Post by Traditional Music Forum on Mar 15, 2021 14:53:55 GMT
A weekly two minute catch-up for members from the
TMF Director's desk
These are some of the things that have caught my attention this week.
The North Atlantic Song Circle is expanding, largely due to the monthly song circles live streamed over Facebook. Last Sunday it was the turn of English Folk Expo's Tom Besford and myself to organise and compere a night, which featured Melanie Leys from Flanders, a new name for me but a superb voice, Lizzie Hardingham from England, and our own Fionnag NicChoinnich and Scott Gardiner bringing the number of languages represented up to four.
Song circles on Zoom are fine for now, and to be honest something like NASC wouldn't really work without it, but I yearn for singing in company. On this date last year the TMF Board was debating whether to cancel the following night's World's Room and took the decision to go ahead. The guest was Borders singer, Henry Douglas. Now, Henry is a great racing man, and it is his usual habit to go to the Cheltenham Festival which was on earlier that week. Thankfully he had decided against it on this occasion, as news later emerged of its 'super spreader' status. We had a great night, although it felt like there was a shared consciousness that everything was about to change, and not for the better.
One of the things we could never have envisaged was the establishment of hardship funds for struggling freelancers. Creative Scotland's Hardship Fund re-opens on Monday 15th for one week.
The Cross Party Group on Music, for which the TMF is the secretariat, met earlier this week for the last time in this Parliament. A main topic of discussion was a new report produced by the Scottish Music Industry Association, 'Moving Forward: Approaches to Managing Brexit for the Scottish Music Industry'. The report is concerned with taking the bitter lemons of Brexit and making lemonade, and is refreshingly upbeat, with a host of ideas including collective approaches to things like a Scottish pressing plant, centralised visa services, and a broadcasting hub, the latter something which also came up at our recent Festival Forums meeting.
At the same meeting Allan Dumbreck from the University of the West of Scotland trailed a new audit, of the key skills required to work professionally in the music industry, to determine that what is being taught is what is needed. The results of the audit will be available once it is completed. Link to the survey here.
I mentioned Cal Newport's book 'A World Without Email' last week, and was interested to hear a long discussion with Newport and a couple of industrial psychologists on Radio Five Live earlier this week (starts at 10min 55). I'm experimenting with only checking my emails once a day at the end of the day so that I can get on with other stuff without the constant back and forth. It means some things may take a bit longer, but there's always the phone for anything urgent.
I learned a good technique for dealing with email (and other communications when it comes to that) a few years ago - 'Do, Defer, or Delete'. Answer it if you can do so in less than two minutes, defer if not, and delete if you don't need to keep it. But what do you do with the 'defer' stuff, I hear you ask. It gets shunted into an app I was introduced to by Simon Thoumire, called Omnifocus, great for organising tasks, which can then be assigned to blocks of time. I also use a time tracker called Toggl which is useful for totting up the hours at the end of the day or week.
However, despite all these resources, and an electronic calendar, I still managed to completely miss a meeting this week that just completely slipped my attention. My colleague, Donald Smith, one of the best organised people I know, does it all with an old-fashioned diary and scrap paper.
Some of my time this week has been spent preparing for Spring Forward, the first in a series of three online mini-conferences held by the European Folk Network, to replace the much postponed conference originally scheduled for last November. Still time to register if interested. Also on the European front, TRACS is organising a Euroceilidh for World Storytelling Day on March 20 with contributions of song, dance and story from Scotland and across Europe.
I was digging through some old vinyl the other day and chanced on a classic album, The Silver Bow, a collection of Shetland fiddle music played by Tom Anderson, Aly Bain, Davy Tulloch and Trevor Hunter. Jack Broke the Prison Door and the rest sound just as fresh as the day they were recorded.
All the best
DF
David Francis is Director of the Traditional Music Forum
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