Welcome to my new blog, Without
Barlines – a space where my professional experiences and creative motivations
can be shared openly and publicly. In line with my working philosophy, I’ll be
treating musical practice and culture as a diverse field of interaction whose often-encountered
partitions, which are many and varied, I see as serving only the most
superficial functions. On a personal
level, I hope to be able explore and understand my own ideas more deeply by going
through the process of preparing them for public consumption. I also hope
(perhaps fancifully) that discussing and analysing my experiences in the
musical field will provide musicians and those that care about music with new
insights or perhaps simply alternative viewpoints to counterpoint their own
experiences and ideas.
The context for starting this blog is colourful and varied. I’m
generally classed as a composer. Indeed, this is perhaps my greatest strength
as a musician and it’s certainly the area in which I’ve invested the most time
and effort undertaking training. But I class myself as a musician – a more
general term certainly, but one that more accurately portrays my professional activities
and one that tallies with my firm belief that greater things can be achieved in
the arts by embracing the diversity of the field. So, as a composer, I can talk
about upcoming projects and work that I’d like to complete if only for the fact
that I think it will make great music. I can talk about my processes and
methods, the abandoned ideas and the surprising revelations. I can also talk
about my disenchantment with parts of my back-catalogue and the various things
that cause me to have identity crises as a composer.
This is all well and good, but I doubt it would be much use
to me (or anybody else) to consider any of this in isolation. I’ve recently
started working as a copyist for composer Nigel Morgan, whose working methods
and music are very different from my own. This has required learning how to use
new software, getting to grips with a new house style, and applying my existing
skills to a type of music that I’ve had little contact with before. This has profoundly
affected me as a composer (for one) and as a musician in the more general sense
(and the far more important sense as I see it). Working with Nigel has allowed
me to develop previously germinal thoughts on scoring and the presentation of
music, not to mention given me cause to question my own relationship with the
idea of ‘process’ in the compositional and analytical acts.
I’m also in the midst of a longstanding relationship with
Leeds Haydn Players. I never saw myself as someone who would conduct a
significant number of Haydn symphonies (truth be told, I didn’t rate Haydn too
highly before I started working with LHP!). Yet, here I am, preparing for a
pair of concerts in the coming weeks and beginning to think about another in
December. Not only that but I continue to produce orchestrations of Haydn
chamber works – orchestrations that have all kinds of requirements and unexpected
technical demands. But I couldn’t be happier doing it. As well as broadening my
musical horizons my work with LHP has reaffirmed my belief in the immeasurable
value of working with amateur and community groups.
Speaking of orchestration and conducting, I’ve had some
wonderful experiences with the band Starling on their first two albums. Producing string arrangements and going through the
process of recording these with both student and professional musicians has
taught me a lot that the ‘classical’ music world (which is where I’ve received my
formal training) couldn’t hope to teach me. While all is quiet on this front at
the moment (we’re currently awaiting details of the second album’s release),
the things I’ve learned here have helped me enormously with film and theatre
music.
I could go on to talk about my previous teaching or my plans
to move to the other side of the world. There’s so much diversity in my musical
life (not to mention my wider existence!) that I can no longer see the
divisions that supposedly separate this genre from that, or this activity from
another. Consequently I will happily make the following assertion:
I am a musician. I do music. And, crucially, I believe that music does. It’s not that music is – it’s not simply a product or a learned set of parameters, however important these things may be – music acts upon the people who come into contact with it, the places where it’s heard and the culture that surrounds it.
The importance of all this has recently come crashing home.
I worked for the best part of two years in the hospitality industry. The whys
and wherefores are not really important. Suffice it to say that working in an
industry that demands long working hours, mainly at weekends and in the evenings,
caused havoc in my life and work as a musician. I managed to hold onto a few
contacts and undertake a few projects, but I basically found myself adrift. I’ve
since left hospitality to return to the field for which I have the greatest
passion: music (and the arts more generally). This has entailed all kinds of
job interviews, declarations of self-employment and other such dull things. But
it also made me take stock and think very hard. I returned to the field having
lost contact with a great number of people, not being able to get to events and
gatherings. At first I found myself going into a sort of default work-mode,
which was heavily coloured by my time as a composer in academia. Not having
access to research materials and not having a job in an academic institution basically
rendered this approach useless. And so here I am, trying to find myself again
as a person and as a musician. While this has been extremely difficult at times
(largely due to intervening catastrophes in my personal life) I’m now at a
point where I’m able assess what is and has been most important to me, to determine
exactly what skills I have and how these can be used to the benefit of others, to
find new avenues to explore creatively and in life more generally. While clearly
of enormous personal importance (which is not something I wish to dwell on
here), I see this process of exploration and questioning as one of wider
significance. In musical terms this has unearthed a number of areas that I
think are worth exploring and, indeed, areas that I’ll explore here in due
course. My thoughts are not yet fully gathered, but I can give you a taster
of what they will include: the methods, purpose and future of scoring; the
importance of community music, working with amateur groups and engaging audiences;
the issue of music and space in the concert hall, installations and music for
the visually impaired; and overcoming musical separations (historical,
stylistic and activity-based).
This blog, then, is an outlet for me – someone who does
music – to explore and share what doing music really means and how it can help
us understand music’s impact as an active, lived cultural and societal
experience.
I hope to be able to provide something both helpful and
entertaining. If not then at least it will help me organise my own thoughts,
which is no bad thing.
You can find out more about me on my website.
Comments and criticisms are always welcome.
Adam Fergler
(composer, conductor, arranger,
copyist, editor, child, lover, waiter,
geek, drinker, musician)
