Like Frank Sinatra entering a karaoke contest, my friend and co-conspirator Richard Brincklow recently decided to follow up being paid by people to compose music by going to university part-time to study for a degree in music composition. It turns out this week that the jammy bastard has been awarded a First. I suppose I should congratulate him. Nice one, Richard; I’ll be wanting that crib sheet back now. Bloody contemporary musicians: bunch of weirdos hitting rusty washing machine parts with tyre levers over the din of treated pianos playing backwards—and all at the tax-payer’s expense I don’t doubt.
17Nov05 — 3
If it makes you feel any better, a few years ago I put together a long list of artistic late developers, the minimum requirement for inclusion being that they had to have passed their 30th birthday before they produced anything worth mentioning.
(My favourite was the composer LeoÅ¡ JanáÄek, who was already fifty when he made any kind of impact at all outside his native Brno, and he wrote most of his best stuff in his seventh and eighth decades).
This was for the 30th birthday of a friend of mine, and it seems to have worked, though I notice she didn’t offer me a share in the royalties when she finally got a book into print.
Michael, You do realise that Richard is my collaborator on the that SciArt grant application to the Wellcome Trust you foolishly signed off on last month? If I got your address right then a few weeks back you should also have received a CD copy of some of the collected works of Mr Brincklow (BA Hons).
[…] As revenge for having to listen to his new catchphrase—”a 2:i is a perfectly good degree, Damian“—I hand-edited Richard’s keyboard performance and have begun to loop it into manipulable chunks. It is now the basis for an “anti-Spiritual”. You are welcome to listen to a verse of Bow Down Below. As you can hear, it isn’t finished, but it’s still copyright and playright Brincklow and Counsell 2005. I’d love to play you some of our SciArt stuff, but Rich is in the process of the more heavy-duty, “needs a degree in music” orchestration on our current favourite Break Bones. […]