London Viola Player, Fiddle Player & Arranger

Martin Ash Grad Dip

Musical theory of relativity

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Organising musicians is often said to be like herding cats. I think the big difference is musicians are more likely to steal each other’s food.

But there’s a massive variability in how far in advance is deemed acceptable, necessary or alternatively worrying for organising music. Ben Mowat of the String Project is a little concerned we only have eight rehearsals to gear up for our very big gig on 24 April (get it in the diary now folks! The Cellar, Oxford); and last weekend The Filthy Spectacula (including me) were getting worried about not having any detailed plans from the director for a music video being shot four weeks later.

On the other hand, on Tuesday I answered an email about needing a viola for a (concert, not staged) performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. On Wednesday evening I was in a rehearsal, sight-reading basically the whole thing along with eight of the eventual 11 instrumentalists; last night (Friday) we performed it, feeling hard-worked and nervous but without any major problems.

Partly, this just says that if you have to pay for rehearsal space and people’s travel and/or time, and you’re not going to make much if any profit on the performances, then you cut all the expenses to the bone, including rehearsals, and count on good hired hands to work with the situation. But it’s also a little to do with a truth about classical and popular music that is the reverse of common myth.

Classical musicians are normally assumed to be super-prepared, having rehearsed daily for weeks and tied down every last nuance. And that can be true, but it’s usually closer to the amateur than the professional experience. (most) Professional classical musicians have some key advantages for fast preparation:

  • They don’t have to write their own music. They don’t even have to write their own parts to existing songs. The parts come pre-made.
  • They don’t have to memorise their parts, just know them well enough to play them fluently and with ensemble coherence – but with the notes in front of them. Think of the difference between a radio play (even broadcast live), where scripts are fine provided delivery is natural and rustling paper doesn’t get picked up by the mikes, and having to memorise the same script to, say, act it on stage.
  • Questionable advantage to some, but I think if you’re used to reading music you’re likely to sight-read much more quickly than you can learn parts by ear.

It’s the bands writing originals, or doing creative-ish covers, that have to spend time painstakingly jamming out arrangements, learning chord progressions from each other, workshopping ideas of sounds in the rehearsal room. Even covers bands can at least learn parts pretty much entire in isolation (meaning, at home with YouTube … ) and only need the rehearsal time to fit them together. But having done all of these to some extent, unless everything you do is a twelve-bar bash through, the apparently turn up and play rock-n-roll bands who don’t write anything down need most preparation; a bunch of strangers can viably show up, spend three hours rehearsing music they’ve never played and haven’t necessarily heard or seen before, and perform an evening of (relatively) very complex and ‘difficult’ classical music.

Many things are not what they seem in music. Including preparation.

Undampened

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Ever had one of these?

You have the choice to play indoors or, because the weather is surprisingly bright for March albeit breezy, outside under a bandstand. You go for the bandstand to try and get passing audience, and hope you can fix your folders onto music stands well enough to withstand the wind. It seems to be going all right.

Then halfway through your set it starts getting really dark, you quickly withdraw from a venture out in front of the stage during a solo when you realise you’re getting rained on, then the heavens open and you play your last couple of numbers to half a dozen brave souls in anoraks sheltering under the nearest awning.

This should be a metaphor, but is actually what happened at The String Project’s gig on Sunday. Credit to all performers, crew and organisers concerned for professionalism, good humour and continuing to deliver the goods through what turned into a full-blown thunderous deluge!

Teasers and time-wasters

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Have you ever had to advertise for a new housemate, interview / show around interested people, decide whether to offer them the room, see whether they decide they want it, go back round the process whenever they find somewhere else they like better? I can assure you (from experience) finding a replacement or extra member for a band is just as bad, with the added disadvantage that you usually have to see candidates in places you’re paying for (unless you have your own rehearsal space) and that everyone will usually take up a good 45 minutes to an hour of extremely limited band time.

Lots of band member wanted ads conclude ‘no time wasters please’. Some even fill it out to ‘no time wasters please, we’ve had enough of those already’. It’s almost as much de rigueur as ‘must have great stage presence’ (for lead vocalists), ‘own transport’ (for drummers and anyone in a function band) or ‘fluent reader essential’ (for all cruise ship jobs, which sadly never require strings). It’s no wonder really, particularly for instruments like guitar or drums where there are millions who play them and you may be after a quite specific subset that takes a lot of sifting through able but unsuitable players to find, never mind the ones that are just bad at their instrument.

There are also times when I want to reply to ads with ‘no time wasters please’. It seems to be considered a good way of getting responses, by some marketeers, to publish tantalisingly vague ads along the lines of ‘musicians of all kinds wanted across UK for exciting new commercial project. Email [contact] for more information … ‘ I suppose the intrigue factor probably does pull people in, but does it just mean more irrelevant emails for them to deal with? I’ve had a couple of this type of thing not reply to my response at all, which is certainly intriguing, and I was particularly baffled by one I did get an initial response from.

I sent a fairly standard expression of interest email: Here’s my CV, here’s my website with recordings, video etc., where I’m based and roughly what I do, please tell me more about the project. Within hours, I got an email back starting something like ‘I’ve spent 20 years as a professional gigging musician. I know what it’s like to drive four hours to a gig and then the same back in the middle of the night. To have no money when the bookings dry up and no way of chasing up clients that don’t pay.’ et cetera, a good few hundred words on the woes of jobbing rock/pop musicians. Then finally appearing to get to the point: ‘My new project will put an end to poor pay and worse income security for musicians. I should say now that I am looking for a particular kind of person: dedicated, passionate about music, hard-working and easy to get along with.’

I had alarm bells going off all over the shop by this point, but reckoned I didn’t have anything to lose by pursuing it a bit further since he already had my email address anyway. So I replied along the lines of ‘Sounds like a great result. Before I commit to anything, can you please tell me how you’re going to achieve this, seeing as no one else in the industry has yet and you haven’t said anything about the means or the plan yet?’ I’m sure it sounded sceptical, but I think justifiably so given the conversation to that point! His next email was for all practical purposes nothing more than ‘You don’t sound like the sort of person we’re looking for. Have a nice life.’

Which leaves me with this great puzzlement: did he in fact have a brilliant idea, but one that would only work with total trust in ‘the plan’, and also a very short fuse? Or was I ‘not the sort of person we’re looking for’ because I was, bluntly, not gullible enough? Sometimes folks you never can tell …

Praying for wind

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The oddest thing about doing freelance work, I’ve decided, is the sitting waiting for someone to book you.

For music there is at least a semi-proactive side to this – you can go scrolling through musicians wanted ads for a while, but they will run out at some point. Even in the time I’ve been doing this, most of the places where I see any traffic or any work being booked have cracked down on ‘available for bookings’ posts and the odd person that does still do them looks, erm, odd. ‘Drummer available this weekend if anyone needs. [assorted details] … ‘ If I needed a drummer and could afford a pro dep I would have started looking earlier than this mate.

So there is still a lot of sitting around waiting and trying, a la Edison, to hustle while doing so. Blog, network, practise, catch up on admin, promote upcoming gigs, do it all again … and see if there are any projects you can get off the ground that won’t leave you with no time at all when/if the freelance bookings pick up again, and that won’t be a massive financial loss if they have to be parked or abandoned at some point down the line. Unless you’re pretty much literally going to and busk 10-20 hours a week, this business is a lot of playing the long game – investing, metaphorically and very literally, in opportunities which hopefully pay out well in months or even years, because there aren’t really any immediate rewards.

In the mean time, I really must get my violin bow rehaired in the fortnight between the next two gigs (rare to have so long to do it!) and start drafting a shortlist of wedding string quartet demo material. Hopefully both of which will pay off …

Ramblings

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Yes I know that’s what this blog consists of at the best of times, but also …

Both my bands are set for a bit of travelling for their next gigs. After a triumphant home-base evening at the James Street Tavern in Oxford, the String Project are venturing to London for our next public outing. Read all about both. Meanwhile, the Filthy Spectacula are making our second venture out of London home waters, this time to the nearest I have to a home city, to play a prominent support slot in Liverpool. Bizarrely, I don’t think I’ve ever played a band gig on Merseyside, only classical concerts and church events, so this is both a homecoming and a kind of first for me. I’m also the only one of the band with any connections up that way and as usual we need turnout to get paid (in this case, to get the agreed fee, 20 people coming ‘to see us’ as interrogated on the door) – so locals, please push this and come if you possibly can! A very varied lineup should offer more or less something for everyone (I won’t personally be offended if you claim to be seeing us on the door then spend our set in the smokers’ shelter … ).

The Filthy ship sails on from there to our second Bristol appearance less than a week later, with some video shooting on the way; the String Project stay closer to home for a high-profile gig in Oxford with guest artists from (again) Bristol, to be followed or possibly preceded by an away-leg performance in Bristol with the same performers. But all of that can wait for other posts to be explained properly.

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to put a string quartet together for the wedding / event trade, without repeating the situation where someone has to go into London for every practice unless someone else leaves London, and both cost too much so everyone’s unhappy. I think I have my people (albeit with the strange situation of all three upper players wanting to play viola not violin!) if the actual geographical spread proves workable, so watch this space …

All right Southern fairies …

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… here’s your weekend mapped out:

If you live in or near Oxford, come to the James Street Tavern on Friday night and witness The String Project, Grandmas Hands and more for free, with new material, a new member and what looks like being a packed audience (get there early before they drink all the best beer).

If you live in or near London, come to the Fiddlers Elbow on Saturday night for The Filthy Spectacula, the incredibly named Wang Dang Doodle Band and others. Bring your dancing legs, your drinking liver, your singalong lungs and possibly an old-school Methodist to make sure you get home again.

If you live roughly halfway between the two, make a weekend of it and do both!

If you live in some woods by a small village near Reading, please stay out of shot when I’m finishing filming a music video on Sunday. Unless you’re, like, a deer or a raven or something.

(Northerners will be exempt from these orders on production of authentic monkey DNA or successful passing of the chippie condiment test only.)

Is it over?

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Am I safe to risk poking my attention into some semi-public agora (the nearest Co-op, my Facebook newsfeed, Google’s targeted ads, whatever) without being cajoled, invited, ordered to contemplate my own and other people’s relationship status and invest time, effort, money and worry in it?

Oh look, most of the shops have skipped straight over Shrove Tuesday (that’s Pancake Day to you heathens) and gone in for the Easter chocolate kill.

Sorry, I can’t think about Easter yet, I have half a dozen or so gigs booked in between now and then. And one on Easter Saturday in Liverpool which I’m a little bit peeved about because it’ll make such a distraction in the middle of Holy Week.

Devil may cry, devil may care

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In Iain M Banks’s rather wonderful ‘Culture’ science fiction novels (as opposed to the often frankly upsetting supposedly non-genre books published without the M), there is a sort of future-hippie offshoot of the central civilisation (arguably by characterised by such advanced technology that there is no need as such for any life-form to do anything any more) which calls itself the AhForgetIt Tendency.

This morning, I went through one of those rounds of getting a round robin email about a last-minute music job; getting excited and sending off a sky-aiming offer to play it; waiting in elevated nervousness; and hearing nothing back. Under the circumstances and knowing how common the experience is as a rookie jobbing musician, Tending more towards AhForgetIt would seem like a good piece of self-protection.

Except, of course, that you need those jobs to progress. Some of the outside chances working out is largely how you get some wider experience, a better-looking CV, people to hire you back, more of a flow of work. You can’t afford to ignore them unless you’re already getting as much and as good ‘quality’ work as you need.

And of course if you want any of them to work out, then you have to really sell yourself putting yourself forward for them. No good sending off a form email with the name at the top changed and generic information, 36 hours after their ‘last minute left in the lurch’ search started; it has to be tailored, appropriate and enthusiastic, at least to all appearances to the reader that won’t know you, the individual.

So the decision to really engage and throw your effort into each roll of the dice is necessary to make it worth rolling at all. But then avoiding riding an emotional rollercoaster every time you have a work-related email demands being relaxed about the strong likelihood of never getting anything from the application from the point you send it off.

It’s like, in order to both progress your career and preserve your sanity, you have to care loads about your applications and not at all about their outcomes. Several times a week at least.

No wonder creatives have a reputation for being flaky unstable bundles of emotion.

Janus’ eye view

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If you’ve known me personally for a while (and have a good memory!), you might recall that my current working arrangement is a six-month trial as regards my desk job, which I’m currently doing for the equivalent of two days a week. That six months expires at the end of February (so, in a fortnight), and it’s therefore been necessary to start thinking, planning and agreeing (or compromising) with my employers as to what happens next. There’s an element of forecasting in that, as well as decision-making about the future; but inevitably it’s based on a lot of reviewing of the last six months as well.

So how far have I come? Well, I have some pretty decent promo material in place, I’ve met a lot of people and made some potentially useful connections. I’m playing in a new band that is regularly making a noticeable profit on gigs, though probably still barely offsetting rehearsal room hire and my travel costs. I’m doing at least notionally paid music jobs probably an average of about once a week, though some of them barely cover expenses and some don’t even manage that. (Note to self: be very financially cautious about profit-share arrangements in future.) And, perhaps somewhat to my surprise, I’m finding myself musically competent to all of this; the lack of conservatoire training can certainly be a CV hindrance but doesn’t, at the level and in the situations I’ve so far worked, actually seem to leave me musically inadequate to the jobs.

And, on the other side, I’m happier than I think I ever was working full time in publishing; despite all the late nights, irregular hours, long bus and train journeys, uncertainty and pressure, it’s working a lot better than a 9 to 5 desk grind at copy editing and proofreading. And my desk work hasn’t gone completely off the rails; there have been strains and I don’t think all of my colleagues are that keen but it’s never all gone totally to pot.

So where next? Well, it would be highly unprofessional of me to disclose much about a process in work that is only under way at present anyway (just as it would be to let on here who I actually work for). But it looks like this is going to be a honeymoon phase, and the next step will involve having to increase my desk hours somewhat in order to keep my job in any recognisable form. That will be tougher, but shouldn’t be the end of the world (depending to some extent on what eventual figure comes out for my new working hours); at least it will mean a bit more cash I don’t have to earn from the whims of a freelance market.

The direction of the music work is mostly far more imponderable. For the bands, or at least The Filthy Spectacula and hopefully the String Project, it is largely a question of ‘onwards and upwards’ – most obviously in the former case, where the amount of both prominence and cash we can command is perceptibly rising. But both are starting from loss-making baselines, and The Filthy Spectacula didn’t exist 6 months ago. There would be a lot of progress before either paid for many bills.

As for the one-off performances – mostly, but not exclusively, classical, orchestral and viola – they have got more frequent, but as they are almost all produced by me answering ads and I have yet to work for the same client twice, it is difficult to talk convincingly about trends. Regrettably, the increase in number of jobs has recently been largely produced by poorly paid ones – the highly valuable £100-£120 for one day’s work remain about one a month, well worth having but about a third what I would like. It then remains an article of faith in a much longer building-up period than six months for my new sole trader enterprise that the gigs will get better paid or the higher-paid ones more frequent, whichever way you look at it. But a necessary one, otherwise the books will never balance.

So there you have some shape of it: forward and past, notes and suggestions. Less of a brave new world now perhaps; more of an environment starting to be known and responded to, with its own potentials and problems, and limits to both. Less exciting? Maybe; but more tangible too. And the goal was and is tangible (or at least tradeable) benefits, not just excitement.