Alan Coady’s Musical Blog

Think you’ve got a good ear for musical style and history? Listen to this extract les-elemens and try to put a date to it. Then look at the last title in the Selected Compositions list on this page for the answer.

You can hear more on YouTube.

This afternoon I was proud to take part in a performance with 9 guitarists and 2 singers from Knox Academy & North Berwick High School. Organised by Health Scotland, the theme was mental well-being and the idea of the performance was to allow delegates to see the benefits conferred upon young people by engagement in positive activity. This resonates with my own view (not mine alone, of course) that involvement in something, which is both meaningful and bigger than oneself, is one of the key ingredients of good mental health. Music and sport provide many and varied opportunities for the natural occurrence of this phenomenon.

Impromptu MC, I was keen to highlight the relevance of the way in which much of the music had been put together to the themes of the day. Many of the pupils had been on exam leave for several weeks and, nevertheless, were game to take on new material for public performance at very short notice. One example of positive attitude was to be seen in two pupils who agreed to join in the accompaniment of two songs only yesterday. Another was in the willingness of the whole group to perform a blues put together in a few minutes with neither notes nor overall plan written out. Four individuals volunteered improvised solos in this blues, and I was keen that the audience enjoy the quality of living in the moment, which always adds an immediacy to performance. I decided to dedicate this blues to Carol Craig of the Centre for Confidence and Well-being who was seated quite near the group. Her talk on well-being at the 2007 Scottish Learning Festival was one of those rare events where someone appears to be articulating inchoate thoughts you’ve had for years.

Our final item, an arrangement of The Average White Band’s Pick Up The Pieces, seemed apposite. The young people playing have most of their lives before them. Things are bound to go wrong in the remaining decades but the thing is to pick up the pieces and keep on keeping on.

Thanks to everybody involved* for representing East Lothian in general, and these two schools in particular. The audience seemed both engaged and moved and the organisers were very grateful to the pupils for providing exactly the positive effects they had envisioned.

* the day had kicked off with a performance by some hip-hop dancers from Dunbar Grammar School – unfortunately this was long before we arrived for our lunchtime slot.

Wednesday’s edition of All In The Mind featured a study on the effect of rudeness (in the workplace) on creativity and productivity. The study by Amir Erez of the University of Florida and Christine Porath of the University of Southern California, discovered that even witnessing rudeness can affect cognitive performance, memory and incliantion to help out.

This discovery is at odds with our culture of humiliation as seen in Britain’s Got Talent; X Factor; The Weakest Link; Dragons’ Den; The Apprentice. The first two of these are extremely popular with pupils and, before hearing of this study, I often used to wonder what message was being conveyed when the response to ambition was often mere cruelty.

Listen again here, or else! The article is the second of three in the programme.

The depth in which a new musical concept is explained varies greatly depending on the age of the pupils. Often, the first encounter of a concept contains little in the way of technical data, the main concern being to see whether or not the pupils can hear the concept.

One such concept is tonality – or the idea of a piece of music being in a certain key. In the first instance I mention no more than the fact that in most pieces have there exists one note which is the leader, the centre and the foundation of the piece. This seems to do the trick. I play a short extract and pupils then rummage around the fingerboard until they locate the centre of the piece. The gravitational pull is usually sufficiently strong to ensure that most will eventually get there. In fact, the pull is so strong that the key note does not even have to be present in the tune. If you play this extract, you will hear what the key note (aka tonic) should be and that, in fact, should have been present as the final note: click

This fact bewilders most pupils. An implied planet cannot exert a gravitational pull, so how can a note do it? Normally an analogy would be pulled out here to illustrate the point. The problem is that I can’t think of a convincing one. The nearest I can get is that in certain sentences, a missing verb is so obvious that it feels more or less present:

He ****** the ball so hard that it broke the crossbar

But even this sentence has room for doubt.

Can anyone out there think of a parallel situation in another subject?

How many countries are there in the world? How many of these have a musical culture of which you’ve never heard a note? Would it strike you as odd if one of these countries was Iraq – a place with which we have been heavily involved? I had never heard any Iraqi music live and so was delighted to discover that Reel Festivals was putting on an evening of Music of Iraq at the Roxy Art House on Saturday. This formed part of their Reel Iraq Festival.

The evening featured Farida with the Iraqi Maqam Ensemble, supported by the Babylon Arabic Band. Both groups were very affectionately received and there was an engagingly enthusiastic, participatory feel. This video will give you some idea of Farida and the Iraqi Maqam Ensemble:

If you’ve never heard any Sufi music from Afghanistan you might like to catch a return visit to Edinburgh of the Ahmad Sham Sufi Qawali Group at the Roxy Art House on Tue 26^th May. I saw this group in a fantastic performance in The Queens Hall last year. Here is an excerpt of the email which alerted me to the upcoming event:

The Ahmad Sham Sufi Qawali group is the most famous Qawali group in Afghanistan at the moment. They will be performing at the Roxy Art House on Tuesday, May 26th. The doors will open at 6.30 and music should begin around 7.30. We aim to convert the Roxy into as close an approximation of an Afghan Sufi house as possible for this. As such we won’t have a fixed price for entry, but will ask for £5 suggested donation. More of course will be much appreciated by the sufi group, all money will go towards covering their costs and any left over will be donated to an Afghan Charity. Last year the group raised £7000, which they donated to widows and children disabled by war.

And here is a taster:

I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t like YouTube. Almost everyone I know has confessed, at some time or another, to having been sucked into a vortex of fascination and losing (track of) time. Can young musicians actually learn much from watching videos? I’d contend that the answer is a resounding, yes!

They can hear how an unknown piece sounds; see how the hands move; hear how changes in tempo and dynamics can help to shape a piece; notice how the accenting of some notes and the subduing of others can result in solo music having several simultaneous layers and sounding more like ensemble music. There is also encouragement to be had in, for example, being spurred on by seeing someone younger than oneself turn in a commanding performance, or someone older making heavy weather of something you’d found quite straightforward.

One thing I have lately found YouTube nudging me towards is comparing various interpretations of the same piece, thanks to the related videos box to the right of the screen. While looking for Leo Browuer’s Estudio Sencillo No. 1, a piece played by many S3/S4 pupils, I stumbled upon an explosive performance by Wang Yameng of the 3^rd movement of Browuer’s Sonata, written in 1990 for Julian Bream. The movement, entitled La Toccata de Pasquini could, I feel, only have been written by a guitarist.

Before long, I had watched ten performances, resulting in a heightened awareness of differences in technique; interpretation; performance spirit; posture; ergonomics of hand movements; quality of film and sound recording; location; lighting. Strictly speaking, these are not in any order, but the top three impressed me the most. What also appeals to me about this situation is the democracy of it. The grace and favour of promoters, agents, publishers is not required. All you need to do is learn the piece, film it and post it.

Wang Yameng

Costas Cotsiolis

Chaconne Klaverenga

Carlo Marchione

Oman Kaminsky

Ali Jorge Arango

Roman Viazovskiy

Dušan Oravec

Nemanja Ostojic

Diego Barber

It’s always special to take part in concerts in a school you attended as a child - one obvious element is that you bump into people you’ve known for quite a long time.

I was especially happy with the performance of the Knox Academy Guitar Group this evening’s Spring Concert. The piece was rhytmically tricky, relying upon fierce concentration but, once on stage, it felt more as though the group had secured the right feeling for the piece. Not only had many of the members performed 6 pages of music on Friday night as members of the East Lothian Guitar Ensemble, but several of them were instrumental (and/or vocal) in many other ensembles this evening.

Here is a clip of us during our rehearsal this morning: pick-up-the-pieces

You’d imagine that a job which entails 52 practical lessons and three rehearsals per week would feel repetitive. Well, I suppose it does in the same way that breathing feels repetitive but, as Burns might say, the deil’s in the detail. Timing is everything, resulting in some days feeling qualitatively different from others. Yesterday was a case in point. To paraphrase a sporting cliché, it was a game of three thirds.

Morning

Teaching in a school with the biggest variety of experience possible – S1 players who began in S1 and S6 players who began in P5. Practical exams behind us, more experienced pupils* could concentrate on repertoire for the East Lothian Guitar Ensemble (ELGE).

Afternoon

Final rehearsal of ELGE before next Friday’s Showcase Concert. The tiredness often seen at these Friday afternoon rehearsals was nowhere to be seen and, to coin an inelegant but accurate phrase, the pupils were really knocking hell out of the music – where appropriate, of course There was no discussion about where to put fingers, technique etc. It was all about balance, articulation, mood, feeling – about enjoying the experience and conveying that enjoyment to the audience.

Evening

2^nd of three performances of Guys & Dolls at NBHS. My role in this is simply to play bass guitar and, as I become more familiar with the part and the cues, I can begin to enjoy the on-stage action more and more. Last night the worrying spectre of illness haunted the cast and the possibility of leading characters simply not being well enough to make their next cue was palpable. Given the commitment and teamwork this really has to be the most unfair piece of luck possible. However, I would defy anyone in the audience to have noticed. This really was the most inspirational illustration of the word trouper I’m aware of having witnessed.

* some of these experienced pupils are in S1

I remember with some fondness my old Amstrad PCW and how it obliquely encouraged me to generate a huge body of work in few episodes. This was due to having to load the operating system from a floppy disc and then each individual programme – the loading of one necessitating the disappearance of the last. So, once set up, the temptation was to bash on.

Such was the feeling yesterday when I had hoped to make a start on recording videos of ensemble parts for this year’s Showcase Concert repertoire. I thought I’d do two or three, call it a day and set aside some time later. However, once the camera was set up, and the school nearly empty, I found myself repeatedly saying “just one more” and pretty soon all 14 were finished. It was my ambition to do each one in “one take” and I stopped only three times – once when the phone rang and twice when the weekly fire bell test took place. Miraculously, all three events conspired to take place in the closing bars of largely error-free takes – thanks guys!

The funny thing was the set up. I asked a 6^th year pupil to line up the Flip Video so that the frame would be pretty much filled with the fretboad – since fingering and articulation were the main points of interest. Somehow, I imagined that my head would be out of shot, but this was not true – and I didn’t ask. Consequently, the videos have the nature of someone being filmed unawares. I have to confess that I look quite bored throughout the process, but nothing could be further from the truth – it’s simply a mix of concentration and the paradoxical endeavour to remain relaxed under pressure, in order to avoid re-takes. I must remember this the next time I suspect a pupil of less than 100% engagement. Techies might notice that the music is (sometimes) being read, in Sibelius, from a laptop screen, which refreshes only at the very end of a page/section. This doesn’t really add to the chances of a relaxed performance as you can’t look ahead – but what’s life without a little challenge now and again

The films, which are all embedded in a new Video page, are pretty much a temporary affair - hence the lack of subtle editing. The East Lothian Showcase Concert, in which these pieces are to be performed, takes place in The Brunton Hall on Friday 27th Mar at 7:30. After that date there will be little use for the videos - unless any other similar ensemble would like to play the arrangements.

A recent, avuncular post of Don’s features the impressive guitar shredding of his nephew, Pete Bramley. A fan of Steve Vai (protégé of the late maverick, Frank Zappa), this is Pete’s entry for Guitar Idol 2009 which, at the time of writing, has gathered 37 votes – mine was the 36th. I was certainly impressed by this playing, particularly given that Pete has just turned 16.

One way to take a look behind the scenes of any competition is to have a look at the judges. The profiles contained many interesting bios, websites, MySpaces etc. What grabbed my attention was this video demonstrating the indomitable spirit of John Denner: