Know Your Onions

I've been doing a little research into local folk music. The reason is that I wanted to make reference to one or two old, local folk tunes in an orchestral piece that I'm writing. It appears that Cecil Sharp, the erstwhile gatherer of folk tunes visited Newent in 1910 when he noted tunes from "Charlie" Baldwin when he was in Newent workhouse. The workhouse is now our Community Centre building on Ross Road, where, a nice little coincidence, the orchestra rehearses. Charlie Baldwin was born in 1827 at Gorsley Common, described (I like this!) as a "wild and untamed place", on a drovers' route from Wales and a stopping place for travellers. One of several tunes Cecil Sharp collected from Charlie was 'Polly Put the Kettle On'.

Folk and classical music can seem miles apart and this gap is defined in medieval times when the goals of sacred and secular composers were different. Composers of sacred music sought to bring a mystical atmosphere to church, while secular music was made solely for entertainment, for dance and to express love. Sacred composers were formally trained while secular composers were not. The two forms of music represented a musical separation in society between the trained and the untrained, basically between the privileged and the poor. This division still exists today but not so clearly in terms of rich and poor but as an unfortunate musical snobbery: there are the commoners who love their folk, pop, rock and country music, and those who are 'classically trained' and ostensibly appreciate the finer things in music. At this point, I'll drink a toast to crossover music.

Where was I - oh, yes, onions. The music I'm attempting to write is a tone poem, with scenes inspired by some aspects of life in Newent.  One such scene is the Onion Fayre, which takes over the town for one day in September (this year on the 10th). Revived in recent times the fayre has medieval roots so I thought it appropriate to make reference, in music, to medieval folk traditions and combine this with something more modern.

The Newent Orchestra has a stall to promote itself at the Onion Fayre and this year, will be doubling the size of the stall to present some live music throughout the day. If you are wandering past, you might hear some of our woodwind and brass musicians, and one or two string chamber groups.  You might also hear the strains of a couple of those scenes in and around Newent depicted in music, one in particular owing something to Cecil Sharp and Charlie Baldwin.

Hi Fidelity

Yer know that Nick Hornby did that thing about making top tens - what's yours?  Like, top ten best albums of all time, or yer top ten Motown recerds, or top ten bass guitarists or... well. u get the idea.  Ten is actually quite a lot.  You get to three or four, whatever the category and then have to start thinking really hard and that hurts.  The thing is, that top-ten whatevers changes, too.  Depends on your mood and, the main thing, discovering something new and unexpected.  So here's my proposal.  Never mind the top ten, that's too hard.  Let's make it top five. Apart from anything five focuses the mind.  Makes you think about the BEST.  No buts, not ifs, no nearly-rans. Sharing a top five means too that we give those top tips that really mean something.  You'll know they're worth looking into, especially if there's something you haven't heard of.

Here's a choice for the top five albums that I want to listen to right here, right now, Saturday night.  The peculiar thing I realise on thinking this through is how wildly unrelated is my right-now musical taste: Strypes, Little Victories; John Adams (the one who lives in Alaska), Become Ocean; Royal Blood, Royal Blood; Howard Skempton, Lento; Oh, and I won't bore you with the fifth.  Safe it to say it's some 17th-century Baroque stuff.  How pretentious is that.  There you go; I've bared my soul.  There's nothing else.  Just emptiness.

Haiku Music

No one travels
Along this way but I,
This autumn evening.
- Matsuo Bashō

They say that an artist should not release his ideas and creative processes into the world until they are fully fledged and ready to go. I'm going to write a piece of music and see what it's like to do the opposite. So, this blog and possibly others if it comes to anything, are the jottings of ideas as they come to me and a record of the music as it comes into being. Usually, I spend time with half-formed ideas in the background; get tired of waiting for them to form properly, sit down and begin to write almost at random. You have to start somewhere and see what happens. I'm often struck by how this seemingly random process yields up a piece of music that, without too much trouble, takes on a form and life of its own.

However, this time, I'd like to be more prescriptive, clearer about what the aims are. So, here is what I have so far. I thought of using poetry as a means for defining a narrative about facets of life: birth, youth, work, relationships, old age, death - that sort of thing. That might be too big a brief for a single piece of music - unless you are a Gustav Mahler and about to write another symphony, which I'm not. Instead, I said to myself, how about using the brevity of the haiku and applying its principle in the music: three lines of five, seven and five syllables. The haiku has a stable pattern and applying this to some music could be a means of organising it, for example in phrases of 5, 7 and 5 bars.  It could also suggest a rhythmic pattern or even a chordal structure.  Hmm, that seems to be a good start to me.

Scenes from a life or a journey in haiku form might introduce equally concise musical sections.  Those scenes could be philosophical (about life and death), practical (about getting a job, marriage, divorce), chance (events, discoveries, illness, accident), turning points (birthdays, moving home, meetings).  The list could go on. I'll put together a rough programme based on this and post again.

How To Increase Audience Numbers

This is part of some research into the direction of music education, the mysteries of its funding and the associated role of community music-making. Contact me to contribute your opinion.

A constant complaint from music societies and promoters alike is the problem of audience numbers. I'm not well-enough informed to know if audience numbers in the classical music field are dwindling in general but I have some experience with certain aspects of it. It's a multi-fold subject and can't be considered as a whole to arrive at any useful conclusions. For example, classical music encompasses a whole range of genres, from early music and Baroque, to early 20th-century and contemporary, each genre with overlapping, but different audiences.

There are also different types of division to be recognised. For example, the division between those who know about music, who are versed in its esoteric jargon of cadences, codas, sonata forms and suspensions, and those who love listening to and playing music, know what they love, but don't know why and don't understand the jargon. Narrowing this gap would be a big help.

Age is a factor. At one end of the spectrum, the traditional classical program audiences, particularly for chamber music and music festivals, are aging and conservative in their taste. At the other end, the youthful end, potential audiences find it difficult to find a way in, discover only institutionalised pomposity and lack of visceral pleasure in concert going. It's the conservatism that is the barrier. Informality may be a key here to combating this.

I'm generalising, but whichever aspect of this problem you consider, the solution seems to lead back to music education and the relationship of grass-roots music making to this. The heart of music education is in our schools and colleges, but it should also be considered further afield. Music societies, for example, have a role to play in not only presenting music but, through education - presenting workshop programs, say - encouraging new members and involving audiences in the process of making music.

This has come into focus because of severe funding pressures on music education in schools, where everyone seems to recognise the benefits of learning about and participating in music but places too low a monetary value on it. Consequently, there is a void in music education opening up that can be filled by music societies of all kinds.

In terms of the practicalities of how to increase audience numbers, well, imagine concerts that are not based on 'them and us', not based on audiences down here and musicians up there, but which aim to make connections between the them and the us. We need a new word to describe the audience plus musicians symbiosis: the living together of two dissimilar organisms. The musience?