Monday 4 July 2011

Bruichladdich
I’ve been reading Bill Bruford’s autobiography, which is as well-wrought and considered an account of being a serious performing musician as I’ve come across: it’s very funny too. It’s light on showbiz stories, but instead shot through with analysis of just what is going on when a performer tries to make interesting music for a living, and he rounds it off with an admirably honest account of the reasons for retiring from ‘active service’. The front cover has to mention the bands he was in to generate some sales, but as it charts his move from being someone else’s drummer to a bandleader, and his move from the world of rock into jazz, the book isn’t so much a narrative of past glories as an enquiry into how music comes into being, and why and how those musicians who are interested in music (and there are plenty who aren’t) do what they do. Highly recommended.

I’ve always had a bit of inbuilt resistance to the guitar tuning DADGAD, probably as a result of hearing too many people accompanying fiddle tunes with ‘those chords’ that everyone plays. To be fair, it is an improvement on the old I-IV-V triadic stuff but it does get tedious after a while. However … after working with three guitar players who use variations on DADGAD in interesting ways (in Alasdair’s case, Jedi variations on it) and realising that you can play tunes on the thing, I’ve been sitting around here with my travel guitar getting my head and fingers around how it works. For a harpsichord player it’s a bit like learning a short octave for the first time, as suddenly the notes all are in different places from the ones you’re used to.  This is purely for my own entertainment of course: I won’t be doing it in public.

The combination of an open(-ish) tuning and a capo (or kay-po as our North American friends say) can of course put you in any of the 12-tone equal tempered keys, which led  to a particularly good moment in rehearsal the other week. I hadn’t twigged from the sound of it that one of Olivia’s songs  was in F# major.  ‘It’s in F sharp? You’re joking. That doesn’t exist! [on half the instruments in the room] You can have F or G: are they any good?’

The other story from Aldeburgh that I’ve just remembered was how in December we’d started most days with some group listening exercises that I’d picked up a few years ago at Fred Frith’s improvisation workshops. Alasdair had been really taken with this and tried it out with his band, to be met with a total refusal from Alex Neilson to take part in anything of the sort. I thought this was completely hilarious.

I’ve been mulling over possible projects for next summer and trying to pin down the reasons for my reluctance to re-engage with the classical music industry. I think that the key to my unease is the interchangeability (or replaceability) of personnel.  If you’re booked to play violin for example (for strings it’s most difficult) there are usually a lot of others who could do much the same job, and if for whatever reason you can’t do it, someone else will step in without really changing the overall effect that much. And why bother to learn such-and-such a concerto, when around the world there are lots of others doing the same, some of whom no doubt have a greater affinity for that particular piece of music and can do it better than you? Well, if it’s a well-known piece, it’s what the punters want: play the hits and you’ll sell some tickets. But at the end of the day, you’re in a covers band playing someone else’s hit, whether that someone else is Andrew Lloyd Webber, Beethoven, or Rameau, and finding musical rather than professional motivation for doing it can sometimes be difficult. If I’m booking musicians, it’s not just for their capabilities but because they’re the right person to have in the room: replacing one musician with another changes the personality and content of the end result substantially. To go back to an environment where musicians are booked largely because they have the correct generic skills, even at a very high level indeed, would feel like a backward step.