Category : Drumming

So I reposted the previous blog post from 7 years ago on Facebook. Partly because I felt my joke about the Gregorian Choir being named after some sect worshipping Greg Lawson (in the comments 7 years ago) never got the recognition it deserved…. But also because we have just played a Grit Orchestra concert and it somehow felt even better than ever – like it was moving forward as an ensemble and it is still something marvellous and to be valued even though it has been around for a while now. And it still has unexplored potential… Martyn wrote a piece for me to play on drum kit and pots and pans with him on small pipes and a string quartet in 1995 and to be frank when we played it initially neither I nor the string quartet were within a country mile of being able to play it in terms of skill level. Eventually we played that piece with McFall’s Chamber and after 10 years or so on occasion I managed to play it it correctly with James MacKintosh’s help ( so I was only playing kind of half the part Martyn originally wrote for me) and it took that long to get good enough to be able to play half of it correctly – even some of the time. It would be interesting to know how playing in the Grit Orchestra has made the various musicians in it – from these different backgrounds and traditions – grow and expand their skillsets and concepts of music making. Maybe for some of the other players it is more like what they normally do – but for the drummers it is this very rich combining of skills, approaches, styles and challenges. I definitely learn and grow a massive amount each time we play – partly from the music itself and partly from the other musicians. It is as if Martyn left behind a 30 or 40 year Scottish Music Continual Professional Development Programme for some of us to study …. plus Alex on sound and the rest …. And it feels we are only part way through it…. there is a lot still to go…. Whenever we meet the drum section talk about how the process – of trying to work out how to play tunes like Waltz for Hector and Aye? in a live setting – never actually ends . Each time you listen to the original track there are more layers to unpack, and more alternative ways to approach it revealed. In the rehearsal on Sunday we played the both of those the best we had so far – but still a long way to go…. Really quite amazing… All this also puts into perspective the fact that music funding is in such a state of disarray right now in our country. That just needs to be sorted because there is so much potential, so much still to be played and composed and discovered.