Thursday 9 August 2012

Well, summer came back to Glasgow eventually. On Tuesday Alison, Brianna and I had a sunny Hume planning meeting in the excellent new Botanics café – proper good tea, Struan toast with hot smoked salmon & capers, and big umbrellas that I’m told keep the rain off as effectively as they provide shade. Table just big enough to accommodate food, drink and lots of paper too.  I’m told it’s run by the folks who used to do the café at the Mitchell Library, so they have form.

Then yesterday we had a first play through of some of the material we’d chosen from Hume’s first book, to add to the recording if the live set isn’t long enough. Alison had the lira, and the wonderful Meares bass viol (1670s I think) on loan from Alison Brown – so, one instrument more than 300 years old, and one just finished last week.  This morning I’ve been catching up with a few (hopefully) last loose strings of admin and contractual bits and pieces, which are horribly stressful until they’re done. Then I might get back to thinking about the music, which does happen occasionally.

I’ll be more forthcoming about this in due course, but I think I can now admit that with my university hat on I’ve been successful in getting substantial AHRC funding for a three-year project exploring ‘bass culture in Scottish musical traditions’. It’s a collaboration with Cambridge University and the RCS, and will eventually include a couple of Concerto Caledonia albums and an online database. Anyway, full details a bit further down the line … I only mention it now because so much of my energy goes on finding money to pay people to make projects happen. I’ve never audited this, but I’m pretty sure it takes a great deal more time than the musical preparation, and it is certainly the source of a lot more stress than the actual music. Being a musician would be easy if you never bothered to pay anyone for their work.  Which leads me to …

Revised opinions, no.1. I noticed this advert from the Scottish Ensemble this week, recruiting for a 3-4 month post, three days a week. Unpaid. As Ben Goldacre pointed out the other day,(and Zoe Williams recently) internships work to exclude the less well-off from what used to be called ‘the professions’. Arguably there are some areas of life where this just doesn’t matter, but restricting the organisation of publicly-funded classical music to those with financial security is potentially very unhealthy.  I may have scoffed here at some of the thinking behind El Sistema (the symphony orchestra as a model for social change? I don’t think so) but what it does do brilliantly is refuse to accept that high culture is only for a certain kind of person; unpaid internships in the arts throw us right back there.  I don’t work in classical music much any more, but when I did I often felt that as a Scot (even one who got a scholarship to an expensive school and had the posh Scottish accent to prove it) I didn’t really belong with those who took the decisions about that kind of art: I wasn’t really ‘one of them’.  Well, when decision makers are recruited onto the first rung of organisations by unpaid internships, those of us who aren’t ‘one of them’ will find it ever harder to have any say in how our culture develops.

Revised opinions, no.2. I took delivery of a Samsung Galaxy S3 yesterday, delighted to free myself from the control-freakery shackles of Apple and their iPhone. And it is a thing of wonder, a spectacularly brilliant bit of kit. But I sent it back. I just couldn’t imagine actually carting it around with me all day. It’s a bit too big to be a phone, but not quite big enough to be a workable tablet, so it was an effort to pick it up; I kept returning to my laggy, overstretched 3GS. Apple Stockholm Syndrome has clearly taken hold. I still don’t like Apple computers though: perhaps for me, big bits of kit need to be endlessly customisable, but things that go in your pocket have to be simple and idiot-proof. And I'm still not totally at ease with the 'pictures-behind-glass' interface as a means of input. I like equipment you don't have to look at in order to use it, but that's musical training for you.