 | Richard RussellWhither a website? |
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Poetry and contemporary music. Contemporary music and poetry. Whichever way round it doesn’t quite have that Pavlovian snap so desirous of the pups in contemporary publishing. Anything that doesn’t have schoolboy wizards is "too niche"; anything that does have schoolboy wizards is of course "derivative". Music publishing of any sort barely registers on the socio-economic radar when some lucky guy collects his royalty on his pop song in carefully planned anonymity while Robbie Williams takes every credit for singing it. In concert music, it is fairly difficult to get a first performance; pretty impossible to get a second. As for publishing and royalties, fame and glory, you’re as well hoping for peace on Earth and goodwill to all men. Poets anyone might have heard of fall into two types: they’re either employed by the Queen ( we get given a new one every thirty years or so) or they’re stand-ups who rhyme occasionally while they guest on Radio Four for a series or two until their one joke wears off. If I ever get to be either I hope i’ll still have the guts to say "fuck" when need be. As far as I know, and by all means correct me, but the only way I can think of to get my poetry published into real paper is as follows: I do the rounds up West to obtain a tanned cab-riding creature called a ‘literary agent’, one who knows where all the swish publishers’ parties are. Then I put on my best shirt and my best cocaine nose and go with my literary agent to one of these parties, replete with dead lobsters and dead rabbits and sickly-smelling non-vintage. I mill around w ith a vacant grin for a while and then I sleep with one of them: the publishers, that is, not the lobsters or rabbits. If I think i’ve got four novels inside me, I immediately suggest marriage. If i’m sure i’m past my best, then I just go tampon-shopping for a few months until i’m remaindered. There are a couple of reasons why I haven’t tried this: you can’t get a decent pint up West, and besides, I was lying about having a shirt. I haven’t the foggiest notion how to get a musical score published. The sheet music publishers don’t throw swish parties, on account of them all being dead for the past two hundred years. Their publishing houses generally stick to the old man’s roster, in between bribing their way onto the grade exam syllabus. The temptation is to stick the whole lot, everything I’ve written, up on the web, for all to leer and scoff at. I figure i’d rather have a chance of getting played in Bolivia than pay the postage on a parcel of precious paper to some carping competition judge in grassy Hants. The truth is I do the writing, and just the writing, and really have no urge to hawk my arse to the highest bidder. I can’t destroy capitalism, but I can certainly do as little as possible to encourage it. Art is intrinsically about reality and emotion, truth and beauty in variety, and not style, packaging, lip-gloss, poorly-choreographed gyrations, clothes for toddlers, or gunz in the hood. The more we see all of these things, the more we see the artless viciousness of commerce over industry, gimmick over talent, re-hash over fresh exposition. Many serious artists are busy grasping the concept of web-selling their wares as a virtual cottage industry, rather more William Morris wallpaper than Jim Morrison on prime-time. Modern culture is a splintered twisted wreck. Starvation under Thatcher plus dictatorship under Blair equals clusters of creative artists living by sharing the crumbs of neo-Victorian poverty. One way out is to turn to the local community to become the best songwriter on your estate, at least before the government licences live music out of existence. Another way is to tap into virtual communities, building as we go, before government plus Murdoch and his pals equals rigid controls of the web. This site contains no links to Amazon, ebay, Microsoft, or AOL Time Takeover. I know, Murdoch doesn’t have any pals: he just has servile underlings and a pet prime minister. Doesn’t mean i’m talking complete bollocks, does it? The point about concert music is the range of forces you can employ and the precision good players add to expression. I like to play jazz, as a complete antidote to the rigours of any script, but when it comes to writing things down I become an obsessive watch-maker, the supreme dictator of all eardom. My artistic ambition is the continuance of the tradition of orchestral and chamber music in a world where our very best players sit on their ragged arses for ten months before the ‘phone rings with fourteen seconds of work from Barclays Bank. So all my works so far have required seriously good players, since there’s no point employing Thierry Henri if you just want him to hoof it up the other end. I’ll write some easier stuff for schools and clubs if someone asks. Until then i’m examining the structural and tonal (as well as atonal) implications of modern music, while not losing sight of the profound belief that the most important thing about any piece of music is the noise it makes. I don’t mean retrograde romanticism about beauty, that is merely another subject under discussion); but even classical concepts of form and proportion are by no me ans exhausted by the march of history; especially when everyone happens to be marching backwards. That covers about ten per cent of what any work of mine is trying to say. Music is a universal language, ergo we will never be able to describe it adequately until we all speak a universal tongue. Mozart, Elgar, Artie Shaw. Bach, Berio, Bob Dylan. Ravi Shankar, Radiohead, Trout Mask Replica. I could continue making lists for hours and the conclusion would be that every single piece of music a composer hears in his or her life existence will affect in one way or another all their ‘own’ work. Originality is a pure Platonic form, not a truly obtainable ideal. Form and structure are geometric obstacles in the fabric of real time, which must be overcome within the intrinsic mathematics of a musical movement. Melody is still an option, even in atonal music, and whatever serial or non-conventional style you employ you still need to follow actual rules such as: ranges of suitability of each instrument; relative weights of different instrument groups; breathing, actual and emotional; and attempting to prevent an audience nodding off- trombones can often help. Given that music cannot be explained, it follows within even a finite universe that music is able to articulate things, concepts, emotions, that no other means of communication can. This would account for why the shameful parasitic capitalist world of Hollywood still employs vast orchestras for every blockbuster, even when they’ve got the latest pointy-bra’d little whiner to sing the theme song. Deep down they know there’s no fix like the pure fix of brass and strings to get the punters to a sufficient comatose state. The football Premiership is sold to you by U2, who are a passable second. Burgers are sold by rap music. Cars are sold by jazz music. Dubious ‘hair-care’ products are sold by an innocuous bit of acid house. And yet who sells music? Well, no-one really, if you look at CD sales’ leaden state. That’s their own fault of course: they narrowed the market down for good capitalist reasons and sold everything to 12 year old little girls. Now all the little girls are bored and so only buy the stuff that will annoy their parents and there’s not much of that left. Live music is about to face famine thanks to New Labour’s ‘regulation’. So-ca lled ‘classical’ music consists mainly of Tchaikovsky highlights. Now I like Tchaikovsky, but if you stick old footage of Bobby Moore on the telly every Saturday then John Terry will never amount to anything. ‘Contemporary’ has become a negative word in concert music, ever since the audience turned its nose up at Stravinsky, almost a century ago. This is still a small audience, and I suppose it’s them i’m writing for. Some of my work has been played, but there are no immediate plans to take a symphony orchestra through my more ambitious stuff. In the meantime, I have to settle for cranky little midi files that do at least further the imagination in the infinity of the sonic medium. Repeat ad libitum.
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