeared with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, as soloist in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op 61. It was a truly wonderful performance. Mullova personifies all that I look for in a classical music concert. She was charismatic, attractive, composed, and most importantly, she has her own unique sound. Perhaps not the biggest or most unctuous sound, Mullova’s violin playing has a silvery, elegant quality that seems particularly hers, and is spellbinding. 
The rest of the concert was more problematic, and brought me back to the mindset I always seem to end up with after an evening at the Usher Hall. The world premiere of Martin Suckling’s “storm, rose, tiger” left me with more questions than it answered, and the Schumann, while well-executed, failed to move me. 

Does the problem lie in the Usher Hall’s acoustics?  Today, we have access to more music than ever before, and more means of listening. Music heard through good personal headphones is immediate, in stereo and loud enough, a level that the Usher Hall failed to reach. While live music is rewarding in a way that recordings are not, the quality that recordings have, and our ability to select what we listen to and to match our moods, can give an over all better experience.  However Victoria Mullova’s electrifying performance did demonstrate why a live performance, at it’s best, is more satisfying. 

Does the problem lie in my own expectations? When I go to a concert at the SCO or RSNO, I want to be entertained but most of all I want to be moved. I want to be bowled over with joy, overcome with tears or just filled with awe. Composers such as Palestrina, Telemann, Rachmaninoff or Warlock never fail to make an impact on me, as Charles Ives never fails to bring a smile to my face. Over the past two months I have broadened my musical range and have found much to like in Donald Byrd, Damien Rice, The Shins and Michael Nyman, among others. On Thursday, Suckling’s piece left me cold but the Beethoven was perfect, and saved the evening

What was Martin Suckling trying to communicate to us?  I have no idea. Is it my failing in that I found nothing in the music or there something lacking in the bond between me and the composer? Is some music more satisfying to the performers and the composer than the audience?
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Playing Holst on 19th Century Wooden Flutes and Handel on English Concertinas

12/10/2011

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When I applied to do the Degree Foundation Course in Traditional Music Performance, never in my wildest dreams did I expect to be playing Holst on my nineteen century wooden flutes, nor Handel on my english concertinas. It’s been grand, but it’s also thrown up unexpected challenges.

Rudall and Rose 8-keyed wooden flutes are fully chromatic, but they were designed to play sharp keys with relative ease. Even so, in traditional music, most tunes are in the keys of G, D, A, occasionally E, C and F, the related minor keys, and rarely anything else. The open holes and lack of duplicated fingering possibilities leads to the difficulties I am facing in the Dflat section of Holst’s Suite in F for Military Band. A beautiful piece of music, with some lovely traditional tunes woven into the music, the Dflat section is particularly challenging. Never before, and certainly never in any Scottish traditional music, have I been faced with the sequence:

              Eflat   Fnatural   Aflat   Fnatural   Eflat. 

The 8-keyed wooden flute has two F natural keys, one short in the right hand and one long in the left hand. Many traditional flute players never use the long F, but I have worked over the years to make it my key of choice, as the short F, if used a lot, can become unstable, wobble and leak on these flutes. Unfortunately, the long F sits over the Aflat / Gsharp key. Since, in sharp keys, it would be rare to play a sequence of Fnatural to Gsharp this is scarcely a problem. 

In flat keys (from Aflat on up), the sequence involves playing the long F (since the short F is not really possible following an Eflat at speed), sliding off it onto the Aflat which is fine, but sliding back onto the long F is difficult and will take practice. 

Thankfully I'm playing the oboe part, as the flute parts include third octave notes that are well out of the range of my flutes.
Playing Handel on my concertinas is terrific fun, but not what I’m used to. In fact, the english concertina was the mainstay of Salvation Army bands in the early 20th century, used for playing all sorts of “classical” music, in harmony. The english concertina comes in several sizes: Treble (with a range from G below middle C to C three octaves above middle C), Tenor and Baritone (lovely for accompanying lower voices), Bass and Contrabass (often sounding only on the pull, not the push). There are also Extended Trebles (with 8 extra buttons above the treble range), Tenor Trebles (with extra notes below the treble), Baritone Trebles ,and Piccolo concertinas (although I have never come across one of these).

I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to play Handel on the concertina, as it gives me a chance to focus on dynamics and articulation in a way that would be uncommon in traditional music. Perhaps I’m not the best judge, but I really like the way the sound blends with the fiddles.

Just an aside - The other day I overheard a Boehm flute player complaining about the difficulty of playing a tune in A. Honestly, they have no idea!
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Mindful, mindless or out of my mind - the game of music

9/10/2011

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After nearly a year developing new repertoire, Shindiggery performed at Gullane Village Hall last night, in our socks! The village hall has a lovely stage, but it’s hollow underneath, and with nine trad musicians tapping their feet, it would have been a real din. The hall provided condenser mics, so we were unable to chat to each other without everyone hearing - an unusual situation, no shoes and "comfort checks".

Formed of players from the Digger’s Session after a trip down to London in 2009, to perform at Anthony Gormly’s Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in the middle of the night, last night’s concert was a big step forward from our previous repertoire. Traditional bands need to have something out of the ordinary, an edge, that makes them different from everyone else. After a whole band trip to work with Mairi Campbell on Lismore last October,  we have introduced voice as a harmony in one of our instrumental sets. We have also developed an unusual voice and instrumental arrangement of the song, Marianna, as well as including a few smaller groups in the programme. 

Working with Ros, one of our fiddle players, I wrote a couple of counter-melodies, and a couple of harmonies for three French mazurkas that she and I play together, and she developed a couple of counter-melodies. Putting together the arrangement was simple - developed in an hour and a rehearsal. Playing the set proved to be much more difficult. We rehearsed together once a week for about 6 weeks, played it twice to the band (going wrong somewhere both times, and with me needing my crib sheet for the harmonies), and once in the pub (more work needed).
A couple of weeks ago, I started wondering what to do with my mind while we performed our duet. In rehearsal I would find my mind wandering all over the place, considering the height of the chair, whether the recordings would come out, what I was doing afterwards (I have a low boredom threshhold, and a tendency to multi-task). A discussion with Neil Metcalfe at the Thursday performance afternoon gave me some ideas, and I borrowed “The Inner Game of Music” from library, but haven’t read it yet. Rehearsing at home, I decided that the thing to do was to play my mind as an instrument while I played the concertina, making sure that my mind articulated every note. I wonder if it was a bit like the way Glenn Gould vocalized the music as he played.  That certainly kept me focussed, but I did feel a bit of resistance or dissonance between my ears at times, which was disconcerting to say the least.

At the end of the sound check, almost as an afterthought, Ros and I ran through the mazurkas. It was an unmitigated disaster on my part. First, I only played half of the second tune before I played the harmony; having corrected that, I failed to get into the third tune in the rhythmic countermelody. Then, in a complete panic, I forgot what to play in the second tune again. 

Less than an hour before the concert began, I discovered that playing my mind as an instrument leaves me no room to be aware of what’s going on or where we are at any time (we play without music). It’s like driving in autopilot - it’s fine if nothing surprising happens, but it can then be the cause of major accidents. Instead of being calm and collected, I was in a state of panic. I ran through  the correct order of the tunes in my mind, I breathed and I thought positive thoughts... and amazingly, that worked!

Shindiggery, collectively, performed a personal best, and Ros and my mazurka set came off well. Afterwards, in the interval, she mentioned that it was the first time we’d performed it from start to finish without anything major going wrong - and I’m glad I hadn’t realized that before! 

 Listening back to a recording, there are things that could be better. In the first tune, it would have been better if we had sat back a bit in the rhythm; we could introduce a better dynamic range throughout the set, and there are a couple of bad notes (not very noticeable) and one chord error (more noticeable, at least to me).  However, it was a great feeling to bring out a new set and I’ve gained a glimmer of understanding of how to manage my mind while I’m playing. I do enjoy performing, especially in a group, but the other thing that I really like... is how good it feels when its over!
http://soundcloud.com/panda53/mazurkas-rg-psc
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Professionalism Is a Relative Term

3/10/2011

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Professionalism, in music today, is an important concept, covering codes of appropriate behaviour, learning and technical skills. It’s desirable, or even absolutely necessary, to develop a good public face, to build a good portfolio, to be reliable, likeable, well-prepared,  flexible, approachable, a team players sometimes, a team leader other times... All of that should be within our reach, living as we do today with access to information on the web, mobile phones, transport, libraries and food on our tables. But music has also always been full of supremely successful but idiosynchratic or even unprofessional talents, such as Mozart, Jimi Hendrix, or Neil Young.
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Life was much more difficult, and professionalism was a relative term for the early Delta blues and riverboat jazz players  Men like Muddy Waters, Louis Armstrong and Robert Johnson grew up in a hostile land, where work was scarce, poorly paid, and there wasn’t time or money for the kind of learning that facilitates our current idea of “professionalism”. Louis Armstrong’s experience, as documented by William Howland Kenney in Jazz on the River (2005) illustrates this:

“For Armstrong, as for the musicians who played with him on the riverboats, jazz was, in addition to musical entertainment... a space in time between past and future where one lived while on the move... Jazz skills, jazz ideals, and jazz's alienation from mainstream middle-class culture functioned as a body of knowledge with which and within which one could live and work while on the move, particularly on the water.

Armstrong owed much to his musical experiences in New Orleans. But from 1919 to the end of the summer of 1921, he tramped the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio rivers. He had no fixed home. He worked in order to change his place and position in American society. He never made Chicago his permanent home, either, and when he bought a home outside of New York City, he spent as much time away from it as in it. His music expressed the special kinds of movement characterized by migration, diaspora, and steamship voyages. It had great energy, ambition, daring, courage, undercurrents of the voyagers' nostalgia for home, and a tough alienation from sentimentalism and from mainstream culture.…”

Professionalism was a completely different concept and context for British blues musicians like Eric Clapton, John Mayall, Georgie Fame and Van Morrison. The world had been a dark place through World War II and the Cold War, replete with rigid social conventions. British blues was filled with young musicians looking for a different way of life, and like the hippie movement in the USA, found it’s salvation in drugs and alcohol. Despite this, those with talent like Eric Clapton, survived to become iconic figures in British music.  Looking at them today, as in Martin Scorses’s dvd Red, White & Blues, these hellions  are now respectable members of society. Eric Clapton, for example,  has created a charity to help other people overcome addictions.

Professionalism is truly an important quality, and something that musicians should commit themselves to... but sometimes... sheer talent will prevail.
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