Wednesday 25 February 2004

I had some time this morning to think about music for once, and the prospects for some interesting things to happen in a couple of weeks' time are very good indeed. I'll need to do some practice though, my limbering up with Hanon exercises was pretty hard going. And having to play my melodica at A=415 shows up how wildly out of tune a lot of the sharps are, so the chainsaw file is going to pressed into action soon tuning those reeds.

The publicity material for the concerts is delayed at the printers, which is a bit perplexing with 14 days to go till the first gig, but "let's see" (a useful phrase much used for procrastination when dealing with small children).

Tonight I wrote a draft funding application for another project, which led me to muse on the difference between commission and support. When a work is commissioned (by a patron or another body) the agreement is generally that the work will be paid for. When a work is 'supported', usually by some public arts funding body, the agreement is that only some of it will be paid for - so that by granting support, a burden is granted too, that of raising the remaining funds. The artist is still not free to do the work, but has been given yet another job to be accomplished first. 

What can happen is that an initial creative idea becomes an administrative nightmare, and the 'creative' process never comes to fruition. When I worked in the theatre or in television, my job was simple: people gave me money to write music, and record (or play) it for them. As a result I spent a lot of time realising ideas. Now I spend a lot of time sitting at my computer and making phone calls.  The official priorities of the fund that I was applying to contain lots about promoting collaboration between agencies and organisations; it's not until you get to the very bottom of the list that it mentions the possibility of an audience getting a worthwhile experience.

Anyway, once the next three weeks are past, I'm looking forward to a sabbatical from organising music. For 10 months at least, I'm just going to make it. Now let's see how long that resolution lasts. To paraphrase Robert Fripp, I'll wait for the future to present itself.

I've been listening to Peter Blegvad and Andy Partridge's newly-released Orpheus the Lowdown. Blegvad said in an interview that it's not a record you can listen to while doing the dishes, but I'm not so sure. It repays concentration, hard work as it is, but it's also very effective if you just let the well-chosen sounds wash over you and allow a bit of meaning through from time to time. Having Blegvad tell you that 'what the dead lack is substance', and about the power of noun-verbs in a whisper (and occasionally with great sternness, as when he tells of their 'doing double duty') is real entertainment when you don't think about it too much.