Committees

The health and fitness regime is now two days old and I already find myself feeling a little better. I have run (or rather hauled myself) around Highgate Woods both today and yesterday, and zero high calorie food is passing my lips. I'm such a fat banger. Everything's a massive effort and when I'm waddling around the woods, it seems like I'm running at half speed. It struck me today, however, that I'm carrying at least two stones more than normal, and wondered how the old slim me would have coped with going jogging armed with about 8 bags of sugar. A tiny part of me therefore feels proud for even getting out of bed! Looking on the bright side.

I've been in meetings at the MU all day. I'm a member of the writers' committee and was trying to encourage everyone to be more proactive about the rights of composers. It's a complicated issue. It's relatively easy to protect performing musicians with various rules and guidelines regarding what they're paid and for what sort of work. With composers it's very different. There are no set rates. Some composers do their own orchestrations as part of their fee whilst others are expected to pay musicians out of their salary. A few will even pay musicians out of their own pocket simply because they can't bring themselves to put their names to music which sounds like it's been played by computers. We looked at the results of a recent survey of film composers and their wages and discovered that they vary wildly from people being paid £2.33 for a writing a minute's music right up to £20,000 and more. How much do composers earn? How long is a piece of string?

Amongst other things we discussed the lack of women on the committee (we have three in total, none of whom were there today); which begs a pair of age-old questions. 1) Are women that fussed about joining committees? And 2) Do that many women work as composers and writers?

I posed the last question and was immediately shot down in a sea of politically correct flames. I maintain it's a valid question. The only female composer I know is Fiona, and she's on the committee too! 

Actually, there are countless female singer songwriters out there, aren't there? Why aren't they joining us? Surely there's nothing particularly macho about being on a committee? We certainly don't actively dissuade women from joining. Now I'm confused. It's too late.

I'd personally argue that there was also a distinct dearth of gay people on the committee, judging by the fact that I seem to be the only one who has an opinion on matters Musical Theatre! That said, when I cheekily ventured this particular opinion, an older bloke pursed his lips and said "ooh there are..."