A friend and I have been discussing the career of a mutual friend who died recently. He was a fabulous musician who wasn’t as well known as he should have been.
Writers and visual artists can stay put in the place where they choose to live, and create their work quietly. If their work becomes known and loved, people will beat a path to their door. An artist can live in a tiny village, a writer can live in a little house on a Finnish island and feel no need to travel to promote their work. On the contrary: once their work is appreciated, fans will come on pilgrimage to see where it was that they wrote or painted those marvellous things.
This I suppose is because there is no such thing as ‘live writing’ or ‘live painting’. Sometimes an artist may demonstrate something for a TV audience or whatever, but in general the work is done quietly in the artist’s own studio. And there is not much entertainment to be got out of sitting and watching someone write a chapter of their novel. These things are not performance arts.
Musicians, on the other hand, have to travel to as many places as they can to reach audiences. ‘Live music’ is everyone’s favourite kind of music. Of course, there are recordings, which could be made at home without an audience, but listening to recordings is a very different type of experience. I don’t know any classical musicians who were able to give up live performance and just make recordings, though Glenn Gould came close. Some artists in the pop world have built their reputations on recording rather than live performing, but live concerts are still the biggest draw. I live in one of the cities where Taylor Swift performed not long ago, and am well aware of the huge excitement her live concert generated.
In a way it seems sad that a talented musician can’t just live in the place they want to live, make music beautifully and have people flock to their towns and villages to hear them. I used to have a fantasy of a concert hall at the end of my street, to which I could stroll every weekend, play a concert for whoever wanted to hear it, and be home ten minutes later for a glass of wine. The whole exhausting business of travel, with all its delays and problems, would be eliminated from my life. Yes, I imagine many musicians would welcome a little concert hall at the end of their street.
Oh yes – after a few years of travelling, many a musician would love that concert venue just down the road!
The dream for semi- retirement is – convert the workshop and give mini- concerts for friends and locals in East Lothian.
What a wonderful dream, Clare! I hope you do it.
Einojuhani Rautavaara said that as a child he would dream of living all alone in a tower and writing his music and that in old age he had achieved it. I’m not sure about the details of how he did this, but as someone who enjoys the solitary aspect of writing it sounds rather appealing! I like your fantasy of the local concert hall. I think there is an increasing tendency for even writers to have to perform though – their prowess at interviews and theatre tours is sometimes appraised by publishers almost as much as their writing abilities. This a shame because by nature many writers will never be able to shine at that game…
Good point, James – I hadn’t thought about writers being increasingly forced to become ‘good at’ book festivals, but you’re right.
PR skills are demanded of many artists these days. I’ve sometimes indulged in an idle fantasy about a pre-concert talk given by Beethoven or, even worse, Wagner. Quite an alarming though amusing mental image!
Goodness, yes, can you imagine? A pre-concert talk advertised as being 30 minutes long, but the great man is still speaking after two and a half hours.
I think it was that great Wagnerian Vaughan Williams who said he was glad not to have been at one of Wagner’s evenings when he read out his latest epic libretto to his guests! As for Beethoven, his pre-concert reflections on music and philosophy would no doubt have been Interspersed with random thoughts about his “disgusting” servants and “the princely rabble”. It would certainly have been a lively evening! His attire might have raised a few eyebrows too, but then as someone who saw Nigel Kennedy amble onto the RFH stage looking like he’d just fallen off a motorbike I am not easily shocked…
It’s fun to imagine a pre-concert talk by John Cage.
This idea should become part of a Green movement. I know of one pianist/activist (Makiko Hirata) who has tried to promote the idea of local artists remaining local, at least more of the time, but for instrumentalists who need major orchestras, it might be hard.
Deborah, you’re right – I hadn’t thought of it that way, but there *is* a Green element to this. It would make a lot of environmental sense to remain local. But I guess the problem has always been that you can’t expect a local audience to come out and hear you fifty times a year – or even five times. Maybe if the concerts were free, they would come out several times, but then how would the artist make a living? This is what forces musicians to travel far afield to find another and yet another ‘local audience’ somewhere else. The economics of the music profession are quite bonkers when you think about it.
29 minutes and 44 seconds of everyone sitting listening to the hum of the air conditioning, perhaps.
Sorry, this should apply to Susan’s idea of a pre-concert talk by John Cage…
My first job was a six-month placement from my City University sandwich course, working at the Open University, in 1974, when Milton Keynes was little more than roundabouts and mud.
I had digs in a lovely old house in Woburn.
Why is that relevant to this thread?
My landlady was an artist and a good friend of Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth, who started what is now the impressive Stables Theatre in the stable block of their home in 1970. Their dream came true.
We have been there many times and, on one occasion, I nearly bumped into Cleo in the Foyer.
Eric, yes, the Stables Theatre is a great example of a concert hall local to the artist. Although I think Cleo Laine did a lot of touring as well, of course …