hcmf

Round about this time of the year, Steph and Tom email me asking me if anything interests me in Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival's programme. Well, of course it does.

I met Steph almost thirty years ago, when I was a research assistant and she, a lecturer in Educational Research, had the office opposite. I have a bit of a crush on both of them and secretly want to be their friends. I love their parties, from the moment when I open the invite--always handwritten, always by post--a bit ashamed that I'm so delighted to receive it. They took me out last year during HCMF to a Lebanese restuarant and paid for the whole thing and the pint afterwards, knowing I was very hard up. With sophisticated manners they created an evening in which we all wordlessly refused turning my poverty and their graciousness into a relation of largesse and gratitude.

I've volunteered at HCMF for more than ten years. The hardness of the contemporary music scene becomes more obvious as one becomes less tolerant or more aware of it. I use the word "hardness" to suggest two things: the rigidity of its social hierarchies, and the coldness of its social life. Every year I go there (fourteenth year now) I am newly made aware of this hardness.

As a volunteer, I have stood in black with my tray of chilled wine in receptions for the Danish cultural attaché, sat doing the box office at a table in the draughtiest bit of St Paul's Church, or, my least glamorous gig--although the one in which I heard the music best--stood outside a toilet to tell people not to flush it lest it disturb a piece by Bent Sørensen.

In all of these, and during all the rest of the festival, I, like the other volunteers, was like glass to the salariat of HCMF. Once the music stops, and you've done your job, you're expected to fuck off with your own sort. It's not what I'm used to. In the subcultures I circulate in, unless you're a knob, which I am not, you're always invited, included, asked down the pub, and no-one gives a shit who you are or what your role in the evening was.

On this, and other evidence which would make this post too long, I conjectured this froideur might be functionally relevant to the production of contemporary music. I started a PhD to explore this before I exhausted a credit card for the fees and realised that I'm too selfish a person and a writer to argue for a point of view with the degree of patience required in a PhD.

So now, I just want to listen to the music and go down the pub afterwards with Steph and Tom.