Jeremy Garside is in Norway supervising the technology for an
orchestral and choral concert. It is 2003 and he has already
clocked up 20 years' experience meeting the IT needs of an
impressive collection of orchestras - the Halle, the Welsh National
Opera and the BBC's National Orchestra of Wales. In a year's time,
he will add a fourth to that list - the London Symphony Orchestra
(LSO), where he is head of technology.
For the moment, however, he is immersed in his current project -
because this is going to be like no other music show concertgoers
have ever attended. Or musicians have played in, for that matter.
The audience has gathered in Harstad, a city 150 miles inside the
Arctic Circle, for the annual music festival. The wind band -
part-timers from the local fire brigade - are on stage. But the
string section is in Tromso. And the singers are in Oslo.
This is all part of a technology-mediated musical experience
which is Garside's latest wheeze. He explains, "It was an idea I
started at the BBC - that you could use ISDN phone lines to create
low-latency, high-quality audio links that would allow musicians in
different locations to play as though they were on the same concert
stage.
"We would have a special piece of music composed so each group
could play its part and hear the others. It was like getting three
different perspectives on the same score."
Not your average day at the office. But Garside's time in
technology shows there is more than one way to build a satisfying
career in IT. If you like IT and combine it with another passion,
you get twice the pleasure from your work.
Yet Garside admits he wasn't thinking much about computing when
he left Cambridge University with a music degree in the early
1980s. He played the French horn. "I was a very good player, but it
wasn't going to be the living I was going to make."
Instead, Garside found himself working as orchestral assistant
for the famous Halle Orchestra, as deeply ingrained in Manchester's
consciousness as the Free Trade Hall (where it often performed) or
the Ship Canal. "I was dealing with things such as booking players,
looking after contracts, and the practical arrangements for putting
on concerts and touring around the country."
Pioneering IT
Computers were not much in evidence in the early days. And they
did not figure in Garside's career until he moved three years later
to the Welsh National Opera in Cardiff as their orchestra manager.
After a few months, he took on some of the financial work,
budgeting for operas as well as working out the payroll for the 80
members of the opera's orchestra.
"I started doing pen and paper calculations for all members of
the orchestra once a week," he says. "But that was a dumb thing to
do and what got me into computing was when I programmed an old
Amstrad word processor to calculate the payroll and print out the
pay slips. It took me about three days to do it - but once it was
working it saved me endless days of pen and paper toil."
And he had caught the IT bug. By the time he left the Welsh
National Opera in 1991, Garside was immersed in planning and
budgeting work and had helped the company to graduate to
spreadsheets and databases with a planning system to help manage
the financial side of the business with more precision.
"Putting on an opera is a very complicated business," he says.
"You have to work out how much the orchestra is going to cost as
well as the soloists and the choir. Then there are the costs of
theatre sets, lighting, stage crews and other things. The system
meant we could calculate the production expenses in a more
structured and accurate way, which improved decision making."
By the time Garside moved to the BBC as business manager for the
National Orchestra of Wales, he had developed a reputation for
being able to strike the right note when it came to matching an
orchestra's needs with technology. He found BBC Wales something of
a blank canvas as far as IT was concerned. "We had a building with
something like 1,200 people working in it and not many more than
about six PCs," he recalls.
One of his early projects was to build a scheduling system for
the National Orchestra of Wales. "There were a lot of
well-structured paper-based systems at the BBC and it was a
question of taking them and reinterpreting them using IT. The
system allowed the orchestra to plan its activities and produce
schedules as well as drive its business processes through a
database.
"The interesting thing about orchestras is that they have a lot
of very specific information. Whichever piece you perform, you need
a different set of players. For example, for a Beethoven symphony
you need 75 players but for a Mahler symphony you might need 103.
If you have a database of all the pieces, you can immediately see
which players and other resources you will need to run a rehearsal
or put on a concert."
By the time Garside left BBC Wales, he had played a major role
in making the organisation techno-friendly. Almost everyone who
needed a PC had access to one. Garside, however, found himself at
something of crossroads in his career with an important decision to
take. He had been offered the opportunity to train as an
accountant. "It wasn't attractive to me because it didn't suit my
approach to life," he says.
So he left the BBC and decided to try life as a freelance,
innovating technology in music and broadcasting. Apart from the
Norwegian multi-centred concert, he also worked on a project to
build a broadcast production platform using a minimum set of
technology.
"We took a couple of laptops and hard drives, some cameras and
microphones and lots of batteries to Ammamford, a small town in
rural Wales," he says. "The idea was that the production team would
produce one- to five-minute pieces which we would edit on the
laptop and then broadcast through a wireless platform from an
aerial situated in the bell tower of the local church.
"The project was looking at the practicalities and logistics of
setting up a totally parallel and small-scale broadcasting
infrastructure from traditional mainstream broadcasting."
Make your lifestyle a career
If working on fascinating, even quirky, projects gives you a
buzz, Garside's career approach contains lots of pointers. Work for
organisations you like, marry IT to your other interests, be
creative and innovative in what you do. And look for ways to show
others how IT can solve their problems. It is a way to build a
career which chimes with your lifestyle. Yet it is not the way to
become the captain of legions.
As head of technology at the LSO, Garside is conducting a small
band. If you are working with limited resources, you need to know
how to turn your hand to different tasks.
Modestly, Garside says of his LSO technology team, "We all know
how to do a lot of things, often rather badly." He is wrong about
the second part, but right when he adds, "We are very much in the
business of being general tradesmen and master of none. The key
skill is knowing the limits of our ability and when to buy in
skills we need.
"A lot of what we do in terms of managing technology is about
working out the most effective and simplest way of doing something
- minimising overheads, looking for simplicity, standardising ways
of doing things."
Yet for his love of life in music technology, Garside has one
unfulfilled ambition. "I have always regretted not managing a
bigger team. A small team is enjoyable, but it might be interesting
to work with a larger group of people."
But would he move to a bigger job outside the world of music? "I
think I would it if involved innovative use of technology. I think
that's the key thing for me."