The run-up …
 

THE MAIN THING that’s been concerning me is getting the new material together. The brief requires 20 minutes of new music to celebrate the Tobermory Clock. This was erected by Isabella Bird, a far-travelled and adventurous Victorian lady in memory of her sister Henrietta, who lived quietly in Tobermory.

In order to do this, I’ve had to institute Full Metal Composition, with an internal Sergeant Hartman bawling in my ear that no, I can’t go for a cup of tea, not until I’ve got those four bars done…

Two things came reasonably quickly, but writing dots on paper is a terrible chore. I thought one of them was going to end after thirty-two bars, but it surprised me by going on a bit. The obvious thing to do was to write a busy outgoing thing for Isabella and a quiet reflective thing for Henrietta. A kind of pastiche of a Victorian waltz popped out a couple of days later. Now we hear that Keith Tippett is able to come and record with us. He’s a stickler for accuracy and precision. No pressure there, then.

Friday and Saturday

I’ve become very distracted and almost useless at my place of day-job. Friday was spent trying to find table tennis bats, and stick “stop” on one side and “go” on the other. We use these in workshops so that children can control either the Quartet or their own groups. We’ve used these before, and you usually don’t have to give any instructions at all; people very quickly make up their own ways of using them, stretching up to get high sounds, windmilling arms make the music go faster, etc, etc.

We usually do a journey-type idea, based on a Villa Lobos tune called Little Train, so you get the idea of going away from one kind of music and then coming back to it after doing something else: a combination of sonata form and Butch Morris.

I’ve made a terrible hash of making these though. How do you stick a square bit of paper on to a round bat? There are bits of grubby sticky tape and untidy folds all over the bloody things. The son of a colleague of ours has been reading Flat Stanley, and he wants to send his hero to visit Scotland. Now I’m trying to make Flat Stanley badges for the band out of cardboard and safety pins… Stops me worrying, I suppose.
 Packing the car is going to be a laugh. We bought a VW Polo in a rush after our old car collapsed, and I forgot to take a guitar case to the dealer. Of course, the boot isn’t the right shape to take guitar cases, and all the gear has to sprawl all over the back seats.

Washing down half a packet of Hobnobs with scalding coffee, he tries to get me to talk about the plan for the workshops. I talk some incoherent rubbish. We decide to try to make more sense in the morning.

Sunday

The journey up to Oban goes smoothly and we meet Raymond and Keith at Tyndrum. I dish out the ferry tickets very efficiently like a weedy version of the CalMac Lads with their hard hats and yellow waistcoats gesturing to the towrists in their people carriers, and we stand blethering in the waiting room until we realise all the other cars are swerving round about us hooting impatiently. Keith’s been up since 4.30am and is starting to fade a bit, but is very happy to see Alyn Cosker with us.

The road from Craignure to Tobermory is always longer than you think, and the locals are pretty impressive at the contemptuous overtaking moves.

Gordon MacLean of An Tobar is there to meet us. The piano is excellent, and Alyn Cosker our drummer plays some casually elegant jazz stuff on it…

Gordon buys us dinner in a pub and we have a few beers, then we go back to An Tobar to set up. This takes longer than we think, and we’re trying to do a compromise setup that will do for recording and the workshops. I’m fading fast, and so are the others.

We go back to our gaffs and bed. But I’ve forgotten about the powerhouse of energy that is Dr MacDonald of MacDonald, The Improv Lord Of The Isles! Washing down half a packet of Hobnobs with scalding coffee, he tries to get me to talk about the plan for the workshops. I talk some incoherent rubbish. We decide to try to make more sense in the morning.
 
Monday

It’s 8am now. What I think is this:

Hello, and a warm up.

We’re the so-and-sos from such-and-such, and we’re here to do this and that.

Journeys. Start here, go some place else and come back. What do people think improvising is?

Click and sustain.

Conduction. Stop/go bats

Different sounds. Keith demonstrates improvised prepared piano.

Put this all together with the Little Train melody, the vamp and various stop-go conduction ideas.

Wind down, and out the door.

Well, that’s the plan at any rate…

Then we get everybody together to do Little Train, with an extended bit of percussion improv. I think this went ok, though I’m writing this two very busy days later, and it’s become a bit of a blur.

I was expecting the first lot in at 9.30, but it seems they’re not actually due until ten-to-ten; jazz time as Keith remarks, imitating a cymbal “ten-to-ten, ten-to-ten…” Gordon phones the school to check on things and finds out that they intend to send the whole of the first and second years in one enormous horde, seventy-six children in all. He gallops across the road to the school to sort this out.

Bang on time, the first lot come in, carrying djembes and other stuff. These are S1 pupils, very sweet and polite. Gordon introduces us, and I tell them how we come to be here, and what we hope will happen. The Quartet plays two very nice choruses of the Little Train theme, despite me counting it in wrong. We get a very nice round of applause.

I do a gentle warm-up about stretching and breathing, and finish with “Breathe in. Hold for a second and then sing one note with an oo or an aah sound as you exhale.” Two times through and the notes are coming out clear as a bell.

Raymond takes over and continues the vocal stuff. I think I’ve pre-empted him a bit; he is always much more calm and level-headed than I am in these situations. Maggie Nicols had taken us through this kind of exercise with a very large group of musicians, and she let things take their natural course and begin and end as the group dynamics dictate.

We’re confined to one 40 minute school period, though, and Raymond has come up with a clever idea to get the same thing happening in a very much shorter time. He counts 1-2-3, and everybody counts to 10 in their heads at their own speed. At some point of your own choosing, you make a very short sound. The end result is a very short piece of music made up of clicks and squeaks. When that is working well, you can do it again with a count of twenty and two sounds.

He gives them a talk about silence being just as important as sound in music, and the fact that we are all musical.

There’s an awkward transition here as we try to translate this into working with instruments. I’d spent hours of my life making the bats so I suppose I wanted them used. I arranged the people into three groups of four, and got one of them in each group to wield the bat. It doesn’t have a natural end this one, so I have to bring it to a close with a lot of waving and clapping. The little groups coming in and out at different times sounds good I think, but it’s ragged and there isn’t time to follow it up.

Then we get everybody together to do Little Train, with an extended bit of percussion improv. I think this went ok, though I’m writing this two very busy days later, and it’s become a bit of a blur. (Professional educators, of course, write up their evaluations immediately after the end of the session…)

It’s the morning interval at the School now, so we’ve got twenty minutes to have a coffee from An Tobar’s coffee machine. Debbie gives us the idiot’s guide on how to get a nice head on your Americano, and do that noisy dramatic thing with the steamed milk.

(We mainlanders having been calling this place “an toBAR”, but Gordon says we’ll get into trouble unless we say “unTO-Pur”. The Gaelic police are, apparently, worse than the jazz police…and God knows they’re bad enough… )

The next lot come in. These are S2 pupils, and are a lot more fidgety, giggly and sceptical. This is a bit of struggle. It was hard to keep them on track, and we don’t have the school teacher’s knowledge of the individuals. Though we like to think we’ve got reasonable people skills, a working teacher’s classroom savvy is something else again…

As Raymond says, everyone has music as an evolutionary birthright.

We wait apprehensively for the next bunch, the last period before the dinner break. These seem ok but again there are a couple of noise makers and fidgeters. They also look a bit depressed, so I ask them what class they had come from. “French” they go. I get a cheap laugh by doing the warm-up in rubbish French; “Alors, mes enfants. Levez votre mains au ciel, si’l vous plait! Fantastique! Et maintenant, Le Grand MacDonald!”

This class has a couple of lads in it who have a rock band, and they chat incessantly amongst themselves, claiming the acoustic guitars and twiddling away at their favourite licks. The “short sounds” exercise produces a fine selection of farting sounds, and finally poor Raymond has to stop them. In retrospect, it’s obvious that the musical ideas behind what we’re trying to do does make an impact at odd moments, but there are long stretches where we are struggling.

After lunch, we get another lot, and I get that “here we go again” feeling as the usual giggling and raspberry noises get going. Suddenly, everything comes round during Raymond’s group exercises. The version of the Little Train piece is the best yet. There is a long coda in which a phrase bounces around the room getting slower and slower towards a triple p ending.

Keith is delighted by all the workshops and he’s got something positive to say about all of them, but this lot really get him going. He says that there are professional musicians making good money who don’t have the listening skills and the responsiveness of this group of schoolchildren. We all agree with him.

It was drummed into me at college that lesson plans are the thing, and that you’ve got to have all your activities planned to the minute, so this kind of working is a bit alien. But Raymond points out – rightly, I think – that if you’re asking people to open up creatively, then you’ve got to leave space for it to happen, and it’s inappropriate to stop a fruitful activity just because you’ve got a set of objectives to cover.

This is a hard ideal to reach for, though, and inevitably as the day went on we began to settle into a routine of activities and chat that would get our points across.

There’s a lot of shifting territory between the ideas of being a creative musician, a teacher, a member of the community and an entertainer. It’s very difficult to assess the effect work like this has on children. Between ourselves we reckoned that, from the five classes we saw, we could put together a group of about a dozen pupils who would be able to produce some remarkable music as improvisers.

Most of the rest sat through the thing and joined in good naturedly. But this sheep-and-goats type of procedure has its pitfalls. We noticed that one of the latter group standing utterly transfixed by the sight and sound of George Lyle playing his double bass with the bow. Who knows how that experience will grow and develop? As Raymond says, everyone has music as an evolutionary birthright.

After the children have gone, and we ceremoniously present their teacher, Miss Cooney, with a stop/go bat, we have a bit of a breather then start the recording part of the project with some improvised stuff of our own. Tomorrow we begin work on the commissioned stuff, and that’s another story …

‘A Day for a Reason’ by The George Burt / Raymond MacDonald Sextet featuring Keith Tippett will be released on Tob Records in June 2005

© George Burt, 2005