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Tati’s Journey, Part 8: Art I Would Starve For, Art I Wouldn’t
Written by Tati
Today I got a little bit of loving in return for all the emails I’ve been sending. I awoke to find a message from the team organising screenings of Miss Representation for media bigwigs. Miss Rep is a documentary on the misrepresentation of women in the media; the team want to use my response song to the movie as one of the pieces of accompanying footage during their screenings.
This is hugely heartening, more on a personal level than anything else. Miss Representation is one of the finest, most powerful documentaries I’ve watched, perhaps because the issues they discuss relate so directly to my own life. Self centred? Maybe. Or just naturally skewed interest. I don’t expect anything to come of this opportunity, but I’m enormously proud to be even involved to that tiny degree in the work Miss Rep do. You go, Jennifer Siebel Newsom. You are excellent, good job.
The other email I got was from a creative directory that has recently been establishing itself called the Young Creatives. So I spent some of the morning writing up a profile to give them.
I’m about to go away for two weeks, so I guess I’ll see what responses I’ve got when I come back; some people are slow to reply to emails, particularly emails from people they don’t know and probably aren’t bothered about. That’s fair enough. Having spoken to people who have been working in and around the music industry for a few years now, though, I’ve discovered that this is a pretty unorthodox method. Hopefully some reviews will come out of the contacts I’ve tried to make; advice and opinions are always helpful. But part of me thinks maybe I just have to do a few more years of developing and growing and honing my talent (and see if it stretches far enough to be honed). As a composer, I’ve been honing for years and weaselling into all sorts of events and projects and, even though I get good reviews, I still have a few hurdles to go before I hit my stride. Maybe I should be more hypercritical of everything else I do? My compositional development shows it to be a recipe for improvement, although it does involve being really stressed out all the time.
It’s hard to throw your all into something when your all is already smalls-deep in something else. I’m not sure how far contacting communities will take me when I’m pretty certain that the real way for me to get success would be:
Constantly fundraising/working a billion jobs to earn money for tours
Practicing my instruments, productively, every day (the relevant ones to the singy/songwritey bits like ukelele and piano, not my clarinet) so I am an unstoppable force of comfortable-in-the-limelight on stage
Working on my stage presence, productively, every day (I don’t know how I would do this, singing to the mirror with a hairbrush probably, which I’ve never really been into. I helped my clarinet-stage-presence a lot by filming myself playing and then reeling in horror at my terrible posture etc)
Gigging. All the time. Ed Sheeran does over 300 gigs a year or something crazy. He did that for yonks and supposedly almost gave up just before he was crowned King Ginger and wrapped in the UK top 40 cape.
Recording and recording and recording demo after demo to work out the exact sound I want. Getting them as close to perfect as they possibly can be. Sending them everywhere.
Being everywhere an industry scout might be. Finding out who these people are and doing some crazy detective work to get in the know as to where I could find them. Know who everyone important is, in the way Holly Golightly knew who all the millionaires were. In the way I know the history and fate of every original cast member of the original Addams Family telly series, and can list every Muppet with an anecdote about their back story. Talking of which, Kevin Clash has released a movie called Being Elmo… EXCITED!!! I cried watching the trailer. Kevin is absolutely one of my heroes.
Being really lucky. And maybe getting Rosie to wear a T-shirt with my face on it, which I know she would totally be into.
Basically I have to do what Rachel does in Glee, but with hipsters rather than musical theatre. As she says to Tina in season 3 when Tina is whining (does anybody even like Tina? Shut up Tina):
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to be me?…. It’s exhausting being me. I get up at five in the morning just to get all this prepared in case a solo is thrown my way. I have the entire Sondheim, Hammlisch, Lloyd Webber, Elton John songbooks memorised, including every single Katy Perry hit as well. And I do all of this while keeping my boyfriend interested and physically satisfied and being the captain of 16 clubs and keeping a 3.68 GPA.
Gurrrrl you got it going on. You have a life plan and you’re sticking to it, because you are righteous, if a little irritating at times. Fortunately, Rachel only has the one life plan. As I said – you can’t commit to something 100% if it’s not your main thing. And I can’t do all the dead sensible (in terms of making it big, not in terms of getting a job and buying a house one day) things I’ve just listed. It’s just not possible. I can’t keep all that up along with my degree…. Because I’m not at uni for the degree.
A degree is just a really awesome thing I’m going to get on top of being able to spend three years (only three!! And I’ve done one now!! And I’m never getting it back, and I spent half the friggin year in a fury because of that electro-noise-music module) studying the art of composition. Reading Berlioz’s gorgeous treaty (edited by Strauss… dream team!) on instrumentation and orchestration, and realising, as I mop the saliva off the page, that I have some kind of fantastic, all-consuming fever-plan of what I could do with a serpent and a tuba. Spending an entire afternoon humming and tapping things and clicking and whispering, and knowing it has been an afternoon well spent, according to the paper all over my walls that I’ve scribbled on, and my peace of mind. I’m beginning to sound like a ridiculous luvvie now so I’m going to stop, but not before pointing out that for me, composing is what I want my life to revolve around. That, and real human relationships, because otherwise I would get lonely. I would stick to spending £10 on food a week and living in my parents’ basement (we don’t have a basement, we live in a flat but you know what I mean) for SEVERAL years if I could keep my unlikely Plan A of getting to write people music AND being paid for it alive a little longer. I don’t have the same commitment to forcing upon the world the songs I’ve written about my breasts. And if the feminist/musical communities online don’t care about my breasts, who will? Aside from Boyfriend. Maybe it all boils down to illusions. I have illusions about the fancypants music I write for concerts, plays and imaginary ballets. I don’t think I have illusions about my career as a singer/songwriter.
Incidentally, my mother believes that, in order to become a successful pop star (which IS going to happen, apparently), I need to get my clarinet diploma so I ‘look more credible’. Never mind that I’m studying towards a degree in music, so a diploma would be a redundant qualification anyway. Oh dear.