One very busy month and a huge wodge of change...

Between now and the 8th Oct, I have moved twice house, done a years tax accounts, fixed my car, started a new job and been bridesmaid to my best mate. It's been epic. Very little time for imagination. Still, at least I know I can graft like a bastard. Like all really horrid times it's been useful in a clarifying kind of way.

**NB. Wedding was not horrid but lovely & excellent**

Somehow I'm almost out the other side - I got properly bored tonight and had a bit of time to reflect. Tired and bored and grumpy go hand in hand for me but thankfully often bear useful fruit. In this case I learnt how to use twitter a bit more (requirement for new job), skimmed fRoots and realised I should listen to Martyn Bennett. I also realised that my whinge on this blog about working on my own back in the summer has now been fulfilled.

The new job brings me work colleagues: hurray! We're not exactly in the same office (remotely working: first skype conference call on Monday) but we are working together. I'm enjoying having colleagues to go heeeeelllpppp!! to or just giggle about our work. It's so much more fun to work with other people.

It's also a completely different kind of work to get my head around. I wasn't ready to get on with album-y stuff and was a bit bored with what I did have to work on. It's funny how the right amount of busy-ness can bring you extra focus. Perhaps it's the right amount of excitedness.

In other chunks of change, the new house is quiet, clean, warm, tidy, with nice friendly house mates and basic working facilities like cookers and washing machines (lacking in my previous establishment). There's a garden and I can park easily. My lungs don't hate me and housemates are out in the day so there's plenty of noise making time. I think long term housemates will probably be fun. I can teach. There are a lot of upsides.

The downside is I miss my noisy, dirty, smelly, barely see anyone room above a pub that was right in the centre of town and full of people and music. I might never have got a good nights sleep but I was never bored. I miss cooking dinner with people playing jazz underneath me, or watching the world go by out of my front window. I miss the sound of college bells in the evening and the "terrace" - sitting half in half out of my window ledge and leaning into the courtyard. I miss all my neighbours and the sense of being connected up with a city. I miss the park out the back with the river.

Where I lived was pretty damn close to an artsy commune. We ran a ceilidh in the courtyard out the back in summer and had to stop every now and then to let cars go past. I knew my housemates before I moved in so the fact I am a loud disorganised enthusiastic curious messy happy changeable person was obvious and had space to exist and didn't impinge on anyone or need to be quashed.

Right now I live in silence and neatness and that careful careful exploration of space shared with other adults. I hope I discover I live in a space where it's ok to be pretty silly: invent a song about your dinner being a fish and make someone else laugh rather than wince. I briefly lived in a housesit this month and found that I could indeed make up fish songs and make the owner laugh. That was a good day.

As my musical life is not going to happen beneath my feet I want to invest more time going out to play with other musicians. This used to just happen but now I'm going to have to do the far scarier thing of going out and finding new spaces and introducing myself. To be fair though I wanted to do this before but had no incentive and no energy. Hopefully a quiet sleeping space means more fun time long term. I need to re-jig my working week though - I have too many nights taken up away from home. I'm not sure how that is going to happen. Time to look at priorities anew...

... and on with the next adventure.

Brendan Breathnach

Brendán Breathnach was an Irish piper and a music collector. I first got interested in him after hearing another harper had found nice, simple tunes in his collections. I like the older sounding, slightly more stark Irish tunes and his collections sounded like a possible source. His collections are called Ceol Rince na hÉireann vols 1-5.

Wikipedia has a nice article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breand%C3%A1n_Breathnach

Also by TG4 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9AG2AC7LdE

Someone doing some indexing work using Brendán's collections and interfacing it with an ABC search:
http://msikio.online.fr/Breathnach/bbcode.htm
A nice detail from the video link below is that Brendán included name and location of each tune in his index allowing him to build up a "map" of where each tune was played. I don't know if he ever publishing this as a map - I'd love to see it. Might work incredibly well as an online thing - you type in a tune name and the bits of the map flash green where that tune was known.

Long interesting biogrpahic article from the Journal of Music:
http://journalofmusic.com/article/301

JStor has links to another article:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/20522525

Lilting on the Comhaltas site

http://comhaltas.ie/music/tag/Lilting

Comhaltas tag system makes stuff really easy to pull out. Hooray.

Irish lilting of tunes: video and audio.

Musical identity can be a hard thing to find

It's taken me a long time to learn what I like like playing.

It's taken the inclings of a stylistic position on all this folk stuff - or rather deciding that such a position is pretty pointless as what I find valuble is making my music fun and engaging. Instead of thinking "I like English and Irish tunes" I'm prefering "I like this kind of phrasing by this player in this tune here". It would be nice if it coalesced into some kind recognisable style, it's a lot easier to find an audience!

But as this stuff has to be memorised and evolved and if I'm doing it for myself then I have to really like the stuff, really like all the qualities of the stuff I'm creating. Otherwise why I do want to live it, to burn it into me?

I decided that I'm happy with my music as long as it is well developed, distinct, possesses a certain clarity and it has a little bit of magic. That's how I like the music I choose to listen to, and the people I interact with too. More importantly, that is the music that I see audiences react best to. It doesn't matter what it is - it has to have a very clear "ness".

If you fall outside of a tradition then you have to realise you're playing a popularity game of some degree. It's been pretty obvious that the desire to make stuff my own way is a bit too strong for me to exist only as a "Classical Harpist" or "Irish Harper" or perhaps any stylistic tradition. I still value them hugely both for their aesthetic appeal and the extreme skill involved in each. I will still play music from those traditions, but if I tried to place my identity inside them I would feel false.

I hate working on my own. I'm going to have to design a working life where I'm not.

Right now I can't quite see how that's going to happen. So on with the research...

Hunting nessie....

immersion - incubation - illumination - verification

http://cameroncounts.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/doing-research/

In 1945, Jacques Hadamard published a book called The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field. The above four words are his theory: that there are four phases of thought involved in solving a mathematical puzzle. I think this is a pretty good description for solving any problem. Doesn't mean that you know when to stop or start each one, more that you might find the landscape more familiar and less annoying.

Woods and trees

I'm grateful for all the non-musicians I get to play for. So often musicians can't see the woods for the trees - all that detail is too close. Those who don't spend their lives obsessing over sounds give you a much better impression of the world you are actually crating with your music, which is after all the point.

Something Triona Marshall said to classical harpists learning to play Irish music - you have to go for the energy. The vibe, the feel, the energy does not come out of the details. Go for the the woods first, you can focus on the trees later.