Today I am running a session for PhD students on social media use and exploring which are the best apps for developing your online presence. I personally use Twitter for developing academic and music networks then Instagram as the central hub for pushing visual messages to friends and colleagues. Linkedin is my ‘professional space’ and this website my central hub. The publishers website for my book, Blank Canvas, is also a grat central staging post. I have tried Tik Tok this week without great success but can see its potential. I develop more personalised groups within Facebook.
Let me know Which Social Media site do you use for publicising your creative work?
I am very honoured and excited to be part of the Sidmouth International Jazz and Blues festival team featuring great headline acts such as the Brand New Heavies and Courtney Pine.
The free community music is unbelievably high quality including Roland Gift of the Fine Young Cannibals and the amazing Hannah and the Apparitions. All in wonderful sunny Devon. At the end of May. Perfect
hey pop pickers, it’s your lucky day. Those lovely people@thequietus have extracted a section of my book from the @brianeno section on his art school experience. Please have a read and if you like it there is a lot more here: https://www.intellectbooks.com/blank-canvas
The inspiration for Blank Canvas (Strange, 2022) came from my career as a musician and educator. I have circled the industry as a musician and producer across all genres. I was brought up with popular musicians who were educated through the art school system. From my research, art pedagogues sought inspiration from a diverse range of areas – the science of plants to cybernetics, philosophers, politics, visual and auditory creatives.
What is Blank Canvas?
It contains four points: hierarchies, process, experimentation and relationships.
I interviewed a range of art school inspired creatives from Brian Eno, his teacher Roy Ascott, through Stephen Mallinder (Cabaret Voltaire) and Gina Birch (the Raincoats) to Pauline Black (the Selector) and Bill Drummond (KLF), who wrote an art school inspired play for me. Not all art schools were radical but these successful artists caught the coattails of postmodern experimental and conceptual thought.
Blank Canvas refers to occupying a blank state – coming from a position where the personal self is maximised without interference from schooling. Art students get that. Music students tend towards conservatism. Visual artists innovate rather than imitate. As an example, Gavin Bryars, in association with Eno, Clive Langer and a smattering of art students, created the Portsmouth Sinfonia, the ‘worst orchestra in the world’. Its brilliance lay in the fact that everyone was trying to be great but the combination of lapsed and random musicians created a cacophony which was recently heard to powerful effect in EEAAO – multiverses splitting into fractals, breaking glass, falling beautifully apart.
Art school encouraged an exploration of the self: Roy Ascott (tutor for Eno and Pete Townshend) paired students to develop personality testing games; they then had to enact the opposite of their discovered characteristics i.e Eno talked a lot so he had to be silent, whilst Townsend was wheeled around in a trolley as he was hyperactive. For Ascott, art school pedagogy wasn’t about copying a Mondrian or Renoir but about exploring individual and group expression.
Gina Birch is currently undergoing a renaissance as a painter and musician, with London exhibitions and a music release playlisted by 6 Music. She lives and breathes art school, has done since her teenage years at Nottingham then Hornsey (Middlesex) where she discovered her people, embracing DIY, conceptual art skills and unfettered self expression..
Current music education would benefit from investigating the ethos and ideas brought during the art school heyday, utilising visual art pedagogical practices that centred on conceptual thought and cross subject interconnection could be an element towards the unlocking of a creative jam besetting the current music industry, redefining a new year zero for 21st century popular music. Viva la punk ethos.
Blank Canvas: Art school creativity from punk to new wave is available here:
Woo Hoo! Emma Warren is on @laurenlaverne in a bit to talk about her BRILLIANT DANCE YOUR WAY HOME book and, er ‘collective effervescence’ perhaps 🤔 out this week through @FaberBooks lovely, lovely book recommended. pic.twitter.com/HF84oTEucP
The BBC Singers provides our country with so much culture and heritage, being around since 1942. I think the BBC’s decision to scrap it will cause an upset to thousands of people, and today I asked for a debate on the future of classical music which is essential for mental health pic.twitter.com/MkrahbIbZY
My inbox gets filled with articles about the importance of music in our lives. It always amazes me how this truly acknowledged value gets forgotten when the UK government makes decisions about the arts and education. The global music industry is $25.9 Billion in size. Fund the arts.
So financially, the creative arts are vital but that falls into the shadows compared to its impact on physical and mental health. Here is a link to another article which outlines the benefits of music, that it helps to connect you to time and place, providing the foundations for life on earth.
