In the Shadow - Vol 2, The FraKctured Zone Diaries (2006 - 2012)

By Andrew Keeling

How do composers compose? And why?
Andrew Keeling's online diaries at The FraKctured Zone offer insight into the secret mechanics that power the creative process by disclosing the intellectual concerns, emotional impulses and habitual actions that constitute the daily grind of a composer-musician in the 21st Century. Besides demonstrating the minutiae of the creative process, also included are essays on songwriting and improvisation, reflections on the Lake District and Carl Jung and two Guitar Craft diaries.
Andrew Keeling is a composer, musician, improviser, arranger, teacher and writer who lives in the North West of the UK. His music has been performed and broadcast by many leading musicians and released on several record labels. It has also been published by Faber and PRB. He has written three musical guides to the work of King Crimson and has orchestrated the Soundscapes of Robert Fripp which have appeared on the DGM/Panegyric CD 'The Wine of Silence' received to widespread critical acclaim.
Andrew Keeling's diaries reveal how the harmonies, counterpoint and rhythms of life fuel the creative act.

"The return of an honest man." - Robert Fripp

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew Keeling
• Release date: Apr 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780957048928

Andrew Keeling

Andrew Keeling is a composer whose vocation only became fully apparent when he was 31. He has said, "I began to think that the musical and psychological pursuits of the first half of my life were insufficient to sustain into the second half of life. Composing presented itself as a solution to this dilemma." He had previously been a cathedral chorister, played as a multi-instrumentalist in various rock bands, and performed as a flute recitalist. Meeting such composers as Sir John Tavener, John Casken, Nicola LeFanu, Anthony Gilbert and Howard Skempton, and the result of embarking on a Jungian analysis in 1987, paved the way for his subsequent creative activities.Since the late 1980's he has written music for the likes of Opus 20, Het Trio, The Hilliard Ensemble, The Apollo Saxophone Quartet, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, Evelyn Glennie, The Goldberg Ensemble, Fretwork, Virelai, Gothic Voices, Jacob Heringman, Matthew Wadsworth, Catherine King, Steven Wray, Alison Wells, Ian Mitchell and many others. Some of this music has appeared on CD releases by the Discipline Global Mobile, Riverrun, Burning Shed, Metier and UHR labels, as well as being performed and broadcast worldwide. It has also been published by Faber, Fretwork Editions, Staunch Music and Alto Publications in the UK and PRB Productions in the USA. He has written that, "Both compositionally and analytically, I wanted to reconcile certain features of the rock music I knew and liked with the things I'd assimilated from contemporary classical music."Since the late 1960's Keeling has been a keen advocate of the music of King Crimson, and in 1999 was invited to arrange new versions of the group's music, as well as the solo guitar Soundscapes, by Robert Fripp himself. Some of these have been performed, broadcast and recorded by The Metropole Orchestra of Amsterdam, the early music group Virelai and Contact Contemporary Music Ensemble. He has also written with former Fairport Convention vocalist Judy Dyble, former King Crimson/ELP lyricist Peter Sinfield and author/poet Alison Prince, and featured as an arranger for former Fairport Convention/Steeleye Span/ Albion Band founder member Ashley Hutchins, Ken Nicol (Steeleye Span and the Albion Band) and border-pipes player, Matt Seattle. In 2009 First Things, an album of his early acoustic songs, was recorded by Ken Nicol and released by MVS Recordings. Also as a flautist, together with former King Crimson violinist David Cross, he recorded and released English Sun, an album of nine improvisations, on Noisy Records.Andrew Keeling is also co-author, together with Mark Graham, of A Musical Guide to King Crimson, a series of books exploring the music of King Crimson and published by Spaceward Publications.In 1997 he was awarded the first PhD in Composition from the University of Manchester, and was subsequently a lecturer at the University of Liverpool and the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.

Book preview

In the Shadow

Glimpsing the Creative Unconscious

Volume 2

The FraKctured Zone Diaries

(2006 - 2012)

By Andrew Keeling

Edited by Mark Graham

A Spaceward Publication

Copyright © 2013 Andrew Keeling and Mark Graham.

Published by Spaceward, Cambridge, UK

ISBN 978-0-9570489-2-8

Smashwords Edition

License Notes

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XII/II/MMXIII

Table of Contents

Introduction

Songwriting

Improvisation

The FraKctured Zone Diaries

Appendix 1 - Guitar Craft, Introduction Course, Spain 2003

Appendix 2 - Guitar Craft Level 1 Course, Los Molinos, Spain 2004

Appendix 3 - The Lake District

Appendix 4 - Why Jung?

Notes

Works

Releases and Publications

Photographs

Introduction

After the DGM Diaries finished, I became more determined not to write emotively. Both in music and word, I begin to think that less equalled more. After two years of keeping an online Diary at Krimson News (now all lost apart from two) I began writing for Mark Graham’s FraKctured Zone. These Diaries were less forthcoming, partly through my learning experience with DGM; partly because I wanted them to be simpler.

There was also the time factor. I remained as busy as ever with composition commissions and teaching. I’d had CDs of my music released. The music had also been published. The musicology had also become important. The Musical Guides on the music of King Crimson had been published by Spaceward Publications. I was also feeling the effects of my father’s death and the events which constellated around that. I’d also decided that writing about oneself isn’t exactly a humbling experience, but I remained reasonably optimistic and determined to learn about myself through keeping a Diary. My experience of Jungian psychology had also deepened. None of this was consciously intended. I just found that things had come this far and followed what I thought was the psyche’s leading. I also began to question what constituted the ‘real’ me; what was my essence, even though I couldn’t subscribe fully to Gurdjieff or J.G. Bennett in these terms. As a result, I began to write a series of aphorisms on my MySpace page.

In the world of professional music I suffered setbacks and success equally. There are different modes of success. Mine was mainly that of an inner kind, which bound my own music to the introverted, psychic world. I also saw more fully that both my explorations of the inner world and my own music were emerging from the same source and merging into one, so to speak. While that was certainly the case, disappointment also played its part. In the summer of 2010 I met Sonja Wagner, one time girlfriend of Nick Drake. Sonja told me that Drake had become disappointed with what he’d discovered in the music business, and his reliance on anti-depressants was as much to do with that as anything else. Things clicked into place. I thought, ‘yes, Nick. I can relate to that.’ This reinforced my belief that we are meant to come across our initial influences for a purpose.

It was also the time when I resigned my academic posts at the Royal Northern College of Music and the University of Liverpool. I felt I could no longer offer students a music in which I no longer believed. The purely academic had to go, as the unconscious made perfectly clear. I returned to teaching one-to-one flute and guitar and continued writing. As a result my songs re-emerged and I began to play the flute again, which was more fully realised in the context of the Cross and Keeling improvisation duo. I also began to write songs, continuing from earlier attempts in the 1970's. I began to live a simpler life. Less inclined to feel the need to impress all the time, the Diary became more succinct. By the beginning of 2012 I’d been keeping a Diary for twelve years and Mark Graham at Spaceward felt the writings might be represented in a book. I agreed to go with the project because I felt that someone, somewhere, might benefit from reading first-hand how the contemporary, creative psyche works; or, rather, how the psyche of a musician works in our contemporary culture.

I would like to again thank all the people listed in the Introduction to Volume 1 of the Diaries, but especially Mark Graham who invited me to write and compile these volumes.

(Andrew Keeling. July, 2012)

Songwriting

History

I’ve always written songs. My parents bought my sister a guitar in the late 1960’s which I commandeered. Friends at school had guitars which I, unsuccessfully, tried to play. I couldn’t work out the chords from the chord manuals they had. So, I made up my own chords and wrote my own songs usually round an E minor and chord and bastardised G chord. I once heard Patti Smith say she could only play one chord at the beginning (E minor) so, after that, I didn’t feel too bad. Even at this stage, my method was experiential. I had little, or no interest in theory.

To get at the ‘whys’ for this writing, some personal history might be helpful. During the late 1960’s and early 1970’s I listened extensively to the bands and musicians who formed the British underground scene. I was at Oakham School in Rutland. I did absolutely no work there apart from play the flute, guitar and piano. I’d gone to Oakham as a Music Scholar aged nearly 14, after five years spent singing as a chorister in Lichfield Cathedral. Singing in a choir for six days a week for five years had a profound effect. I’d sung music by Byrd, Gibbons, Purcell, Britten and so on. Singing and song and choral forms were in my bones. At Oakham I turned to the guitar because, as I see it now, I had absolutely no choice in the matter. Destiny was playing its part. Guitars were always around in the student Common Room. Unlike the largely driven celebrity-driven ethos of today, parents and Housemasters screamed, ‘You are wasting our money by popping your time away,’ meaning that rock and folk music, as they saw it, was a waste of time and, certainly, a reaction to establishment thinking. I never questioned their endless antagonism and certainly never argued with them. Quietly, I just went my own way, as I’ve always done in life. I didn’t even think they were wrong or I may have been misguided. I was simply possessed by the music I was hearing and beginning to write. I formed a band with bass player Dave Trawford and drummer Chris Palmer-Jefferey. We called ourselves CO2 (because it sounded like T2 whose music I knew and liked) and played around five gigs. The band played covers and several of my own songs/pieces, one called Notre Dame Suite. At one gig the audience (members of school) peppered us with paper cups as we limped our way through this epic, a suite comprising several songs and instrumental passages. Undaunted, we continued to the end.

In May 1971 a friend, Jim Morris (a fine acoustic guitarist), and I saw King Crimson at Birmingham Town Hall. That day my life changed. King Crimson was the turning-point. I’d already heard In the Court of the Crimson King in December, 1969. I realised this was what I had to do. Music suddenly became a calling. I had no intention of following any other career, although my parents had other ideas. Songs from this period were Latter Day Lament and The Sun Won’t Shine Again, as well as The Notre Dame Suite. Latter Day Lament was recorded by a London band, but didn’t get anywhere. The one copy I owned was lent to a chef in hotel in which I worked, and never returned.

Eventually, in 1971, my parents withdrew me from the school. They were no longer going to allow me to waste their money on my interest in rock and folk music. I ended up in St. Annes-on-Sea on the Fylde Coast of Lancashire. Here, things really began to happen. I went to St. Annes College of Further Education, grew my hair long and formed and joined bands: first, Seagull (a folk/electronic outfit comprising me on acoustic and vocals, David Wilkinson on electronics [my tape recorder which utilised tapes of recordings of my mother’s vacuum-cleaner] along with Steven Grimshaw and his girlfriend as dancers) and a light-show. We played two gigs. First, at St. Annes College at an end-of-term gig; secondly at St. Annes Premium Bonds. Both shows were disasters. No one actually quite ‘got it’. Neither did we. Then someone heard me playing flute. A phone call from local guitarist Ian ‘Sprog’ Morris followed, with an invitation to a meeting in a pub with a view to forming a new band. We met in the bar of the Highfield Hotel in Blackpool’s South Shore. Ian, Steve Wilkes (drums), Al Bowell (bass) and I decided to have a jam at Ian’s parent’s house. This was in October, 1971. Three weeks later we played our first gig at the Sands Casino on Blackpool’s Hawes Side Lane. Success! The band was called Mohawk. Now, this was a band. To quote Robert Fripp, we didn’t know what we couldn’t do. So, we just did it. We played all our own material and things began to look rosy. First, we won the area heats of the Melody Maker National Folk/Rock Contest in St. Helens. I was 17, Ian, 18, Al, 19 and Steve slightly older at 23. I was also the vocalist as well as flautist co-writing the songs with Ian, although everyone chipped-in. Friends would often say, ‘so, you’re like Ian Anderson? (Jethro Tull)’. The thing was that I didn’t really think Ian Anderson was very good. I much admired Ian McDonald and Mel Collins from King Crimson. Vocally, it was Paul Rodgers from Free and, to some extent, Greg Lake, but because my hair was reasonably short, I had acne and didn’t shave, I looked like a kid. But I suspect, now, that was the part of the attraction from the punters. I looked like a hobbit. Much later, I saw Danny Kirwan of Fleetwood Mac who looked pretty much the same when he first joined Fleetwood Mac. Friends from St. Annes College came to see Mohawk support The Groundhogs at the Mecca in Blackpool. We were the success of the evening. The next day I found myself surrounded by people saying they couldn’t believe what they’d seen the evening before. Two or three songs standout from that band: our opener, The Quest; Tale of a Lady; The Valley. The main problem was having the time to develop these combined with a lack of money. Pete Cruickshank, drummer with The Groundhogs, showed interest in producing us if ever we got to the recording stage. We didn’t. The band continued to play for the next three months but when we failed to win the next stage of the Melody Maker contest, things took a downward turn. Ian wanted to push things further but Al, sensibly, had a job and didn’t. Steve got a job playing for a London band called Timothy David and they had a contract with CBS.

Ian phoned one day to say the band was stopping and he was moving to London. I didn’t really think anything about it, accepted the band’s demise and continued life around my listening. I listened to everyone and everything, absorbing it all. Some weeks later Ian phoned again asking me if I’d consider a move to London. I said I would, got on the train a week later and joined him in a new band he’d formed. We lived in Peckham. Steve had left Timothy David and also joined. Now there was bass player Terry Bown from Bedworth and his friend Terry Willis as roadie. They’d played in a band called Children and supported the likes of Black Sabbath in and around the Birmingham area and, more importantly, had a 600-watt Wem p.a. system. We decided to resuscitate the Mohawk repertoire and re-christen the band Rivendale. This had potential, but after gigs at Barbarella’s in Birmingham, a move to Kirkham in Lancashire and further gigs, the band never quite found its feet. To this day, I don’t quite know why. I suspect it was based more on illusion than sound reality.

Again, Ian left and I teamed-up with drummer-roadie Gary McGrotty in a Preston band called Sunburst – a name I’d stolen from Keith Cross’s post-T2 band. I played bass, organ, flute and provided vocals. Kevin Chapman was the guitarist. Originally, there’d been another guitarist, Sam Hill, but we dispensed with his services from the beginning. Sam should have stayed. He had real talent and was a gifted songwriter. (I later played in a folk trio with Sam. We played a few gigs including the Greenbelt Festival in the 1990’s. For me, that was a something that had to be; a turning point in terms of realising that contemporary Christianity had reached an impasse). We toured Ireland and lived in Colerain for a while. Songs from this period were Rock n’roll Gypsy (a great crowd-pleaser) and Goin’ Down the Country. We were penniless. Our manager, a really good chap called Kevin from Ballycastle, used to buy us a sack of potatoes every week. We ate them for breakfast, lunch and tea. A roadie, another Kevin, risked his life (really! It was the time of the troubles in Northern Ireland) thieving groceries for us from the local shop. Disillusioned, I returned to the UK in the summer of 1973. The first thing I did was phone David Wilkinson (ex-Seagull and studying to be a graphic designer) who brought round King Crimson’s Larks’ Tongues in Aspic for me to hear. Again, the ‘spirit’ of King Crimson spoke to me: I had to stop playing in bands, dedicate myself to practising the flute, return to St. Annes College to gain O-Levels so I could go to Huddersfield Polytechnic to study music. For the next twelve months, this is precisely what I did. The song writing effectively stopped for twelve months. I had a part-time job washing dishes in a St. Annes hotel in the evenings, while attending college in the daytime and practising the flute whenever time allowed. In November, 1973, I auditioned for Huddersfield Polytechnic (The University of Huddersfield) and was successful.

In 1969 and 1970, I’d also heard Nick Drake and thought his first two albums were masterpieces. In 1974 I read about his untimely death, re-listened to Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter and bought Pink Moon. I bought a classical guitar and began to learn all Drake’s songs, sitting over a portable record-player for hours at a time. I then had five further classical guitar lessons because I thought Nick Drake had probably done that. At the time, no-one knew anything about him. Whereas I’d written to Robert Fripp, I'd never written to Nick Drake and should have done. This is one of my major regrets. However, this music exercised a kind of enigma and I tried to learn what that was in an effort to understand what drove him. Later, I wrote to Molly, his mother, who was of great encouragement to me in my classical music writing. Drake’s songs stood as the pivot in all my efforts as a songwriter, then as well as now. I also came across Judee Sill. I loved her music. From this period, my own songs included First Things First, Shadow (the early version was called Star) and another called The Flautist. My girlfriend, Barbara, had a brother, Manuel. He wrote the words for The Flautist: ‘She wanted me to fall into a suit/Not fall into the gutter/She wanted me to sit and play a flute/Not try and be another.’ In a way, I always felt these words were, to some extent, prophetic.

During the summer of 1977, I briefly played again with Ian Morris in a band called The Sensible Club. My friend Kevin Price played guitar alongside Ian, and I played third guitar, flute and soprano sax. Paul Rogerson, formerly of local band Marie Celeste, played bass and supplied vocals, with future ENO baritone John Connell on keyboards. Dave Minshull was the drummer. This could have been the moment, but I got itchy feet and left. Songs from this period were Lytham Green and contributions to other band-written songs.

1977 also marks the year I became a professional musician earning my living as a freelance flute teacher. I joined a Pentecostal Church in Fleetwood, Lancashire, UK, and became the Musical Director. I never take titles seriously, much to the disdain of the minister, and formed a band called Lovelife, which eventually transformed into Thruaglas Darkly. I had to more or less teach the band members to play and wrote most of the music. This was a vital learning experience for me. Kingsway Music took us on and we made a single in 1981: Modern Man/Battle. An album was planned but never made. The band could never quite make up its mind whether to play Progressive-rock or New Wave-style music and came to an end when one of the guitarists left his wife. There and then, the ministers of the church brought the band to an untimely demise. Such is the power of (non)conformist religion. I should have stood up to them, but they exercised a theocratic dominance. And we were young. So, I began to write songs for members of the church, write for the choir and generally take the whole Director of Music tag seriously. The song writing took on a life of its own. Songs from this time were Gold, Valleys Dark and Man on the Edge of the Sand and many others.

I spent two years practicing the classical guitar. I’d seen Steve Hackett perform in Manchester and liked his work in early Genesis as well as his solo album Spectral Mornings which I thought was a masterpiece. Then, in 1983, someone told me that Lancashire Polytechnic was running an External London B.mus course. I took the plunge and went along. I studied part-time from 1983-89. In 1987, composer James Wishart walked into the building and it was suggested that I took Composition lessons with him. That was the start of the composing. Or, rather, the start of its development. Later, I studied with Nicola Lefanu, Anthony Gilbert (for my M.mus) and John Casken (for a PhD). I didn’t pay any tuition fees for any of these degrees. All the courses were funded. It’s as though a door mysteriously opened for each. My energies have largely been taken-up with writing contemporary classical music from 1987 to the present day. That's another story included in Volume 1 of these Diary writings. And another part of the story is wrapped-up in, perhaps, the main driving-force in my musical life: Robert Fripp, King Crimson and Discipline Global Mobile, Robert’s record label.

In 2001 I was invited to write an acoustic guitar piece for Preston guitarist, Ken Nicol. This was for an initiative to help the homeless called Raising the Roof. A composer was paired with a rock or folk musician to generate funds for the project. It failed, but what emerged instead was that I worked with Ken on various arranging projects (The Glass Chronicles and his work with Ashley Hutchings). As a ‘thank you’ I was invited to record some of my earlier and newer songs. I wouldn’t have done this if the unconscious (my nightime dreams) hadn’t reacted positively to the resurgence of this dimension of my musical thought. It also tied-in with a change in the direction of my classical music composing. As a result, some thirty years after writing those early song, First Things was released in August 2009 on Ken’s MVS label and included First Things First and Shadow from those early days, alongside some new ones, most notably Fragile co-written with former Fairport Convention/Trader Horne vocalist, Judy Dyble whom I met through my acquaintance with Robert and DGM (for a while Judy had sung with Giles, Giles and Fripp). At the end of the First Things sessions Ken asked, ‘is there likely to be a second album?’ I replied, ‘no! There are no new songs.’ Around six months after that, eleven new songs had mysteriously dropped from the sky. These were recorded by Dave Cottrell at Studio 410 in Ormskirk during the late summer and autumn of 2010, engineered by Dave Cottrell and later mastered at MVS Studios by Ken. The album, called Soror, was released in 2011. Songs included were: Antonia, Like Dorian Gray, Don’t Know and eight others. Then, during 2011, I recorded Bells of Heaven. This was a collaborative effort with Stephe Fellows (Comsat Angels), Tim Bowness (No Man), Jacob Heringman, Suzanna Pell, Jane Wilkinson and several other fine musicians. Another album, Hyde, followed in 2012.

In 2006 I decided to submit my resignation from the University of Liverpool where I’d taught Composition, Orchestration and Music Analysis from 2000. I had become disillusioned with the way in which Higher Education was heading, but also academic composing had become something of a bind. My unconscious was no longer just engaged in the academic process. If the unconscious isn’t in the job then, as far as I’m concerned, the job isn’t worth doing. Some years earlier I’d written to the Bronte Society in Haworth, Yorkshire, asking if they might consider commissioning a Percussion Concerto I was writing for percussionist Evelyn Glennie. They weren’t but in 2006 Virginia Rushton, founder of Operahouse Projects, phoned asking if I might be interested in writing a children’s opera for Yorkshire schools with the Bronte Society. I agreed and was paired alongside author and poet Alison Prince. Alison was a quintessential factor in the re-emergence of my song writing. We worked together on the children’s opera The Wind on the Moor followed by Magic on Arran, the musical Balloons, Jacoby’s Game, the song-cycle Pirate Things and numerous other things. Alison taught me about the importance of words. She is one of the best people I’ve met in my life, and one of our great poets. Future generations will discover the genius of Alison Prince, of that I’m sure. I’ve been lucky to work with Alison.

In the winter of 2009, I met local filmmaker Steve Pennington from Steeple Films. Steve filmed an entire series featuring my writing process – songs, classical music, flute playing and arranging/writing, improvising – placing them all the films on You Tube. This was a labour of love, and I will always be indebted to the way in which Steve worked long hours, more or less for nothing, on this project. The central feature of this turned out to be the song writing.

Methodology

Why suggest the term ‘method’ when there is seemingly no methodology to my own song writing techniques? ‘Hermeneutics of song’ may be a more appropriate title, as I wonder if the songs I write are, in a sense, presented by that most wiliest of the Gods, Hermes? Perhaps, even, an absence of technique implies the presence of something else, then?

Nowadays, while young singer-songwriters attend university courses on Popular Music featuring song writing modules, I purposely steer well clear of any such extravagance. How is it possible to learn how to write a song from an academic angle? To me, it’s yet another indication of the ‘pay your money and you’re guaranteed a slice of the cake’ rationale that swamps our celebrity-fuelled culture. Largely it’s a nonsense; another way for colleges and universities to find alternative sources of funding. It's also an example of a genre becoming learnable and adaptable for educative purposes, much like Modernist music was to be a main focus for teaching within university-based Composition courses. Again, these things are in keeping with the scientific-oriented view of education and are, therefore, more likely to receive funding. Rationale has to be at the centre of our culture, so we’re told. I disagree. I did once read Jimmy Webb’s excellent book, Tunesmith. I gave up somewhere close to the end where Webb wrote that he believes in inspiration. That one sentence summarised the whole book. When I applied the techniques he’d mentioned in the book, I found that not one of his best songs followed the criteria he’d outlined. Like Webb, I think writing a song should be as simple as breathing, but it is, and always will, remain something of a paradox. A good song comes from nowhere.

At the beginning, I listened extensively and, to some extent, still do. My earliest influences were Donovan, The Beatles, The Small Faces (I loved the sheer energy of Steve Marriott’s songs), Crosby Stills and Nash, early King Crimson (I