Arguments you wouldn't make in Alabama 11
I spent the weekend at the UK Sacred Harp Convention, singing blood curdling hymns to the glory of god, very loudly with a hundred or so others. Great fun so it was. There’s something joyous about hollering out a hymn that opens with the line “And am I born to die?” and ends with the stanza
Waked by the trumpet’s sound
I from my grave shall rise
And see the Judge in glory crowned
And see the flaming skies
Especially if you’re stood in the middle of a hollow square with the altos behind you hitting a high note that lifts every hair on the back of you neck.
Anyhow, at one point during the Saturday evening social I found myself arguing that, although we singers today may feel grateful to those congregations of singers down the years who have sung these songs and handed the practice down to succeeding generations, there’s no requirement to be grateful, or even to go hunting for ‘authenticity’. Every generation that’s sung these songs and many others haven’t sung them to preserve them or to pass them on. They’ve sung them because the act of singing them has helped them to get through their lives. The songs we have, we know because successive generations have found them to be worth singing or recording. And we sing them for similar reasons. Future generations can go hang, I sing this stuff because it makes me feel good, not because I have some kind of duty.
“It’s a Darwinian argument,” I said, “Though obviously, I wouldn’t put it like that in Alabama…”
Capturing a rant
There was a session at EuroOSCON on ‘Music 2.0’ and very good it was too. However, during the Q&A, I found myself ranting about how the model of music as product is dead. About the only specific thing I can remember of what I said was “I make music because I must. I record it because it helps me improve. And I distribute it because I can.”
If anyone reading this was at the session and can remember what I said in a little more detail, I’d love to hear from you. It’s amazing how quickly things fade from the memory.
A weekend in August 3
If you were to ask me what my current preoccupations were, the top three would probably be breadmaking, ruby and folk music. This last week has been a pretty decent week on all three fronts.
On Friday, I drove down to Shipton Mill near Tetbury, one of the finest millers in the country, and picked up around 40 kilos of interesting flour at splendidly wholesale prices (substantially cheaper than I was paying at my local suppliers and with far greater variety). I expect to have fun experimenting with a few new bread formulae as I work through that lot. After that, I took a quick trip to the VSCC’s Prescott meeting, where my brother was selling tyres
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Prescott’s really lovely, a beautiful site, some spectacular cars and a great atmosphere on the campsite. There were that many family members and Longstone staff on the site there was a virtual Longstone compound. I was sorry I couldn’t stay for the barbecued legs of lamb but I was spending the night with friends in Bath.
On Saturday morning it was off to the Sidmouth Folk Week. Sidmouth is one of the great institutions of British folk music – a week long festival that’s been running for over 50 years. These last couple of years have been run by a new set of organizers and things have been scaled back a little. It’s still Sidmouth though. I last went in 1998 (I think), so it’s been a while, but it still felt just like I remembered. I was crashing with a friend of mine who’s a Sidmouth virgin and acted as a semi-native guide. I think she might be hooked on it too.
I spent a fair amount of time with the Anchor Middle Bar Singers, a festival fringe institution that, whilst not quite as old as the festival, has been running for some time (they recently retired from competing in the “who can raise the most money for festival funds” stakes having been undefeated in this respect since about 1981). The Middle Bar is a twice daily singaround concentrating exclusively on unaccompanied singing, preferably with a chorus. It’s hot, loud, and has its own set of traditions for How Things Are Done.
For Instance, some songs have a ‘standing chorus’; when the singing reaches the chorus of, say, Thousands or More everyone stands for the choruses so, if you’re not completely au fait with which songs have standing choruses, it pays to keep your eyes open.
Monday night was my last night in Sidmouth and when it looked like the twig wasn’t going to make it around the room more than once (a twig is passed around the room to signify who’s singing next) I mentioned that I would really appreciate getting a second song to one of the people on the bench (the people who run the session and who start and finish the singing) and, bless him, he swapped places with me at the end of the night so I was one of the last three singers.
I sang Si Kahn’s song Here is my home, a secular hymn about the fellowship of singing in harmony. It’s a great song with plenty of opportunity for the chorus to join in (it doesn’t just have a chorus between verses, it has them within the verses too) and the singers in the bar were on top form that night, they were sounding wonderful. What nearly stopped me singing though was when the last chorus came around. I’d closed my eyes as I went into it and when I opened them again the whole bar was on its feet belting it out with me. Not something I’ll forget in a hurry.
So, that’s bread making and folk music attended to
On Tuesday I spent the morning in another singaround in the theatre bar before heading off to London for the London Ruby Users’ Group meeting at Skills Matter. A couple of cracking talks (about Domain Specific Languages and tips on working well with front end types) both excellent, one of which was very much last minute after Geoffrey Grossenbach had to cancel when a proposed London workshop he was planning to give fell through. Once the technical stuff was out of the way (I might write more about them when I’ve mulled them over a bit more) we retired to the pub and spent the rest of the evening talking about Ruby, Rails, Smalltalk, Perl 6 and probably a bunch of other stuff. I shall have to make it down to London more often.
Estimating driving time from Devon to London is never going to be an exact science, so I arrived in Clerkenwell about an hour before the meeting and, not being one for sitting in a pub by myself, I repaired to a nice shady bench, pulled out my powerbook and did a bit of light hacking on stuff. I was just starting to get a bit of flow going when someone came into the park and recognized me. Which is just weird. This is the first time I’ve ever been recognized by a stranger. Admittedly, I was wearing the same shirt as I’m wearing in the photo in the sidebar, but still. Embarrassingly, I’ve forgotten the chap’s name – with any luck he’ll comment here and jog my memory.
So, in all a jolly good extended weekend. Flour, songs, and my first microfame moment. Now, if I could just work out how to do that for a living…
Spiers and Boden 1
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If you haven’t been to see Spiers and Boden yet, you really should. Monday night’s gig at the Cumberland Arms was fantastic. Great songs and tunes and, just as important, great rapport with the audience. Anyone who can take what’s potentially one of the most boring songs in the tradition – The Prickle Eye/Holly Bush and make it a blistering encore piece must be doing something right.
Stealing Culture
At EuroOSCON, Cory Doctorow talked about plans for a European Broadcast Flag — a ‘rights management’ system which is to be built into future digiboxes. He talked about the implications of Digital Rights Management for the consumer (there are no good implications). What he didn’t discuss were its implications for media makers.
Although Cory was talking about Television and video, I’m going to talk about music because there are the same pressures there and music’s what I do.
The internet has changed the game here. Tools like Bittorrent and the P2P networks are extremely effective ways of getting music out there. The rise of podcasting makes it possible for any artist to have a global reach and, as Ewan Spence has pointed out:
If you assume a group of three people need to shift around £45,000 net income to get a basic wage of £15K each (UK numbers, I’ve an idea what you need for a basic living wage) then that’s 4,500 CDs at £10 each. How easy is that to manage in the online world? Well you really just need 2,000 hardcore fans, and an album of music every six months and you’ve got your income. Throw in some tours and gigs every other weekend, and any band should ask themselves why they would need a record company deal for a single territory?
Numbers like that (especially if larger artists start to take note of their implications) are why the record companies are behaving like cornered rats. DRM is a last, desperate, throw of the dice. If they can mandate a fully protected chain of distribution, and force the use of ‘trusted’ playback devices that won’t play unprotected content (because unencrypted content is stolen content, obviously), then they get to stay in place as gatekeepers holding the encryption keys to the market.
They’re almost certainly doomed to fail, but they can do a lot of damage while they thrash around.
I’m a folk singer. Music isn’t something to buy, it’s something to make and share with friends in your home or your local. There are still stars — performers who can reliably fill folk clubs and sell enough CDs to make a living at it — but the majority of folkies simply don’t have that hunger, or aren’t that good.
Even in folk circles, the taste for unaccompanied male singers is, ah, unusual. I don’t look for bookings because I wouldn’t get them. But I can fill a floor spot and I like the idea of being heard by a wider audience. So I make recordings available on this site. One great thing about traditional music is that it’s free (as in beer and freedom). I don’t have to contact the publisher to get permission to release a recording without charging for it, I can just do it. I’d love to record The Old Songs and put it up here, but I’d need clearance from the estates of Bob Copper and Peter Bellamy. I’m sure I’d get it, but I don’t want the hassle. Not when there’s so much unencumbered material out there.
Now imagine a world in which the DRM wet dream has true. How do I distribute my recordings then? How does my audience hear them? How does any podcaster manage it? Where do we go to buy our Artistic Licenses?
What about live performance? With the recent changes in the English licensing laws, there are already small folk clubs that have had to shut down or move because the licensing authorities required the venue to have bouncers on the door on music nights. A club with maybe 30 regular attendees doesn’t buy enough beer for the venue to soak up that cost. That means there are fewer places I can go and singing with friends. Pub sessions are suffering too. Our government seems to see public music making as something to be left to the professionals. Never mind that karaoke is still popular, never mind that the Prime Minister served his time in a pub band, never mind that David Blunkett is a stalwart of his local pub’s carol singers. There is a discontinuity there — their expressed intent is to make it easier, but the consequence of their actions is that clubs are closing down and people have fewer places to make music. Nice one.
The worst hasn’t happened yet. The sky has not fallen. They haven’t stolen our culture yet. But we need to keep a tight grip on it.
Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is Pt. 2
Not content with inflicting my reading of Tamlyn on you all, I’ve recorded a couple more songs
Bill Norrie
First up is Bill Norrie, which I was inspired to learn when I heard Fay Hield of the Witches of Elswick singing it at the Cumberland Arms sessions. It’s a fine example of a ‘big’ ballad, and one of countless tragedies that could have been forestalled if people had simply talked to each other.
Composed in August
Composed in August is a love song by Robert Burns. It’s one of my favourite autumn songs. I got it from Lady of Autumn1 by Beggar’s Velvet. It’s a delight to sing; the tune is gorgeous and the words are lovely.
Licenses and stuff
For the avoidance of doubt: arrangements and recordings are Copyright 2005 by Piers Cawley.
These recordings are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence. In the unlikely event that you do create a derivative work, please let me know about it.
1 A long deleted vinyl album that’s recently been released on CD by Old and New Tradition
Another good night at the Cumberland
On Monday, we watched part of No Direction Home, Scorsese’s documentary about Bob Dylan. The part that struck me most strongly was an anecdote about the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
One interviewee walked into the Gaslight Coffee Shop and found Dylan playing. They ended up singing You’re Going to Miss Me When I’m Gone together. About half way through the song, he realised that there was a good chance that there’d be nobody around to miss him.
It occurred to me as I watched, and again last night, that I could think of no better way to spend my last night on Earth than singing and playing with friends. And last night I did exactly that.
Last night was the first Tuesday night of the new University term, which means the Newcastle University Folk and Traditional Music students are back in town. So the Cumberland Arms Bimonthly Tuesday Singing Session was invaded by many of the regulars from the Cumberland Arms Bimonthly Tuesday Anything But Irish Session.
We settled into a good song, tune, song, tune vibe and a cracking night was had by all. Often in sessions with a lot of players1, singers hardly get a look in, and when they do the players take the oppportunity to have a chat and get some beer in. Not last night. Singers all got full attention and we didn’t have the ‘half an hour of reels’ which can be so much fun to play. We singers didn’t overindulge ourselves either; no thirty verse ballads laden with doom, death and despair for us.
There’s so much talent on the course that it can be scary. An older singer fluffed his guitar part slightly and excused himself saying he had always sung with people no more than two years younger than him and he found it quite daunting being in a room full of people younger than his children, making the music he loved
Speaking of talented young people
On Saturday night I went to see Bellowhead.
Wow! I’ve been an admirer of Spiers and Boden, and of Jon Boden’s singing in particular for a while now, but the full 11 piece band is a thing of power and beauty. There was lots (and lots) to love, but the stand out performance was their reading of Flash Company with Jon in full on torch singer mode, while the band played a cacophonous free jazz kind of thing, apparently designed to put the singer off by bearing no relation rhythmically to what he was doing, and almost none harmonically either. A triumph. Courting too Slow, The Prickle Eye Bush and the ‘disco sea shanty’ all kicked some serious arse, and those are just the songs. The Rochdale Coconut Dance, now much tighter than the version on E.P.Onymous is still one of the most danceable tunes in the world, and the introduction to English traditional chair dancing was quite splendid.
Whether you think you like English traditional music or not, you should check these guys out. Preferably in a venue that isn’t all seated.
I can’t wait for their ‘proper’ album.
1 The usual distinction is between ‘singers’ and ‘musicians’, which is inaccurate; singers are musicians, dammit.
A Strange and Bitter Crop
There’s a print hanging above the reception desk at the place where I’m temping. It depicts a line of silhouettes of poplars. It bears the title Southern Trees
I’m finding it very hard to resist the urge to add a couple of bodies hanging from one of them. I wonder if the artist and whoever bought this print realised what they were evoking.
Putting my money where my mouth is
One of the great things that the internet allows us all to do with music is to share it. I don’t mean ‘sharing’ copyrighted material that we have ‘liberated’ from the media we purchased it on – I know enough struggling folk musicians to realise how important royalties are to those people.
What I mean by sharing is sharing the music we make ourselves.
So I’m putting my money where my mouth is. I’ve recorded myself singing Tamlyn and made that recording available. Tamlyn’s my favourite ‘big ballad’. My version runs to just over 9 minutes and is completely unaccompanied. If your idea of listenable music involves, well, almost anything you’d hear in the charts, you may well hate this. But if you think you might like to hear a stranger singing a song he loves to the best of his ability, go for it, you might like it.
For the avoidance of doubt, both song and tune are traditional, arranged by me, and the recording is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence. In the unlikely event that you do create a derivative work, please let me know about it.
