Hug a musician...

Courtesy Pixabay

I've been re-typing my old journals so that I have a digital copy on the Cloud. In one entry dating from January 1993, I mention that we'd cleared out some clutter from our bedroom. We decided to get rid of a poster we'd had for some time because it was fading badly and become hard to read. 

I'd copied the words into the journal entry, but couldn't read the author's name, at the time. The words are probably reasonably well-known, though I'm not sure that the author, Kenneth Gisoms is. The only thing that seems to come up in relation to his name are the words that appeared on the poster, which all relate to music, and which are both humorous and wise. It's possible that the order of the statements I have here isn't as in the original. 

Furthermore, the statements may have been collected together by Gisoms: the first one appears to be by Aldous Huxley.

• After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
• Music is indivisible. The dualism of feeling and thinking must be resolved to a state of unity in which one thinks with the heart and feels with the brain.
• Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
• The entire pleasure of music consists in creating illusions, and commonsense is the greatest enemy of musical appreciation.
• What gives music its universal appeal is the very fact that it is at the same time the most subtle and intangible and the most primitive of all arts…it can make a dog howl and silence a crying baby.
• The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music. They should be taught to love it instead.
• Too many people are trying to justify the precision with which organised musical sound is produced rather than the energy with which it is manipulated. By concentrating on precision, one arrives at technique; but by concentrating on technique, one does not arrive at precision. Melody is the gold thread running through the maze of tones by which the ear is guided and the heart reached.
• People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the piano happens to be open; because they want to become millionaires; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.
• Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas one has no time to write down.
• The public today must pay its debt to the great composers of the past by supporting the living creators of the present.
• All human activity must pass through its periods of rise, ripeness and decline; and music has been to a certain extent the fortunate in that it is the last of the great arts to suffer this general expense.
• You cannot have critics with standards; you can only have music with standards which critics may observe.
• Time is to the musician what space is to the painter.
• Psychologists have found that music does things whether you like it or not. Fast tempos invariably race your pulse, respiration and blood pressure. Slow music lowers them.
• Music hath charms to sooth the savage breast, soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.
• Good musicians execute their music, but bad ones murder it.
• Some musicians take pains with music, others give them.
• We can look away from pictures, but we cannot listen away from sounds.
• It is not necessary to understand music, it is only necessary to enjoy it.
• Of all the arts, music is practiced most.
• Music is a kind of counting, performed by the mind, without knowing that it is counting.
• The hardest thing in the world is to start an orchestra, and the next hardest to stop it.
• There should be music in every house, except the one next door.
• The more you love music, the more music you love.
• Hug a musician, they never get to dance.

Patrons needed

Even if you bought an exceptional Michael Kelly guitar at Musicians Friend and made the best album in the world there's no guarantee that the Wider Music World will notice you. I've just been watching a programme on Choice TV which pointed out that some musicians who have music on Spotify have to have up to 125 downloads of one of their tracks before they earn as much as a dollar. It isn't Spotify that's causing this issue, it's the fact that there are an awful lot of musos out there, and they're all chasing your money. Social media is a good way to improve your chances of being heard (as one of the women musicians interviewed discussed), but it takes a fair amount of promotion all the same, and most of that's going to have to be done by you, otherwise that one dollar you've earned will be eaten up by some expensive advertising campaign. And that takes away from your productive music time.

I was talking to one of the older ladies at church (older than me, that is) this morning, and she was telling me about her artist son (he's now in his sixties), and how it's never been easy for him to promote himself. He's had exhibitions and his name is known but that kind of promotion is hard work for him, as it is for many artists. Most artists - musicians, painters, writers etc - need a patron to survive well enough to be able to do their best work. The reality is of course that most musicians, painters, writers etc don't have patrons, and struggle. They have to deal with daily life, real life, and that's another factor that affects their work.

This is a bit of a minor rant, really.

Apostrophizing

Ibanez RG8 review at Musicians Friend. Excuse the lack of an apostrophe in that previous sentence, but I'm just copying what someone else has given me, and the someone else obviously doesn't know about apostrophes...or doesn't care. They're obviously of the grammatical school that goes along with this line:

Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit when its not needed.

Talking of apostrophes, did you know that there's an ebook-selling company called, 'txtr?  The apostrophe is part of their title, weird and all as it seems. Apparently they're a German company originally, but there's even a branch that sells books with NZ prices applied to them. I'd never heard of them until just now...and I've no idea why they'd use the apostrophe in such an odd way.

I made a fuss in the first paragraph about the lack of an apostrophe, but it seems there's an ongoing push  to get rid of the thing entirely, partly on the basis that in speech we don't make any indication that we're using apostrophes at all. (Perhaps we should 'click' our tongues?) I remember writing a column about this years ago: it certainly makes reading more difficult, however, because certain words, such as cant have a different pronunciation when the apostrophe is removed - on the page - though context will usually tell you what word is intended. And the idea that the apostrophe is a waste of time isn't new.  Way back in 1902 George Bernard Shaw (who always considered himself a forward thinker in terms of spelling) wrote: "There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli." As forthright as Shaw's statement is, I'm not sure that apostrophes can really be classified as bacteria, and who would regard the use of apostrophes as a 'trick?'  There's an interesting article in Slate magazine giving some background to the ongoing debate about, and the history of, apostrophes. Seems they're not as longstanding a fixture of the English language as we thought.

Apostrophe, as a word, has often been used in a different sense entirely, one that we now consider archaic.  Here's Charles Spurgeon writing, and using its different meaning: "Thrusting, thou hast thrust at me." It is a vigorous apostrophe, in which the enemy is described as concentrating all his thrusting power into the thrusts which he gave to the man of God. According to one online dictionary, Spurgeon is using the word in this sense: The direct address of an absent or imaginary person or of a personified abstraction, especially as a digression in the course of a speech or composition. I've come across this usage regularly in Gilbert and Sullivan's operas, but here's another example of just such a usage, which was common in the 19th century: On finishing school at 16,in spite of a threat of disinheritance from her grandfather, a state senator, Antoinette joined her uncle's stock company, billed as "The youngest female star in America." When the company played New York in 1906, she [was]called "the sweetest, most piquant ingenue Broadway has seen for many long months." Her stage personality was "distinct," her acting "clever and winsome," and her beauty "such as the poets apostrophize."

Anyway, to get back to the contemporary meaning of apostrophe, here's an example of its complete misuse from the NZ Herald. This advertisement was the subject of much rubbishing on Twitter back on the 18th of August this year. 

Keen-eyed readers will note four incorrect uses of the apostrophe. There's also a word missing in the first sentence, a stylistic misuse of the number five, and, according to Vaughn Davis, @vaughndavis, one questionable sentence. I'm not sure which one he's referring to, however. 

Oh, for the days of proofreaders!  [Yeah, go on, I bet you can find a misuse of something in this post too!]

Musicians, poets, scientists and atheists

I wrote about Evernote in my last post.  And I'm going to mention it here again: it's a great place to go looking for something to connect up with an idea or phrase that you're using in a post, a phrase such as the following: affordable Behringer mixers at Musician's Friend.

To many readers that will read a bit like a statement in a foreign language, or a dense poem. By the way, talking of poems, I'm reading an anthology called Poems of Devotion at the moment.  It's edited by the poet, Luke Hankins, who's served as Associate Editor of Asheville Poetry Review since 2006.  It's a collection of wonderful poems by modern poets, some more accessible than others, but all worth reading.  The focus in the book is on devotion to God, but there are some poems that have snuck under the radar a little too. 

But that's a side path. Back to the original phrase.  I did a search on a couple of the words in it: Behringer produced no results, mixers only a couple of not very interesting ones. Musicians - without the apostrophe - produced plenty, and the first was one from a book I read recently called God's Undertaker, by the scientist, John Lennox.  It's a book in which he tries to bring some sanity to the science/atheist vs Christian/creationist debate.  The following quote has only a small amount to do with musicians, but it's worth reading all the same.

"...the fact that there are scientists who appear to be at war with God is not quite the same thing as science itself being at war with God. For example, some musicians are militant atheists. But does that mean music itself is at war with God? Hardly. The point here may be expressed as follows: Statements by scientists are not necessarily statements of science. Nor, we might add, are such statements necessarily true; although the prestige of science is such that they are often taken to be so. For example, the assertions by [Peter] Atkins and Dawkins, with which we began, fall into that category. They are not statements of science but rather expressions of personal belief, indeed, of faith – fundamentally no different from (though noticeably less tolerant than) much expression of the kind of faith Dawkins expressly wishes to eradicate. Of course, the fact that Dawkins’ and Atkins’ cited pronouncements are statements of faith does not of itself mean that those statements are false; but it does mean that they must not be treated as if they were authoritative science. What needs to be investigated is the category into which they fit, and, most important of all, whether or not they are true."

This kind of straightforward thinking does wonder for the brain, especially if it's been assailed by Dawkins-type thinking. 

Sitzprobe

Sitzprobe literally means a 'seated rehearsal' and it's a term used in opera and musical theatre to describe the time when the singers first get together with the orchestra, before a production is presented publicly.  The aim is for the two groups, the singers and the musicians, to put the music together. The equivalent Italian term is prova all'italiana, which sounds to me as though it should mean to test everything in Italian, but obviously doesn't. 


Tonight the cast and orchestra of Grimhilda! will hold their sitzprobe.  The use of the word has had most of the cast asking, What the heck is a sitzprobe? because I don't think it's a term usually used in amateur musical theatre circles.  Perhaps people doing amateur opera use it; I'm not sure. 


I'm familiar with it because in the days when I worked with opera singers, the term came up constantly, and the event itself was always interesting.  The singers would get all theatrical and start to show off, and the musicians would turn on their slightly superior looks and pretend that actors/singers and musicians should barely be allowed in the same room.  However, after the initial impact of having to sit down together and get the thing moving, they'd all become friendly and it would go swimmingly.  


Well, 'swimmingly' might be a bit optimistic: it would go fairly well, because the first meeting of the singers with the orchestra is always quite stressful for the singers.   They've been working for weeks with nothing but a piano, and suddenly all those sounds they've been used to have been transformed into sounds they aren't used to, and it's quite off-putting.   Nothing sounds right. 


Which is why we hold sitzprobes (I'm sure the German plural is something different, like sitzproben, or whatever, but I don't actually know).   Tonight is going to be interesting, to say the least!

Musicians for Grimhilda!

Now that we've mostly got our cast together - we're just waiting for two Bears to arrive (one is in the pipeline, hopefully) - we're beginning the search for musicians for our pit orchestra.

Please note, this isn't a paid gig.  Sorry, but our budget doesn't stretch to paying anyone....it's the way amateur theatre always used to be!   Performances dates: 27-29th April, and 3rd to 6th May.

We'll be looking for:

1 and 2 violins (minimum of two each)
viola(s)
cello
bass.

flute
clarinet
cor anglais (we may have this role filled, but it's not definite yet)

trumpet
horn
bass trombone (again, this position should already be filled)

two percussion players

piano (playing on a digital piano, as getting a piano into the Mayfair pit is a bit of a nightmare)
celesta (played on a digital keyboard) this is quite an important part in the score, so the percussion players won't be able to include it in their roles.


If you can fill any of these roles, or know someone who can, let me know.

New Poet Laureate

Ian Wedde is the next New Zealand Poet Laureate.

I used to work with Ian way back in the 70s, when we were both posties (postmen, to the uninitiated). I don't know that we ever had much to do with each other - it was the musicians among the posties who tended to clan together rather than the poets....although I had gotten to know another poet, Brent Southgate, when I was a postie before I went to England - back in the 60s. He's the brother of the well-known conductor, Bill Southgate, who I knew a little earlier on here in Dunedin music circles, and who coincidentally arrived back in NZ on the same day that my wife and I did, when I returned from England. Both of us stood listening to a race commentary on the radio, having forgotten the unique quality of that NZ sound.

There, that'll do for the name-dropping today.

I've read Wedde's poetry in the past and it hasn't greatly appealed, but either he's moved on from the kind of poetry that didn't appeal to me, or I've moved on....his Harry Martens is typically Wedde in its use of language yet more readable than what I remember from the past. Perhaps solid doses of denser Les Murray poems over the years have made me more aware of what Wedde's doing, and maybe it's time to come to him afresh.