Steampunk - adventures of the New Years Eve kind

I'm going to play for a steam punk event on New Years Eve. I've been doing my research and discovering that there is definitely a steampunk music scene. Apart from plenty of sound effects, it seems that part of the steampunk vibe is Regency dances: waltzes, polkas. Handy. Apparently there is even a band called Ghostfire who have a waltz called ‘Calibernus’ - it would be lovely to have something recognisably "steampunk" in my repertoire.

I will be playing while people enter the club for the first time and I've been thinking about how best I can add to the atmosphere. The main thing I need to do is to help create that sense of otherness and welcome and that costume may be as important as the music I make.

From my web-ventures, steampunk seems to be this mixture of victoriana, adventurers and exquisite brass gadgets with some grubbiness thrown in for good measure. The current costume plan is to look like a harp toting grubby adventurer but somehow also elegant? Now I own something corsetty, can find some blousey thing, and have glove and boot like items. I need to find an appropriate kind of skirt and then as many accessories in brass or leather as possible.

Not too far away from this image on the left (courtesy of Monika Gorka)

I should probably imagine what I would have if I was an adventuring harpist and think along those lines. Mmm. Practicality with a necessary contingent to remain looking elegant. Costume shops in Oxford here I come....!

Actually it's always been a bit of a dream to go adventuring, especially with my harp (though I think a small version may be in order). I met someone when I was at the fleadh in Ireland - he was amazing, he made his whole living from clowning and playing harp. He was awesome. I want my music to take me on a new adventure too!

Biographies

One of my least favourite things ever is writing biographies. They seem to be like ... dark magic.
I think the only thing to do is collect together your necessary points and attack the piece with vigour - I am never going to be happy with it but at least I can actually put something together. Also - you have to remember that each one has to be tailored for its unique purpose - rubbish!!

At the moment I have three to write:

• Something very short for the Clarsach society website
• Something longer for admittance into a harp teachers directory
• Redoing my web page about teaching.

This last one is particularly doing my nut in, so it can wait!

Christmas messing about

I'm messing about with a laptop, free recording software, rubbish mic and my old harp, recording stuff trying out ideas, listening back. Very handy. This helps me to review - feel how what I arrange feels to a listener. Very useful.

I think when you're playing a melodic tradition on the harp and intending to stick within that, your main arrangement options involve ow thick you make your melody - where you place accent notes, do you add harmony lines. What makes the melody suddenly engaging, what makes it suddenly float?

Definitely fun for post-Christmas work. I might even stick some up if I like them.

Music, magic and transformation

For me, performing music is making a little bit of magic. You go up on stage, take your excitement and inspiration with you and let your skills and preparation do the work. Whether it is a huge amazing experience or something sweet and intimate, music has the capacity to take you away from your present world into another state. I feel that transformative power is real magic.

Discussing teaching with a friend last night, it was brought home to me how different teaching is to performing. Totally, completely different focus. You might need the same knowledge but you have to understand that information in a completely different way and give your attention to different levels of it. Additionally, you need your teaching skills: the relatively selfless discipline of working with someone else, in their mind, for them. Whilst on stage you are also working for your audience, but you don't have to keep a calm and controlled state in the same way - in fact it's better that you don't.

Essentially I have trained to do two things - my daytime weekday job of teaching and my evenings and weekend preoccupation of performing, of creating those magic spaces.

However distinct I've just made those two occupations sound, I feel at their heart they have a crucial similarity: that magic of transformation, the slow revealing of how the world can be a different place. Some of my favourite times are quiet morning lessons, with many small discoveries and moments of magic.

Sting even uses melodeons

Now I wouldn't normally write about Sting... but the cd was on where I was working today. I spotted Mary Macmaster's vocals on one track and so read through the cd booklet. Sting has picked a musicians list of really excellent trad players - including most of the lineup of the Kathryn Tickell band! Sweet. On earlier tracks I was thinking that's a nice groove. Now I know why!

Holidays = thinking time

Gosh. I love music, I live it, I really do and am very glad to do so. I also love teaching it but right now I am totally looking forward to the end of term. There is a huge and fascinating world clamouring for my attention. Once I've allowed it to distract me for a while then the thoughts and sounds inside me will flow easily again. I even know what I musically where I want to go next... I just need the energy and space to do so.

This term has been a huge accumulation of experiences and thoughts and planning and lessons and playing - it's been great. It's been the most fun for ages. I haven't been bored (novel). I'm just really looking forward to letting it all sift through - time to reflect on everything that's happened. I have at least half a dozen drafts of blog posts waiting to be finished. Then the important bits will sift out and I be able to see my next steps clearly.

Knowledge... like folk tune repertoire... isn't inherently perfect

I feel that knowledge is not fixed or static but flowing, evolving, changing, new parts and old parts drifting into focus or becoming fuzzy again. Forgetting, moving on, becomes just as important and absorbing new material. In fact you cannot absorb new material without having a relatively clear head - so there is a need to leave the old behind whether tunes, ideas, music or phrases. You can go through phases of things though: I obsess over a problem, solve it, move on. That's one of the points of this blog. In recording the information, the problems, I can review them then move forward.

Just like folk tunes are popularised or forgotten or changed in the fallible process of aural learning and transmission, so ideas recur or vanish or change. Some become more permanent through changes adopted in our institutions, our structures. For instance: we need lots of 2 part jigs and reels for dances that are currently popular so there are more of those tunes well known. Or we've decided that a certain kinds of intelligence are important so our higher level learning institutions only support people with those kinds of ability. The ideas may still change and flow the but the human organised traditions lock us into certain kinds of paths.

While I was growing up our modern world felt so fixed, so completed, there was nothing more to add. It seemed as if those who had gone before had some almost God-like quality - their work (musical or academic) seemed so perfect and complete in conception. I feel the world is presented to us this way as well: it should always be safe, always be complete, if it's not safe then it's the fault of someone else and you can sue them, a Nanny state.

I'm realising: a, there's no real sense of life or in life without the acknowledgement of risk; b, no information is ever complete or fixed so don't worry about it, just get a good enough method for examining and review (your own and peer review as well).

Most of my thoughts are not directly about music, but about wanting to understand the world, for myself now. I want to read much more about he great thinkers who have directly shaped the world before us: the older I get the more I see the world as shaped by people. Once upon a time I saw it all as almost divinely mathematical: you should be able to calculate almost everything, all knowledge was at our fingertips, there was nothing we couldn't know.

Bizarrely, this made me feel like there was no reason to chance anything - nothing new to learn, if you know all the information and the world is still shit why bother? Gradually I have come to realise that it's just a succession of theories - I'm not even sure we could say that the ones we have now are better than the ones that went before. With respect to our lifestyles in the West yes we can say that we live longer, we have a more comfortable existence, we can devote more of our energies to non-essential activities. Maybe this is progress but I feel something has been lost.

What is there in our viewpoint of the world that renders it so hard to live with? Now should be easy, easy yet we have more and more people especially in the Western world succumbing to mental illness, we have obesity and violence and boredom and disengagement on a massive scale. That can't be right.