FINTAN-WALTZ

UK, year 2008 or so..
Just got an email from my friend Noel, saying that he found one of my tunes on a South Korean website. He included a link so I could appreciate fully the magnitude of my achievement.
I did have a look. It turned out to be (being politically correct here, folks), a place which lonely adult males visit at 5am. The website in question featured various carnal activities, performed by the group of rather underdressed people of different sizes. Highly questionable activities, I might add.
Noel told me that he stumbled onto this website while doing some kind of work related research. Noel is a bass player with quite a spectrum of interests, cultural and otherwise, so I didn’t doubt him for a second. Also, you never know where your research can take you. A taxi driver in Rotterdam told me once that he found pictures of his wife on a dating site… (While researching something work related, of course).
I was surprised that someone decided to use my music with this particular set of visuals. My tune was written in the key of e-minor with the time signature of 3/4. The time signature of activities in the video was 4/4, the tempo was…very fast, and the key signature was out of question. It was rather polytonal.
Also, it was scripted and produced by someone with Parkinson’s and a personality disorder.
For me, the next hour or so turned out to be the most fundamental learning experience I’ve had in years. I didn’t even know it was technically possible to assume some of the positions without causing a serious injury to yourself or to your partner. Or rather to your partners, in this case. It definitely gave me a different perspective on basics and techniques of the pro-creative process. I stopped watching and went out to have a smoke and to think it all out.
I was traumatized but intrigued.
My two main questions regarding those activities were ‘How?’ and ‘Why?’
Mostly ‘Why?’ to be honest.
At around the same time, I was working on my CV for the Arts Council application. I was hoping to get a grant for my musical project. My idea was to get a lump sum of money, which would enable me to spend a month at home writing music. Or to buy a car.
There was a questionnaire which I was supposed to fill up – my composed, published, performed, commissioned works etc. I wasn’t really expecting much from this ‘Office of Arts’, as they didn’t have a slightest idea of how to deal with arts in general and artists in particular. I spoke to few of my friends who tried to get a grant before, hoping to find out what would be the best way of presenting my project and what is their main criteria to establish the value of the project.
No one had a slightest idea, so I decided to try a new approach. I included the South Korean website in the list of my achievements.
I provided a link and a description.
I didn’t get a grant. As I suspected, the tempo was wrong.

Now, something just came to my mind. A part of my income comes from the royalties, which means that every time somebody clicks on the latest domestic cleaner or revolutionary hearing aid advertisement, a person in PRS transfers 0.0007 cents to my bank account. Wouldn’t that be a good idea for PRS people to have a look at my music usage on the Korean site? They’ll learn a lot, their family lives will become much more entertaining, I’ll be able to retire in a month, and my friend Fintan will become famous.