Middle classes and music

From the nz-folk list: Here's an extract from a recent article about classical music concerts inthe New Yorker. I wonder if a similar phenomenon took place in folk music at around the time the EFDSS formed? Folk music is probably not what it once was.

With the aristocracy declining in the wake of the French Revolution and subsequent upheavals, the bourgeoisie increasingly took control of musical life, imposing a new conception of how concerts should unfold: programs favored composers of the past over those of the present, popular fare was banished, program notes provided orientation to the uninitiated, and the practice of milling about, talking, and applauding during the music subsided. To some extent, these changes can be explained in anthropological terms: by applauding here and not applauding there, the bourgeois were signalling their membership in a social and cultural élite. As Johnson points out, they felt obliged to reconfirm that status from year to year, since, unlike the aristocrats of yore, they lived in fear of going back down the ladder. “The bourgeoisie isn’t a class, it’s a position,” the Journal des Débats advised. “You acquire it, you lose it.” Attending concerts became a kind of performance in itself, a dance of decorum.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2008/09/08/080908crmu_music_ross

Wellingtonians: The Singers' Club Needs You!

June Sizzled at The Singers’ Club!

Our superb guest line-up of Darren Watson plus Bob Cooper-Grundy with Kate Marshall turned up the heat and gave a full house a truly memorable evening of music that had Upper Cuba Streetjumping, despite the winter chills.

However, there will be no Singers’ Club in July! We’re taking a Mid-Winter Break to catch our breath; get ourselves organised and do some recruiting.

We have lost two of our original Residents, Alistair and Catriona, and we can’t function properly with just the two of us remaining to run the club, run the sound and stage and host the evening. Not to mention the odd performance, which is the object of the exercise!

So we are actively looking for one or two new Residents to help us. Ideally (but not necessarily), musicians, who are easy going, with a passion for live acoustic music. They should also have a small talent for organisation and a big sense of humour. We do this for fun!

There’s not a huge amount to do. We’re well set up and we have a full Programme of Guests organised out to the end of the year and the venue and the audience to support the Club. So contact us now as we need you urgently. 021 253 8996

We’ll update you about August and any changes or news nearer the time by Newsletter; and we’ll update the webpage www.nzacoustic.net

But, don’t despair, there will be live music at The Roxy on Tuesday July 31st.

Bob McNeill is in concert at the Café on that night (see below for details), so keep the last Tuesday of the month programmed in your diaries for great live acoustic music.

As ever, if you don’t want to get news about the Singers’ Club, just send us an email with ‘I don’t want this stuff!’ in the subject line. J

The Singers’ Club Residents:
Tony Hillyard & Tracey Haskell

For regular news about who’s playing at the Singers’ Club on the Last Tuesday of every month, go here: www.nzacoustic.net

If you’re interested in playing at the Singers’ Club contact Tony Hillyard:
021 253 8996 or: tonyh@clear.net.nz

Battlefield Band Concert Review, Dunedin

It was not without trepidation that I waited for the doors to open at the Regent Theatre at 7pm. I tried to suppress an initial flush of optimism as a few people fronted up right away and headed for the ticket counter. I allowed myself a small increase in positivity as an orderly queue of twenty or thirty assembled at the auditorium door. By the time those doors opened and the bow-tied and suited ushers were tearing tabs off tickets, I was something approaching elated. This was a big financial undertaking for the club and it was looking like any bath we might take would at least be a warm one.

A healthy Thursday-night cohort of about 450 people settled in and Lindsey Shields cut a dapper figure as she strolled into the limelight to welcome everybody and introduce the support act, Ben the Hoose. Bob and Kenny played a sterling set, Kenny’s Scottish fiddle styles were sublime and Bob delivered his self-penned songs in what proved to be the pick of the voices this night. His warm tones rang around the Victorian alabaster and shut the Scottish cold out. It was pleasing to see a New Zealand act every bit the equal of the international act to follow.

And follow they did. The first half of the Battlefield Band concert seem to set them all up individually, featuring each in turn playing to their strengths: a rugged set of pipe tunes from Mike Katz, an inspired set of strathspeys and reels from Alisdair White who has just released a solo album (“The White Album” – no mention of The Beatles) and songs from Sean O’Donnell (the Tom Waites Shiver Me Timbers being a particular favourite) and band kaumatua, Alan Reid. Reid took great delight in the theatre’s Yamaha grand piano which enabled him to move away from his twin keyboards for a more traditional Scottish accompaniment.

In the second half the band delivered en force tunes and songs that made the wee hairs stand up. The unison playing of pipes and fiddle were perfect to the finest ornament – it is only in a sound-reinforced concert or studio recording that these two instruments could be equal in volume, so it is pleasing to be able to experience the synergy of both. And as for the sound, while for the most part perfectly balanced, I did find the overly lavish reverb left a harsh tail on the vocals, fiddle and whistles which I found quite distracting.

All in all though, it was the most pleasing way to spend one of the coldest Dunedin nights for a while.

Grada Concert Review

Sean Manning reviews the Grada concert, April 28th at the Dunedin Railway Station.

Now I have to say that Grada are a very good-looking band. Structurally similar To Lunasa – guitar and bass on either side holding the thing together and driving the music along, with the tune players, and in this case the singer, in the middle. They are young, energetic, and seem to really enjoy what they do together. There were no moments of ennui, no difficult dynamics. Even after god knows how many almost identical concerts, they seemed to be really having a good time. They told an illustrative story, how on their only day off in an Australian tour, which happened to be in Bondi, they stayed at home to rehearse new material.

They also seemed to be genuinely friendly. After the concert I went up to see what kind of guitars Gerry Paul was playing – he was off somewhere talking to someone else – and the fluter, Alan Doherty, merrily invited me to have a go with them. When their owner returned he was even more encouraging.

(For the guitar players, mostly he played a McIlroy, made in County Antrim by a refugee from George Lowden’s guitar factory, where they make instruments with a major reputation among folk musicians – Donal Hennessey of Lunasa plays one. Another graduate of the same school, Sam Irwin, made one of my guitars. The other one was a 1960-something Martin, a lovely little parlour guitar with tremendous intonation.)

With Gerry Paul crouching over his instrument on the right and Andrew Laking bending across his stand-up bass on the left, both of them New Zealanders, the music was pushed along – they don’t do much in the way of slow tunes. At times it was too complex for me, I wanted to yell, ‘hang on a bit, what happened there? Do that bit again.’ But they were already on to the next, equally complex measure. I can’t really complain, I found the whole concert completely engaging, which is remarkable, coming from this old grump, who can find something boring or just wrong with almost anything. As the concert developed, the layers of the music became plainer – I suppose they were teaching me to listen.

What they do has some roots in Irish diddley-aiddley music, but while superficially similar groups like Lunasa, Danu or Solas remain with the traditional, albeit in a modernized form, What Grada do turns it into pop, jazz and poetry. Nicola Joyce’s singing was not an old-fashioned traditional voice. She delivered the songs with passion and lyricism. An old-fashioned critic might carp that the words were indistinct, something that usually irritates me, but even that was OK, probably more a result of the venue. On their CD, I discovered later, the words are clear.

On either side they were flanked by two stunning instrumentalists – Alan Doherty of flutes and Colin Farrell on fiddle, both also playing whistles on occasion. These are both clearly capable of playing in a traditional style, but apparently impatient with that, their harmonies and solos owed much to improvisation and sounded at times more like jazz.

Favourite moments? Well, the encore for a start (so to speak). They did two things. First, Nicola Joyce and Gerry Paul returned to the stage and did the only reasonably slow thing of the evening – Suzanne Vega’s ‘The Soldier and the Queen’. Not an easy song, it was breathtaking. Then the whole group did something very fast that ended in a chaotically deliberate and high-spirited cacophony. But the best for me was as much visible as auditory. There was a duet on identical low whistles from Doherty and Farrell. Both dressed in black, they framed the singer who sat in the middle playing bodhron, and were framed in their turn by Paul and Laking. To add to the effect, Laking, left-handed on the right, played with his right hand above the left on the whistle, and Doherty, on the left, had his left hand on top. They are the most symmetrical band I’ve ever seen, and they didn’t even know it. When I told Gerry Paul about it afterwards, he seemed bemused.

Pillar to Post

Our local folkclub prides itself in giving our visiting artists all the bells and whistles when it comes to providing sound for our iconic Victorian venue. A hard room to play at the best of times, so we spend a bit on hiring the right gear for the job and having done a few dozen decent sized concerts now we (me and my team of hardworking, unpaid techies) believe we have finessed the venue. It's a wide, high vaulted room with inopportunely placed pillars but we've found the best layout, built a stage platform and arrange the room accordingly. It's a great venue when everything is working.

15:00 The boys turn up and we start lugging the speakers in (2 JBL Concert series), place them on their plinths, angle them just so - experience has taught us this is critical for uniform coverage of this widish room.
15:30 We're running out the multicore and plugging in the amps - about a kilowatt per side. The thing we know well is that big is always better where folk and acoustic music is concerned. No other music, except perhaps classical music, is more demanding of power for its wide dynamic range (soft to loud) and intolerance to any form of distortion or unnatural artifacts. "Headroom" is key and we strive to keep the sound warm, real and uniform across as much of the room as possible. To do this you ideally need big speakers gently moving swathes of air through the space to avoid peaks and troughs in different locations. It's those annoying peaks that listeners percieve as "too loud".
16:00 The lights are going up and the sound system is ticking over nicely with a CD playing through it. Lines, mics and di's are checked, the desk is EQ'd and things are looking good.
16:30 We're onto the housekeeping, taping down leads and packing cases away. Time for a celebratory beer. No hitches, callbacks or toolkit breakouts.
17:00 Soundcheck time. Enter the Talent, who look aghast and say, "We won't be needing that, this is not a rock and roll gig. We've brought our own gear."

I have to say, I was reasonably impressed with how good their own system sounded given it was one tenth the size of the system we were now packing up. Apart from being annoyed at the wasted expense (money and time) I was sad that, given how good this group was, we couldn't have made them sound as good as they could have. Needless to say, tiny speakers on a stick were never going to cut it in front of 50 plus people spread across a room as wide as this. As expected, intelligibility fell right off 30 degrees off axis, so unless you were right down in front, it was a bit of a struggle.

I suppose it comes down to a matter of trust, really. When you turn up at an unfamiliar venue, do you trust that the locals have got it sussed or do you manage what you can with what you've got. The problem here was that the detail of who was doing what was not sorted out by their agent at the time of booking. We both made assumptions.

Ben the Hoose - NZ North Island Tour 2007

Scottish duo Ben the Hoose announce a North Island tour in March 2007 in support of their album The Little Cascade. Ben the Hoose is a duo featuring fiddler Kenny Ritch from Orkney, and songwriter and guitarist Bob McNeill from Glasgow. One of New Zealands most exciting folk/roots stage acts, Ben the Hoose draws heavily on the fiddle dance tradition of Scotland to create irresistible music. Live performances feature a wealth of traditional Scottish tunes as well as modern compositions and Bobs original songs

Ben the Hoose released their debut album The Little Cascade in October 2006. It has since won the Tui Award for Best Folk Album of 2006.

Dates for the Ben the Hoose shows are as follows:

• 07/03 Comfort Hotel, Wellington
• 08/03 The Plateau, Taupo
• 09/03 Marae Atea, Waikato Museum, Hamilton
• 10/03 Rocky Bay Hall, Waiheke Island
• 11/03 The Bunker, Devonport, Auckland
• 13/03 Mayfair Cafe, Upper Hutt

Full details can be found on the Ben the Hoose website. See: www.benthehoose.com/calendar.asp
Warning: Contains Scottish Music

Compadres: James Keelaghan and Oscar Lopez

From the nz-folk list:

As a long-time fan of Canadian James' songwriting, I was sceptical as to how that could be combined with a virtuoso, Chilean, 'latino' style, nylon strung guitar. Wednesday's concert here in Christchurch blew away any doubts I might have had. These guys are sheer dynamite, the songs shine through and the instrumentals are breathtaking. The term 'virtuoso' is overused, but nothing else can describe the skills of Oscar on guitar and in a style that we rarely, if ever, see here in NZ. The close friendship these guys have off-stage extends into their music and the sheer exuberance and fun is there for all to see. They have a wicked sense of humour too. The lack of any comments after their appearance at the Auckland Festival I find staggering, but for anyone lucky enough to have them appearing anywhere near over the next week, don't hesitate... It could be a while before you'll get another chance to see them in NZ, but I hope it won't be. cheers davy [Stuart]

Sound Advice

As we wind down and do the wash-up from the Whare Flat Folk Festival, thinking about ways we can improve aspects of how we run the event, I often wonder how many performers and artists think about how they can improve their game.

My main role is as sound engineer, one of three or four that do the entire festival. It can be quite tiring because, unlike other gigs, you're doing everything on the fly. Especially in the evening concerts, you never know who is going to step up and with what ("Two mics on the drones please and the hurdy-gurdy pick-up needs a pre-amp,") or with whom ("and joining me onstage is the festival choir..."). First priority is just to get everything going so the performance can get underway - no luxury of soundchecks, so it's particularly helpful if the performer produces a bit of signal from their instrument, confirm that it's going then leave it alone while we do the next one. When musicians are alert to this it's amazing how quickly we can get the perfomance underway and start tending to the niceties of tone and timbre.

Good performers make this process easy and painless. I say 'good' performers recognising that there are fantastic musicians who can be completely unhelpful, albeit unwittingly. Here are some things that we soundmen and stage managers really like:

• Say to the audience, "How's it sounding out there?" This is extraordinarily helpful to the engineer because we can take a vote to see if we're doing a good job and maybe get some advice from the audience as to what we're doing wrong.
• Ask the audience, "Have we got time for a couple more?" No one's more aware of festival time constraints than the audience and after all they're enjoying you more than they could possibly enjoy the next act. Or you could wear a watch.
• Just bring your instrument. Rest assured we'll have a full range of leads, guitar straps, pre-amps, spare strings and a tuner backstage. Anything else we can help you with?
• Insist on the very best condenser mic for your thumb-piano, we want it to sound good. You'll know there's enough of it in the monitor when your ears are bleeding from the feedback.
• Just because the soundman is mixing from in front of the speakers doesn't mean that your suspicion that your vocals are too loud is incorrect. In this case just stand back from the mic. About a meter and a half is good.
• In the rare event that you get a sound check, use it to your full advantage, be as entertaining as possible and take the opportunity to rehearse a few numbers you're unsure of.
• Always mention how hot it is under "all these lights" and that that's the reason your instrument is always out of tune. Say, "It was in tune when I bought it!" We love that one.
• When thanking the organisers of the festival for having you, don't forget to say, "Shame about the weather." This is a useful reminder to us to not be so slack about it next year.

Fortunately none of our guests are anything but cooperative and generous and this is the case New Zealand wide in my experience. It hasn't always been the case. I learned very early in my music career 1) it isn't all about me, 2) the festival organisers are working hard to keep it all running smoothly and aren't out to frustrate me, and 3) the soundman is my friend.

The Great Music Stand Debate

Some years ago I started a thread on the nz-folk list about how the use of music stands detract from a performance. Obviously this came with lots of qualification but the thing that surprised me was how vociferously the use of printed lyrics as a memory aid in performance was defended by some indignant list members.

Clearly there are musical disciplines, orchestras and show bands for instance, where music is read in real time; musicians play from the dots, but in this instance, no one person is engaging directly with the audience - even the conductor has their back to the audience. Classical soloists rarely play from music, they know their material inside out.

In the case of the solo or lead performer, whether it be a punk rock band or an a capella folk singer reading from the text (it's invariably text, not music) devalues even the best performance. First, a music stand creates a visual impairment. It not only distracts from the performer, it usually obscures part of them. Second, I get the clear sense that I am being read to and not experiencing the direct emotion of the artist's intention. One does not expect to see theatre actors perform with the script in one hand; playing a song is much the same thing.The difference is in which part of the brain is engaged in reconstructing the (say) song. Reading, although reasonably intuitive in most of us, is essentially a "logical" or "left brain" exercise. Rendering an emotive, humourous or satirical performance is not. There is some complex cognative processing going on in converting text and/or chords from a page to a voice-and-instrument presentation and this taxes the delivery no matter how well rehearsed.

Don't get me wrong, performing from lyrics and memory aids is fine and commonplace in our clubs and pubs - and if that's what you need to perform, do it. But if you aspire to a being more than a campfire singer then it is best to try to develop a repertoire that you can do from memory. I know of several overseas festivals, for example, that would think twice about engaging an artist that presents with a music stand for major concerts. It may seem unfair but in many of these circles it just seen as unprofessional. Some actually say this in their guidelines. They want you to genuinely know your material and not look like a work in progress.