twang twang twang - MUNICH

a chip in the sugar

Humph.  Alan Bennett writes in Untold Stories:

"What is it about music that encourages the non-performance of its duties?  Musicians are notoriously unreliable and think nothing of sending someone else along to take their place.  And so it has always been, apparently."

Well, he asks, so I'll answer.  Because we might be sick - like normal people who take days, weeks or months off - except we don't get paid if we are, so normally we're at death's door before sending a dep.  More likely, we might have something new on that takes precedence over the old.  Such engagements fall into various categories.  There is the better paid date, which we have to take in case we get no work in e.g. January (or, if our January tour gets cancelled - sometimes you get a smaller cancellation fee;  often you get nothing, which is a little tedious when, as happened once to a friend of mine, you have cleared six months of your diary and expect £8000 of work, and they pull you the week before, with no compensation).  Then there is the last-minute more prestigious call, a) which we have to take so the orchestra will call us again, and b) which acceptance usually involves sending a dep to your first date, because such orchestras often only call at the last minute, knowing someone will always agree.  Then you may have something like the need to take a holiday - TwTwTw has just managed her first 10 days in 5 years - which cannot be arranged until relatively near the time because you have to take it when you have the most "dep-able" work, and not your 5 month concerto tour with the Berlin Phil.  Or your Granny might have died, and you need to go to the funeral.  Normal people get days off for that, paid, without being called unreliable.  You could argue we have chosen the freelance artist's footloose path, but then again, the conservatoires are allowing more students to graduate each year than there are permanent jobs, lasting 25 years a time, in the whole of Britain, so I don't know how many musicians choose to freelance - although they're on the up, because if you're good you earn more these days freelance than if you had a job.  I don't like the depping system any more than Bennett, but I can't think of an alternative.  The professsion does its best by the iron rule that you must organise a dep, and they must be good, or it's on your head.  From that perspective, musicians are supremely reliable - do you organise, and pay for, a colleague to do your work if you're in bed with the 'flu?

Ah well.  I'm going to go and listen to my special relaxation CD I got at the spa where I went on holiday.  I'm just jealous I didn't write Kafka's Dick. 

Here, there and everywhere

Having just got back, now I'm away again for 2 weeks.  I can't think of anything funny to add at this juncture, as I'm trying to find enough pairs of clean trousers.  I always fear that proper harpists have shelves full of clean, pressed trousers. 

aide-memoire

This is courtesy of Terry Teachout, so you will all have read it already, but I'm noting it so I don't forget about it:

“I think some young people want a deeper experience. Some people just wanna be hit over the head and, you know, if then they [get] hit hard enough maybe they'll feel something. You know? But some people want to get inside of something and discover, maybe, more richness. And I think it will always be the same; they're not going to be the great percentage of the people. A great percentage of the people don't want a challenge. They want something to be done to them—they don't want to participate. But there'll always be maybe 15% maybe, 15%, that desire something more, and they'll search it out—and maybe that's where art is, I think.”

Bill Evans, interview, 1980

Mumbling quickly

I know I'm in danger of running a series of moaning-musician posts, what with the decline in concert-going behaviour and an artist's torment, but on Sunday my composers' workshop music has stuff like this:

HARP:  [Clear throat loudly] ff [khrrrrm] .....  [pronounce the letter clearly] f E ..... [mumble quickly under your breath] mf 1134 AME, the Church approves of torture in the hunt for heretics.

Well, maybe it will be really good, and I a flippant blonde twit.

bring back the cane

Concerts these days are touchy-feely;  people can get up and walk around and nobody's frosty if you clap in between movements.  In many ways this is a good thing, and where concerts are given in relaxed spaces (galleries, restaurants, tents), fitting. 

Yet I must say, if you are in a concert room where chairs have been put out in orderly rows, I think there is something to be said for the antique system of sitting in them quietly and attentively until at least the end of a piece.  I went to hear a colleage of mine playing just such a concert, with a programme comprising some of the toughest music in our repertoire;  it would have taken her a year to learn the programme.  She was playing well, so there was no reason to walk out on grounds of her not having put in the work to give a good concert, yet people were clunking in and out from under her nose while she was playing.  She was playing 20-page virtuoso works from memory, you idiots, not background music.  No-one can stop you putting her off if you want to, but when someone's obviously working so hard to give you an (unpaid) nice early evening cultural experience, you are rude.  Hang on at least until the end of a movement.  The entire recital was only half an hour, and you didn't have to go in the first place.  And stop jangling your f***ing keys at the back! This is the Ballade Fantastique! 

When I am made a Dame of the British Empire, I shall wear embroidered robes and not allow people to walk in and out of small recital salons, except between movements, or if they are having a heart attack. 

Every artist was first an amateur

While I have been negotiating the Bavarian property market, Alan Rusbridger has been to piano camp.  It's good  to find any musical perspective clearly expressed, here that of an amateur: “All in all, I think I prefer the life of the amateur. Always travelling, never arriving, frustration balanced by hope and fantasy. And all the time doing it for the simple love of it, and for no other reason.”

Amateurs tend to be better at writing about the act of music-making (as opposed to about music itself) than professional players.   Jeremy Denk is a wonderful exception - he is clever enough for “a mild Adorno phase” - and so are Daniel Barenboim and Niklaus Harnoncourt. Perhaps, as Rushbridger implies, an amateur view is simpler, and so is easier to describe, with the sort of enthusiasm any writing needs if it is to touch others.   

Passionate simplicity is at the heart of great art, whether you are playing, painting or writing about it, and the amateur's enthusiasm is a type of simple passion, lovely and to be highly prized.  But in fact, the professionals have everything the amateur has:  devotion (we adored once too), frustration, and the combination of the two that is also called love.  Both groups tread the same path towards perfection or mastery, but the professional is further along it, and as any travel story will tell you, a journey is harder in the middle, or at the end, than at the beginning.  You are more tired. Hopefully you are buoyed up by what you have seen along the way, but that depends on how lucky you are.

Love begins simply;  you fall in it.  What happens to it after that is moulded by time, experience, battered by good and rotten chance.  Couples get divorced;  professionals give up;  amateurs give up too, all the time, even though they love music.  It is too hard. Other loves endure, grow along the path, human, alive; and like humanity itself are at once and always astoundingly powerful, and heartbreakingly vulnerable.  That is the argument for sticking with it all:  at the end is a great love.  Or great art. 

On the other hand, perhaps it is better to stay amateur, a little naïve, not risking too much or travelling too far.  Maybe music is too beautiful to risk losing it all together, hurtling too close to the sun.  Visions of great art are more clouded by having your instrument kicked by drunks than they are by doing something else all day and then returning to your well-loved piano. 

I wonder sometimes about resilience.  Every professional, anyone in work, has to do things they don't feel like doing;  equally, it isn't only in music that it's good to reach the point where, while you might not enjoy everything, you can at least tell those who really drain your soul you're busy that day.  Dark nights of the soul aren't just for professional artists, the privileged sensitive ones.  Who are we to imply our stress is worse, or more ennobled, than that of our cleaner?  Tell the crooks to f**k off, trouser enough crumpled fivers to hold body and soul together, slurp the champagne you aren't really allowed and reflect either on Bach's Chaccone or what colour to paint your new kitchen, according to what you feel like thinking about.  Get on with it.  Live.  Do your best.  Make others happy.  Is that amateurish?  Supremely professional? What's the difference?

Passing note

Although I'm soon to quit this green and pleasant land, one thing that will linger on my Ipod are the rehearsal out-takes from the Britten/Fischer-Dieskau/Vishnevskaya/Highgate School War Requiem, downloadable from Itunes.

she moves in her own way

I haven't been blogging because I'm MOVING TO MUNICH!  I am going to the Hochschule there, hopefully this time without throwing up in any parks/airports/university offices.

I've learnt lots of very long housing words like "Zwangvollstreckungsunterwerfung".  German Handwerker suck their teeth and shake their heads when you ask how much your fitted harp music cupboard is going to cost, just like in Britain.   The harp music cupboard is probably going to be the only thing in the flat, as I've ordered lots of marvellous renovations and I've got no money left to furnish it.  Fortunately my mother stopped me knocking down all the internal walls "to create a huge open-plan party space, like in Friends." 

Musical blogging will resume shortly, but for now all I can think of is that in about 6 weeks I WON'T HAVE TO DRIVE AROUND THE M25 ANY MORE, ESPECIALLY NOT THE HEATHROW STRETCH WITH THE ROADWORKS.