Post by Admin on Dec 20, 2020 10:45:22 GMT
A weekly two minute catch-up for members from the
TMF Director's desk
These bulletins have appeared every Friday since January this year without a break. This will be the final one of the year, and will resume in mid-January. The feedback on it has been very positive, and thanks to everyone who has been in touch with a follow up, or an observation. The format for this last one of dismal 2020 is a wee bit different.
This summer, following on from the TMF’s Annual General Meeting at the end of June, the TMF’s Board took the decision to contact personally by phone as many of the Forum’s members as possible. The aim was to get an idea of what people’s current concerns were for their work and practice in the traditional music community, and how their different perspectives could feed into the TMF’s plans and activities. The discussions were fairly free-flowing but once we had collated all the reports they fell into five broad categories: mental health and wellbeing, diversity and inclusion, the online world, live events, and audiences. This is a summary of what was on your mind.
On the mental health front there is a desire for spaces where musicians can talk about their experiences, and how the way they deal with those experiences can help others. Mental health is a broad category covering everything from occasional stress to full blown illness, with states of varying degrees of permanence in between. There is a paradox at work whereby music, so often a source of comfort for those who listen to it, can often be the cause of health problems for the people who make it. Causes of poor mental health include performance anxiety, isolation, admin overload, and excessive screen time, although the chance to experience performance anxiety would be welcomed at the moment! Financial worries – poverty – are a major cause of stress, to state the obvious, and these are only exacerbated by the combination of no gigs and low returns from streaming on digital service providers.
At the moment the TMF has a mentoring scheme, TradMentor, which offers some opportunity for musicians to be supported by mentors drawn from the trad music community. We only have six trained mentors at the moment but hope to expand the pool in years to come. There are informal opportunities for people to chat and share in a supportive setting, such as the weekly online gatherings hosted by Jenn Butterworth, but the feeling among the TMF’s membership was that we could be doing more, and not just for musicians, but for the many other people working in trad music, paid and voluntary: providing links with mental health groups and organisations, using the website for tips on ways of looking after your mental health, CPD on the admin side of being a musician.
There is a recognition that the traditional music community in Scotland is not particularly diverse. There are historic reasons for that, of course, as the roots of the music are in a society that was relatively static in terms of inward population movements up until the 20th century. (Outward population movements were another matter entirely.) Whatever the history the present-day reality is that Scotland is becoming increasingly diverse in terms of ethnic origins, and we need to do more to invite people to share our culture, valuing both what we have in common and what makes us distinctive. The highly successful Transatlantic Sessions model could be used to bring in musicians from other cultures.
Diversity goes beyond ethnicity, of course. We need to do more for disabled performers in terms of access to performance areas (that 12-inch-high mobile stage can be a major barrier for some), more for neuro-diverse audiences, more to safeguard young female performers, more family events, more to encourage promoters and festivals to look at gender balance in their programming.
In the current situation we have some time to think about these things before proper live performance becomes possible again. In the meantime, it looks like online platforms are going to be a feature of the music infrastructure post-Covid, as people look to blend live performance with online access, either through streaming of gigs, or including online performance as an option in tours. All of that needs thought about with training directed towards online presentation, and its corollary, social media skills, and the attendant copyright issues. The TMF has recently raised some money for this kind of training along with Showcase Scotland, the Scottish Music Centre, and Hands Up for Trad, which will be available early 2021. One idea that was put forward is the creation of a network of professional tech staff who could provide studio quality production for online presentation.
Much of that activity depends on minimising the degree of online exclusion and digital poverty experienced by many. Information on that and how and whether organisations take that into account would be useful.
Public confidence is going to be a crucial factor in the return to live performance, and standards will need to be high in order to secure that confidence. Mitigation can be costly, and we need to work with Creative Scotland and others to find ways for small venues, sole practitioners and event organisers to manage the financial risk involved.
In getting back to live performance people would like the TMF to work with others on establishing a mid-scale touring network, and that hardy perennial, bringing in more young people as audiences. Another persistent idea is that we should draw more on the Irish experience of promoting traditional music. What prompts those envious glances is the profile Irish music enjoys, and there is a constant desire for Scottish traditional music to enjoy a similar profile internationally, and to take more advantage of major events like the Frankfurt Musikmesse, which other countries seem to take more seriously. Thanks to the work of the likes of Showcase Scotland that higher profile is beginning to take shape, but there is always scope for more effort and more resources leading to better connections.
The Traditional Music Forum is the sum total of the efforts of everyone who is part of it, plus the synergy that comes from our being networked together. There’s always more to do (and those conversations have generated quite the to-do list), but I think we all deserve a break...Wishing you all good things for a restful holiday season and for the coming year despite all its uncertainties.
All the best
DF
David Francis is Director of the Traditional Music Forum
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