Culture Is Like Sharks And Relationships

A great article in the New York Times expresses perfectly the attitude I have towards current classical culture. Like a snake, it is constantly shedding its previous skin. And that's a good thing. 'Move forward... or die'.

http://www.nytimes.com/ (Registration needed, but it's worth it and doesn't take long)

Afterthought

Following on from my previous post...

Reflecting further on this, a 10% kickback would in most circumstances be more than a tiny little quartet like mine might make on some events anyway. Which effectively means that only big companies with higher margins could do this without making a loss. Net result? Inflated prices all round! Funny, I thought that was how a price-fixing cartel worked...

On the flip side, I'm emailing this wirelessly to my blog from a cruise boat half way up the river Thames, so things aren't all bad. God bless technology.

Bribery At The Palace?

I can't quite believe this, but some of my performers have just been unbooked for an engagement at Venue X, (let's just say it may or may not be a building belonging to the British royal family), on the grounds that they are not on the list of 'pre-approved performers'.

A girl from one of the Big Banks had booked us for a performance at Venue X, only to be told a few weeks later by Venue X that we weren't 'approved'. (In 2 years of dealing with some of the most prestigious buildings in London, I've never had this problem before).

Well duh, I thought, let's email them and ask them nicely if they wouldn't mind considering adding us to the pre-approved list. Then we won't lose the engagement, and the girl from the Bank won't get shouted at by her boss for losing the deposit. After all, having heard the demo tapes on the websites of some of the agencies' quartets who are 'approved'... [coughs, politely]

So I fire off an email to Venue X, then another. Days pass. I phone; a receptionist says ominously that 'we generally only work with people who bring us business', but she will pass on my message. More days pass. I phone, leave another message. Eventually, someone from Venue X phones.

"I'm afraid we can't add you to the list. Generally, we only assess new suppliers a couple of times a year, so you'd need to send a proposal..."

Huh?

"... and then of course blah blah... blah blah... security checks... blah blah..."

Get to the point.

"... and our usual arrangement is that 10% of the rate our suppliers charge to the client is returned to us."

Ah. So that's it. You want my money.

Essentially, this woman was telling me that she was forcing me to cancel several hundred pounds worth of performance, having wasted considerable amounts of my time and indeed a small amount of money over the previous two weeks, on the grounds that I was not approved to give financial kickbacks to Venue X in return for recommendations.

OK, I'm somewhat biased here, but is this really ethical?

I understand the notion of a finders fee, and that it can usually (not always...) be an honest way of working. If you really believe in something, it can be a very helpful way of connecting new people together. Even ViolinMP3.com has a few affiliate links to Virtualsheetmusic.com on it, whereby if visitor visits the VSM site and subsequently buys some music, a dollar or so gets sent ViolinMP3's way.

But here, I was being blocked from performing at a considerable cost to myself, so that someone else could line their pockets by recommending an [arguably less refined] ensemble at a higher price. Is this right?

If I'm being overly sensitive, I'd like to know. I've opened up comments on this post if you'd like to tell me what you think. But my gut feeling doesn't like this.

The Musicians' Law of Supply and Demand

Let me share with you a dilemma I have meditated upon for many months.

As I gradually turn to the matter of live concerts and ViolinMP3.com, I leave in my wake a peculiar knowledge of matching musicians to performances, recordings, background events, and to each other.

We all have to earn a living, and whilst starting out on this precarious, exciting journey, one of my staple fares has been bringing together at very short notice high-quality quartets for informal private performances and events, and more seriously, Court Lane Strings, for the recent recordings we've been doing for Virgin and the BBC.

At the start, the vision is utopian. Everyone creates a happy democracy, performances and people are parcelled out fairly, everyone gets a share of the cake. In this performance heaven, everyone is part of a big happy family, everyone is content, the conditions for music-making are idyllic.

But between the conception of a fresh performance and its realisation, there are... the variables. The dreaded variables. For a regular group, like my and Daniel's duo, or an established string quartet, the variables are mundane, but predictable. Traffic. Weather. Weird acoustics in the performance venue. Ticketing problems. Cold or humid performance space. Spider in the piano (I'm not joking). You get used to it; establish a rhythm, work around things, make it happen.

But of course with a flexible last minute group of people, the variables also include the performers themselves.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not talking about 'headline' concerts - those are planned and booked months in advance. But when one of the Big Companies phones and asks Court Lane to record in 5 days time with some Big Artists, how do I do it and keep true to a Court Lane Strings sound, bearing in mind that not all the friends I'd usually call on are available, whilst keeping everyone happy, making sure the right people are in the right places, and doing it quickly enough that I don't lose any precious time with my violin?

The first thought goes to the front. What kind of sound do we need for this? Who can anchor that kind of sound well at the front? Are they available? Immediately, arbitrary decisions have to be made. Agonised over for hours? No. Judgemental? Possibly. Whimsical? Often.

And then the social niceties. Because he couldn't do it last time, we asked her, so for this one, do we ask her again, because she did it last time, or him, because originally he was on this project first... BLAH. Primary school. Shut up. Go away.

Sound Sound Sound Sound Sound.

The truth is that at a certain level, and in times of haste, who does what often has more to do with whether Mr X has a driving licence than how mellow his bass sound is, and more to do with whether Ms Y is teaching on Tuesday evening than whether she is a virtuoso in the Paganini mould. Because within the range of the ensemble sound you're looking for, there are many different configurations in which it can work, and they're all fantastic, if different. Really. With good people you'll always end up with something that sounds very alive, very real.

the herd is not always wrong. but it is always changing

And so I leave behind my utopia with not so much a rueful glance as a knowing wink, and say: friends first, those whose playing I know and trust, the people whose boundaries of spontaneity I know, and they mine, welcoming yet always flexible, like an old coat that always delights. Then follow the players that friends also know and understand; together we create a triangle of new connections, opening up possibilities now and for the future. Then come those with whom we are acquainting for a first time, us with them, them with us. And so the cycle begins. The connections come and go, ebb and flow, and they do the same to us in their worlds, as we do to them, and that's all it is, as we move in and out of each others lives, and nothing more.

One thing is for sure, my respect for promoters, orchestral managers, and other such heros - great as it was - has just shot up a further hundredtimesfold. To misquote a certain Trump; it's nothing personal... it's just art.

Cor, look at those words. I think I may be suffering from a bout of Denkitus.

Have You Noticed

How I seem to gorge on words and repeat them from post to post, only to leave them behind and feast on something new. I wonder if I do this in real life.

Why Can't We Talk About Music?

Jessica Duchen points to a comic hero of mine, Armando Ianucci, who asks: "Why can't we ever talk about what great music means to us?"

Click for full story

Q&A: Who Invented The Violin?

Who Invented The Violin?

We get asked this a lot. Unfortunately the answer is: Nobody knows.

But what people who ask this often want to know is how and when the violin came into being in its modern form. The best answer is gradual development between 1500 and 1600, but it was most likely around 1550 that a definite 'standard' for violin construction was formed. The violin is descended from early types of fiddle, such as the rebec and the viol, and the first violins were built using techniques adapted from rebec and viol construction.

Who Was The First Violin Maker?

As for the first maker, well, there's no definite answer to that either. Andrea Amati was.... [Click Here To Read More...]

Tide Continues To Turn

Canadian musicians now adding their voices to the growing groundswell against DRM

http://www.musiccreators.ca/

P2P will never be destroyed now. Seems to me that the major stumbling block left to fall is for those propagating DRM to understand that control of distribution will not be a prerequisite if a universal network for digital distribution of music can be established. Indeed, most musicians want as many people to hear their music as possible.

VAG: Why Bother With Scales?

Aha!!! Scales... ...the DULL BITS!!!!

Well, only if you want them to be.

The thing is that although scales, arpeggios, and all the rest of the exercises that make up the core of violin technique practice are often seen as boring, this usually stems from the fact that people don't understand quite how, or indeed why these technical bits and pieces are so important.

As a child, I - like many others before me - never found scales and exercises particularly interesting, because they were always prescribed to me without explanation. I wasn't always fully aware of why I was practicing each one. Think of the doctor who recommends a medicine to cure an ailment, but doesn't tell his patient how the medicine will cure him. The patient is far more likely to forget to take the medicine, because... the notion of cause and effect isn't imprinted strongly enough in his mind. Because there's no immediate punishment or loss, an opportunity for long-term improvement is missed.

The key to getting the most out of anything is passion. And the key to getting the most out of scales, arpeggios and studies is of course...

Read More of this article at: http://www.violinmp3.com/why-bother-with-scales.html

VAG, Q&A, and other strange acronyms

I said that everything will now pour through this blog before oozing onto ViolinMP3.com. In order that I, and I guess you, know what's what, I'll mark each entry: VAG is Violin Action Guide, Q&A is - you guessed it - Questions & Answers, and there will no doubt be more silly acronyms as and when necessary...

Next VAG instalment coming right up!

String Quartets: A British Regeneration?

I just remembered I never posted anything after watching the London String Quartet competition. I watched, amongst other things, the final of the competition at London's Wigmore Hall, and was overjoyed to hear a phenomenal standard of music making; there's no doubt that one of the finest genres of music is alive and well.

What I wanted to question though, was the role of the string quartet in the UK right now. I can't speak for anywhere outside of this country, but here at least, many people - and indeed quartets - hold an unfailingly defeatist attitude towards the supposed decline of interest in the string quartet as an art form (London String Quartet competition being a marked exception, though those same conversationalists might suggest that it is the exception that proves the rule). So many people I speak to seem to think that in line with many peoples' perception of classical music, quartet audiences are 'dying off'. "There's just so much less demand for it any more".

I'm convinced that this is a self-fulfilling fallacy (if that's not an oxymoron!). In this recent competition there was a glut of British quartets with interesting musical personalities - Sacconi, Carducci, Pavao, Navarra and Bronte - (and a groundswell of others who didn't enter) - that prove that there is no decline in interest from the musicians' side of things.

So what's the problem? The problem is that with one of the richest, most incredible repertoires in all of classical music, it's very easy to remain conservative - in programming and in outlook - which of course is all fine and dandy in it's own way. But that attitude alone doesn't play well with developing audiences; it's much more conducive to the 'let's hang on and grab as much as we can of what's left' factor. And where have we heard that one before? (-coughs- record industry -coughs-) :)

This is where competition will prove a fantastic motivator. When decline of the status quo means there's not room for everyone, the consequent scrabble for opportunity will force people to seek out the new and the exciting.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the point: with such a dazzling array of British quartets now arriving, it would be irresponsible to focus energies on desperately grabbling about (new phrase I just invented) to catch what remains, when a little inter-quartet consensual development of the 'Young British Quartet' factor could potentially reinvigorate British appetite for the artform (with consequent opportunities for everyone).

If there's one quartet that has done this as a matter of course over the last few years, I guess it's the Brodsky. Now imagine there were 4 or 5 Brodsky Quartets in the UK, all with this breadth and depth of vision. What would happen then?

***

Now here's a question: If you have a School of Whales, a Murder of Crows, or even a Wallet of Tenors(!)...
...what's the collective noun for String Quartets?!

Self-Portrait

Trawling through back archives, I find an early attempt at self-expression lurking in the depths of my computer...

...my high school art teacher would have been proud...

Already The Muddy Waters Of Digital Are Swirling

A friend pointed me to the remarkable Philip Sheppard's weblog, which in turn led to the Future Of Music Book, which I duly ordered and read. The arguments within felt as familiar to me as an old anorak.

There's no doubt that downloads are becoming very mainstream now, and without question there's no going back; this is the way ahead. Finally, the mass media people are realising this too. Well, most of them, anyway.

But there's so much more to it than just what you see now. The floodgates of change may finally be opening, but what we'll experience next is nothing less than a paradigm shift in how we, the human race, consume music. One post in particular on the Future Of Music blog caught my eye (27 Feb): "continued innovation will help to power a $30 billion digital music market ahead, which will consist mainly of transaction-based, subscription, and ad-supported content". Inside the book, there's plenty to suggest that this will be true. I was pleasantly surprised to find plenty of proof that my hunches from January (read new year post) are indeed correct.

The thrust of the argument is that if we can outgrow the limiting, proprietary models of iTunes et al, we'll eventually end up in a world where music is as accessible as water. Why should music be owned? If we were charged by the glass for every cup of water that came out of the tap, how would we react? With anger, I am sure! At the same time, there'll always be a reason to go and buy bottled water from a shop. These analogies and more are discussed in the book, and the resulting conclusions are remarkably convincing.

If you want to see where we'll be ten years from now, go buy yourself a copy. In the meantime, I've updated the front page of Court Lane Music to reflect where we're going. Take a look.

Weirdly, France seems to be the first to strike a major blow against DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems that, unchecked, could maintain the same paralysis for digital that the record industry suffered during its dying days. The response from Apple was fairly predictable, as short term revenue losses from such a move would be significant indeed. But in the long term, a dissolution of the proprietary side of DRM, in favour of a universal system for tracking usage and parcelling out royalties, would be in the best interests of everyone, musicians included. But that's the thing. Universal interchangeability of music distribution systems could only be possible after the destruction of all that proprietariness. If that's a word.

What happens next? Where will all this end up? Impossible to say, of course, but to quote Vint Cerf, Google's 'Chief Internet Evangelist', speaking on BBC Radio 4 recently in response to whether Google's new foothold in China would ever lead to a full penetration of censorship: "You can stand in front of the ocean with your hands up and say 'Stop!', but the sea won't necessarily take any notice" (I paraphrase!). There are some forces that are more powerful than systems arbitrarily imposed by the Powerful People.

As always, it's impossible to tell exactly the destination that we're journeying towards, but the route there just gets clearer and clearer.

Blog Stuff

When things get busy, it's very difficult to keep a proper website updated. Not because there's not time to write, but because there's too much hassle in getting each page online.

So from now on (as you'll see below), everything new will appear here, in the blog. Not just blog articles, but all the pages and music downloads for ViolinMP3.com too. Then I can move them to ViolinMP3.com later in no time.

I've performed to and met some amazing people over the last month or two, and maybe I'll tell you about that in a few days.

But first, I'm going to perform Britten's Suite Op.6 at the Royal Academy of Music tomorrow. If you're around, come and visit (David Worswick is playing too). 7.30pm, RAM (Marylebone Road, London NW1), tickets £5.

The Violin Player

Click here to hear another exclusive preview track - 'the violin player' is a haunting violin solo that may or may not appear on 'Romantic Strings' ... hear it now before it disappears...

How To Practice The Violin

There's no point just talking about practice. The best thing is just to start doing it. But how? I think a feature on How To Practice the Violin will provide the directions that are urgently needed...

The Swan

Romantic Strings is a new album my brother Thomas (cellist) and I are working on at the moment. I'll send a note out to the mailing list as soon as it's ready (sign up at the top of the page!). Here's a taster of what to expect... Tommy is playing that most renowned cello piece, The Swan. And yes, the video does indeed star... a Swan.

Well, what did you expect?

http://www.romanticstrings.co.uk/