When Free Speech Is Not Available, Try Singing Instead

The City-State of Singapore is notorious for its restrictions on expression, especially political speech critical of the state itself. A solution has been proposed to have complaints sung chorally. (Some examples of the mix of political and social complaints: "We get fined for almost everything."; "People put on fake accents to sound posh/And queue up 3 hours for donuts."; "People blow their nose into the swimming pool/And fall asleep on my shoulder in the train"; "My oh my Singapore/ What exactly are we voting for? / What’s not expressly permitted is prohibited.") But the authorities are not allowing foreigners to participate in the performance of complaint songs.

Pay Attention to the Netherlands and the UK

Pay attention to the developments in cultural support in the Netherlands and the UK. In both cases, right-wing governing coalitions are making massive cuts (and massive increases in fees, for higher education in the UK in particular.) But in neither case is the motivation primarily economic. In the UK, it is practically class warfare, but this time it's a revolution from above, dishonestly made by a pair of parties who ran in the last election ostensibly to the friendly left of Labour on many issues, while in the Netherlands it seems that the cuts are being made unashamedly not because they have to be made (i.e. for budgetary reasons) but that the coalition partners, no longer even pretending to represent a broad consensus of the population, can and want to make the cuts from cultural grounds, among them the xenophobic (with xenos, in this case, being both strange (foreign) and strange (novel)).

When I returned to Germany in 2005, after half a decade in Hungary, a constellation of three major funding sources for new musical activity — the German Music Council, the public radio stations, and GEMA — had each, for different reasons and in different circumstances, but tragically in near-simultaneity, made massive reductions in their support. (The Music Council went through a period of serious mismanagement and was "reformed" with music less emphasis on new concert music, the radio stations, while having net increases in fee revenues, found themselves in competition with the privates for soccer broadcast rights, encouraging massive waves of reductions in and attempts to monetize other areas of their operations, most painfully those which exist with no attention, let alone competition from the privates (Neue Musik: bingo!), and GEMA, once governed with some parity between "serious" and "entertainment" composers, left the parity model altogether in a grab by E-producers faced with massive reductions in their income in the post-CD era. ) All this happened rather quickly and quietly and with practically no complaint from musicians, who were in any case largely shut out of the policy discussions. My impression is that most musicians still haven't registered what has happened.

If there is any bright light in the events in the UK and Netherlands, it is the fact that musicians and other artists are not passive. They are taking the developments seriously and are engaged with hard questions about the role of artistic production in society and are, in many cases, speaking loudly and unusually articulately about the actions of their governments in a strong contrast to Germany (or the US, for that matter) where measures of similar gravity just happened with a whimper. In parliamentary democracies, a majority-is-a-majority, so I don't think we can expect much change in these plans anytime soon, but I do think that the governments may have seriously underestimated the charge that their reductions have given to the creative community, intellectually and politically, and the conversations now taking place in that community and with the public at larger may have a greater defining role for the future for both the material support of the arts and its content and mode of production than any of the immediate (and, let us hope, temporary) policies of the present (and let us hope, temporary) governments.

Palling Around

Observation: Once a composer starts making music for anyone other than her- or himself, that composer becomes a community organizer.

What Samuel Says

Composer and poet Samuel Vriezen  writes about the struggle of art and its relationship to the public space.  (Scroll down for the English version.) The immediate cause is the new Dutch minority government's plans to radically cut cultural spending,  but the principles are universal and timely, indeed urgent.  

I've long insisted here that the function of [culture, art, music] is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable, and that insuring quality, diversity, and liveliness in our lives — our musical lives in particular — is a serious business demanding that we call out any petty abuses of musical-partisan micro-politics as a distraction from our common cause.   In any case, Samuel puts it far better than I can. 

The advantages of making music under the radar

The current dramatic cuts in cultural funding — whether due to market or political forces, and whether done in slow steps (as in Germany, where the rapidly rising costs of the rights for soccer broadcasts, for example, are gradually eating up state broadcasting budgets whose fee-supported funding would otherwise be stable or growing) or in sudden cuts (as in the Netherlands, where a nationalist/populist political coalition has found common cause in attacking "elitist" arts organizations, even when some of these organizations are best evidence of what that nation can be) — have been well-described and commented upon elsewhere.  All I can usefully add is a firm expression of solidarity with the protests, as these reductions are being made to institutions which are a essential part of lives led together, if those lives together are to be lived with any purpose more than simple survival, entertainment-fed passivity, and assent to a status quo.

My realistic assessment of times to come, however, is that we will probably have to get used to the largest cultural institutions, if they are able to survive the current rounds, functioning only with dramatically reduced resources and forced to cut back their activities to minima.  That usually means very little for the most adventurous programming, even when such programming ought to be seen and heard, at the very least, as an investment in the future vitality of the institutions. It's a vicious downward spiral, but I take some heart in the fact that no institution can or should be viewed as immortal, and this mortality is actually a good thing in the long term. So long as resources and interest remain or are found for the invention and support of new institutions, there is potential for the creative renewal and reinvigoration of institutional art making.

In the meanwhile, it is useful and heartening  to recognize that most of the work done in experimental and innovative forms and idioms takes place well outside of large institutions. Most new and experimental music does not require the resources of orchestras, state radio stations or opera houses, but is made for soloists (often composer-performers), small ensembles (often composed of collaborating composers-performers sharing resources) and can now include a technical sophistication that is no less that formerly monopolized by the large institutions.  Every composer can now carry the equivalent of a Kontakte-era WDR Studio, RCA Synthesizer and the complete apparatus of Repons in their own laptop.  Most new and experimental music can be performed and heard away from the formality and expensive of large concert halls, can be recorded on equipment and media that one owns at home, and no longer requires a licensed radio station for its broadcasting, nor is that broadcasting limited to the reach of a single broadcast antenna. (It can, however, be limited by the censorship of the PRC or North Korea, or perhaps by an end to net neutrality in the US.)

Perhaps more importantly, in these times, the fact that new and experimental music is essentially invisible/inaudible to the state and corporate apparatus can be very useful.  (James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State is a superb introduction to the limits of the legibility of real, existing traditional structures to the modern state and the disasters that the best of wills have led to because of that inflexibility.)  States and corporations alike prefer and tend to respond only to structures which follow radically reduced schemes and orders.  States and corporations draw straight lines and grids and group things according to least common denominators, losing detail, texture, tone, the nature of which is often more essential than crude, uniform measures. Recognition of this may not make states and corporations pay for our rent or lunch (that's what day jobs are for, buckaroos), but it does suggest a considerable artistic advantage of going under the radar.  

In recent protests against funding cuts in the Netherlands, the police were apparently able to control crowds of protesters because the protesters moved together, with a recognizable front line, and the police are said to have used the protester's own concerted music-making as a cue for their own actions.  How much more effective it would have been had the protesters moved, not as a coordinated mass, but as individuals roughly flocking in a general, but not manageable motion?  And however could the police have taken a cue from the music had it been, instead, sung quietly but independently by hundreds of individuals moving at the own time and trajectories through public spaces?  There's an interesting invitation to compose!  

How many composers do you know within three zip codes of your home?

A friend in the US recently made this suggestion:

Many people appreciate the beneficial presence of art galleries in small communities, but these businesses struggle. Art dollars flow towards urban centers on grounds of prestige. How about making local art purchases, say within three zip codes of the buyer's residence, tax deductible?

Republicans and Democrats could get together on this: a tax cut through which the government funds the arts by encouraging private spending. And the government would lose little revenue -- some of the tax burden the collectors avoid would pass through the dealers and artists.

I think this is a splendid idea, especially when it is extended to artists working in non-visual arts. Yep, tax breaks for new music commissions.  It seems even a politically plausible idea, given the preference of Democrats for stimulus and arts funding and Republicans for tax cuts of almost any sort.  (The scale of this proposal would probably be dwarfed by the massively state-subsidized sports stadiums which have been widely supported by Republicans; see, for example, George W. Bush and the Texas Rangers baseball team.)  

An essential part of a more lively future for new music has got to be giving more emphasis to locally made music as a complement and contrast to music representing super-regional centers of funding or prestige and the consensus of large institutional programmers.  A local element necessarily introduces more diversity into the mix, which is healthy for the development of music itself and for performer and audience attention as well as helps to create a better bond between composer and community, which seems like a necessary element in increasing engagement in the music as well as commitment to live performance opportunities.  

In many ways, the contemporary music environment is more like the Baroque era than the late romantic with its quasi-heroic composers striving for international careers.  In the Baroque, there were clearly musicians and elements of music itself which transcended the local, and even the more obscure small-town composer was networked into this, particularly with regard to style, but the bulk of actual music making, for example all of the huge bodies of liturgical music written by a J.S. Bach or a Telemann, was intended for local consumption and was frequently made with the specific resources — be they strengths or limitations — of their communities.

Another useful aspect of a tax break for commissions is that it could help with the imbalance given to the large commissions — operas and orchestral works — over pieces for soloists and small ensembles.  All galleries love the big sales of works of substantial scale by better-known artists, often to large institutional collectors, but the bread and butter business is the sale of smaller pieces to individual collectors.  The same should be true for commissioned compositions.  

 

Shadow Diplomacy

Wayang kulit (Javanese shadow puppet) figures of Barack and Michelle Obama, commissioned by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono from wayang artist Ki Ledyar, pictured, of Yoyakarta, in advance of next week's state visit.

Revolution?

The half-joke in the Clinton years was that if the amount of wealth which had been transferred upwards had gone in the other direction, we'd have called it a revolution.  It was only a half-joke because most people remained comfortable enough and the word "revolution" had lost much of its currency in the dull years that followed the '60s and 70's.

Now, here's a small article by Felix Salmon that seems to have the general measure of temperaments these days right, and, to be honest, I'm more than surprised by the ease with which terms like revolution, class, and even class warfare are now being thrown about:

"That dream is shattered -- and, what's worse, it turns out that very overclass is responsible for the working classes' own present straits."

Musicians, and especially new musicians are very much on the the margin of any debate structured in terms of class, let alone warfare and revolt.  (Cage or Cardew's writings about revolution now seem odd, even quaint)  We have the pocketbooks of the working class, yet make our livings by packaging our selves and our wares for the pleasure of an intellectual and capitalist class and the state that they have made.   But the condition and survival of new music in rough times is a serious topic, serious in the practical terms of assuring our livelihoods, but also in the aesthetic terms of the nature of our work.   Sometimes, historical examples provide some guidance.  However, for better or worse, it is next to impossible to generalize about new musical pratice in previous times of stress, as there is no general pattern.  Beethoven, Berlioz, and Wagner were each influenced, profoundly, by revolutionary times, but they are too far in the past to provide transposable examples.   After the First World War and during the Vietnam era, there were moments of true musical radicalism, some of which may now echo well with the popular anger of the moment, I suppose.  But after the Second World War, there was a turn to cooler forms of modernism, and during the Great Depression, the coincident styles of neo-classicism, folkloric nationalism, and socialist realism were all aesthetically conservative, if populist, moves.  Of course, technology is always the wild card here:  it may just be that the means of musicial pro- and repro-duction are efficient and cheap enough to sustain a greater diversity of both substance and style.   The half-joke of the '60s, that the revolution would not be televised, may have to be revised to the affirmative that the revolution will be online.

 

 

Feed & Fuel

It's reasonable to suppose that, beyond the wars and the financial crisis, the abiding contribution of the Bush years will be the total coupling of food and energy prices.  In the abstract, this makes sense, as proteins, grains and fat are just fuel for animals and the production and delivery of foodstuffs necessarily includes the expenditure of other forms of energy, so the volatility of one will have to track that of the other.  But the logic of the equation doesn't make it any less painful to economically weaker parties, whether as consumers or producers.   Here in Europe, for example, the butter price has moved in similar motion with the oil price,  with consumers hurt both at the peak prices of last summer and the reduced pocketbook of the moment while small farmers who geared up for the high export demand for China and India are now faced with surpluses and trying to stem increasing loss margins.  If you add in the connection between the nature of our food supply and the resultant medical costs directly associated with food content and quality, it starts to become clear that getting energy policy right means getting food and health policy right as well.  It's a not a matter of fixing something, but fixing everything.

An activity like new music (or dance or poetry)  isn't significant to the markets described above, although the people who make this music are irretrievably stuck inside them, so we tend to do what the system orders rather than actively resist.  But wouldn't it be more useful, to ourselves, our work, and possibly the larger system itself, to find better ways of working in the margins, the statistical insignificant underground?  Often times, the smallest irritation (like a grain of sand in the wrong place in your left shoe) can become an agent of real change.  Yes, this is the case for a vanguard or an elite, if you will, but when the whole is not functioning well, it's high time for experimentation in the parts, even the smallest parts.  

The slow, seasonal & local food movement may well be the best model for us.  In my recent trip to California, I was struck simultaneously by the huge number of fast-food restaurants, the ever-larger size of American bodies and the still-large auto sizes (people are stuck with big cars cause they can't sell them or get financing on new, smaller, ones) on one hand and the near-absence of home fruit and vegetable gardens and reduced produce sections in groceries (not to mention home solar heating or energy generation;  even worse is the news that the series of food contamination scares have driven people towards more consumption of processed foods rather than frech) on the other.  The phenomena are directly related to one another.  More garden production is not going to feed the masses more healthily and economically, but it is an irritant, a positive one, that can lead to mass producers improving both the quality and variety of their foods.  

I believe that the same goes for music.  If more new, local, and live music were introduced into life at the local level, starting from homes, schools, churches, and in community and civic functions, this would lead to a net increase in variety and quality as well as break the hold that large institutional publishers (and institutional censors, like UIL described in a recent post) and their house composers exercise over repertoire.  Moreover, the creation of bonds between creative artists and their communities can be part of a community's identity, an a more interesting part of the identity than, say, the architectural variety of local strip malls. 

See also this old post about composers and localities.

 

Before things get any uglier...

"Government sponsorship of art is ugly. Absence of government sponsorship of art is even uglier." — Ad Reinhardt

Refute or support in $800,000,000,000 or less.

Poetic License

There's been much discussion around the practice — unique to Democratic presidents — of inviting a poet to read at US Presidential inaugurations.   The poems to date, frankly, have not been very good, but that's no reason to object to the practice.  The problem has been that the poems have tried to do things which contemporary poetry does poorly (historical-patriotic self-congratulation) rather than things which poetry can do well; the poets to date have failed to use the opportunity to exercise their poetic license.   It strikes me that an inaugural poem ought to take one of two forms: the visionary, daring to imagine a better state (or, better yet, a state which functions so well we no longer need it), or the didactic, daring to instruct the new officeholder to do a better job.   We've been mighty short on the visionary of late, indeed times may be so serious that we don't have the luxury of the visionary, so I'd settle this time for the didactic, going with Vergil rather than Blake, building this time on the concrete deficits and failures of Mr. Obama's immediate predecessor:  Know more.  Imagine more.  Consider the consequences of your actions.  Work harder.   

Pomp

I've been trying to write a post about music and the US presidential inauguration, but it's kept turning into snark.   I wanted to write about the John Williams commission, but it should speak for itself, another part of the deep embrace between official State pomp and the Hollywood representation of the auspicious in American today.  The society of the spectacle is your government at work.  I also wanted to write about the interesting institution of the "President's Own" Marine Band,  in practice the staff musicians of the White House, but — anachronistically, to my mind — organized as a military unit, but I have a weakness for Sousa marches and the Band does have a serious commissioning program (well, within the limits of a musical school of quietude, i.e. not yet ready to commission Anthony Braxton or Alvin Lucier).   But then, this evening, I happened upon a broadcast excerpt of the concert on the mall today, with Pete Seeger leading Woody Guthry's This Land is Your Land.  Seeger, accompanied by Bruce Springsteen, chose the verses which were ommitted from our grade school textbooks, warming this old leftist's heart and taking, if only for a moment, all my snark away:

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn't say nothing;
That side was made for you and me.

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.
 

 

Real Politics

Mark Swed has a review of Arvo Pärt's new Symphony No. 4, "Los Angeles," which had been mentioned here before due to Universal Edition's unprecedented free online publication of the score.  

Swed notes that the score is dedicated to the imprisoned Russian oil executive Mikhail Khodorkovsky and reports that "The composer called Khodorkovsky a great man and said Russia would be a better country had the oligarch, once Russia’s wealthiest man, become its leader."  

I haven't spent enough time with the score to comment fairly about the music — though I did notice a number of features in common with the late works of quite a different composer, Robert Erickson — and my knowledge (indeed, everyones' knowledge) of the Khodorkovsky case is limited, but the information I do have strongly suggests that the dedication displays some real courage.  

Given the recent trend for the interests of the Russian state and of cultural activities within Russia to become more closely connected, indeed to a degree unknown since the end of the Soviet Union, one must assume that Pärt's dedication will not faciliate performances in Russia, nor by orchestras or conductors closely identified with the Russian state.  That is a rare and gutsy move for a composer in these apolitical days.

Perfecta

With the bailout of the "Big Three" US automakers now on hold, if not dead, it looks as if the legacy of the Bush administration and its party friends in Congress (let's hear it for Richard Shelby, Toyota and Honda-sponsored Senator from the right-to-keep-unions-out state of Alabama!) may well be a perfecta, allowing the decimation not only of New Orleans, but of Detroit, in a unique sequence of forces majeur, first an act of God and then the law of supply and demand, managed by incredible incompetence.  Collateral impact on the cultural life, including the musical life, of these two cities has been or certainly will be significant.  I can just imagine some voice in Washington murmuring: "if they're gonna take us down, why, we'll just take Motown down with us."   

Bush Pardon Watch

It's tough to beat the US election as a very serious matter and a spectacle. I am personally glad that it's over, both for the net positive result and the probabilty that I will never have to know anything more about a certain family from Alaska. (Sen. McCain genuinely made me angry for forcing that show on us at a time of serious concerns affecting the lives of real people).

Now, however, is a time for cooler emotions to prevail, and the next administration is faced with a range of problems on an unprecedented scale. By all accounts, Sen. Obama has uniquely cool temperament, appropriate to these times. I was a bit taken back by the theatre of Obama's speeches in Berlin, at the convention, and in victory in Chicago: just a single figure on a ramp — not really a stage — and not the usual view of a candidate crowded in a field of pols. This image fundamentally clashed with the non-royal "we" of his message, but perhaps it was a useful sign that he is taking on high office without the usual variety of political debts. I hope that Obama has the creativity to match his cool to move to solutions that are more fundamental in nature. The goal is not just to fix the current mess, but to make some long-overdue, perhaps even radical, changes for the better. The financial crisis, energy policy, environmental policy, health care, education, and social security are issues that interconnect and must be solved in parallel motion (if sometimes in a form of lively but dissonant counterpoint), with the extra benefits of such coordinated action likely to pay off in numerous other ways, for example in the war on terror and the critical relationship to the developing world in general.

We still have too many days before Obama takes office and a lot of damage remains to be done by the Bush residency. Look out, especially, for the flood of pardons to come, particular to members or benefactors of the administration. (Heck, I can imagine Bush pardoning his VP a day before his term ends, then promptly resigning so that a Resident Cheney can pardon Bush in return.) Maybe, in an act of vigilance, we should all flood the White House with pardon requests, for whatever little crime we may have once committed: when I was 14, I failed to stop at a stop sign on my bicycle and got a suspended sentence, I have committed too many parallel fifths and octaves to count, and I once pulled that "do not remove" tag off of a hotel mattress. I also stole some soap from the same hotel. Pardon me, Mr. Bush!

1929

The great economic crisis initiated by the crash of 1929 coincided with an aesthetic retreat from the musical ultra-modernism of the early century. While economics was far from the only cause of that compositional hunkering-down — in part, it was also a typical stylistic counter-movement at a generational juncture — the conservatism was a broad movement, shared, in many aspects, by very different economic/political cultures.

Without suggesting a repeat in music history, perhaps it would be useful to consider how, if the present global economic crisis widens, a similar mechanism might come to affect composition in our time. I take considerable comfort in the capacity of contemporary media to sustain a plurality of musical repertoires, styles, and concerns, and note that the same media have made possible an historically unprecedented privatization of the music-making and listening experiences, but nonetheless it is important to recognize that enormous social upheaval does have potential to strongly influence, if not control, the channels and means through which music is made public, shared, and sold.

Can we anticipate new waves of nationalistic and patriotic music? new music connected to revitalized labor movements? neo-socialist or neo-capitalist realism? neo-neo-classicism? Music has the capacity to be at once of the time, in advance of times to come, and very much behind the times. (I just listened to a broadcast of recent Stockhausen, whose music remained curiously locked into step with a vision of the future that dated somewhere around 1958), a situation that troubles me not at all. If, however, circumstances external to music are to force musical production and distribution into one direction or another, then concern is real and urgent.

Choice, Chance, Change

I profoundly do not understand the current elevation of the word "choice" in conservative and fundamentalist US social and political discourse. I don't understand Sarah Palin's use of the word with regard to a pregnancy, although it is clearly an appropriation and detournement of a term from the reproductive rights movement, and likewise I don't understand those who speak of sexuality in terms of a "choice" of lifestyles. But I do have the sense that it is has become such a powerfully coded word in a particular segment of the polity that we ignore its use at our peril. (There was a similar coding, after 9/11, when Richard "Dick" Cheney, used the term "imagination" in a snarl to describe the attacks; the implication was clearly that nothing was more dangerous than use of the imagination*.)

*****

In Southern Californian dialect, or at least in the slang of my youth, the word "choice" was an adjective, probably borrowed from USDA meat labels, indicating high quality and desirability. Sometimes this words was harmless. Surfers waiting for waves would rate the tides: "gnarly," "choice," "excellent". But sometimes, its use more directly reflected its origins in the butcher's counter and was grotesquely applied to women. (And, in a trope that e. e. cummings would have recognized, it was applied to cars as well, for a time replacing the equally misogynist and violent term "cherry').

I suspect that this, simultaneously cool and vulgar, adjectival form has somewhat infected the noun. The very act of a making a choice, a decision (The Decider), has acquired weight and significance independent of the actual gravity and particular circumstances involved.

*****

Lou Harrison used to quip, in a bittersweet response to the later works of his old friend John Cage, that he'd "rather chance a choice that choose a chance." There was a lot of personal and professional history between the two; Harrison indicated that he had first introduced Cage to a translation of the I Ching and that he had also shown Cage a method of composing with chance operations, and couldn't understand how Cage was "satisfied with using only one method of composing. This distancing by Harrison from Cage's chance operations a showed, I believe, a lack of engagement by Harrison with the actual methods used by Cage, in which the assignment of an answer to chance operations always followed deep deliberation and, indeed, rather specific choices about the composition at hand.

One of the most delightful and enlightening moments with Cage came for me after a public reading of his wonderful mesostic theatre of memory James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet: an audience member was angrily questioning him about his methods, and was silenced when Cage noted that, as highly structured the text was, and as important as the chance component was in its composition, a great deal of the text came simply "by taste", from his "imagination." Yes, Cage accepted the risks of a decision process, involving chance elements, which would lead to situations unforeseen in one or more dimensions, but he was never reckless, and he was always balancing chance and choice.

*****

Throughout the current US presidential campaign, the central riff used by opponents against Barack Obama is that voting for him would be a risky proposition, taking chances, due variously to his age, relative inexperience, and personal background. But if there is one impression of Obama that I have been able to gather, it is that he is a profoundly deliberative and introspective man, and one for whom all of the experiences of his relative youth and all of the complexities of his background have been worked through with a seriousness we have rarely, if ever, seen in American political life, becoming assets rather than liabilities. From all evidence, Obama is, personally, one of the most steady and conservative men in American public life. To be sure, should he get elected, he will at times err and disappoint those who anticipate more from him, but his combination of seriousness, a willingness to entertain diverse opinion and a readiness to be flexible in the face of changing facts or environments without sacrificing principles is reassuring in a moment with little certainty.

John McCain, on the other hand, strikes me as profoundly impulsive in his decision-making, as typified by the decision for Palin, but also in dangerously off-the-cuff statements about Iran, the economy, and Spain (all in one week!). Moreover, he shows a determination to stick to decisions, no matter if the wiser path would be to change ones mind. Palin appears to share this approach, giving notice that her approach to foreign affairs would be characterized as not blinking. Worst of all has been his transfiguration, on the road to this nomination, from a political maverick to complete identification with the decisions of a disastrous administration. Not blinking, not choosing, not changing.

*****

In response to an audience member who was uncomfortable with a piece his music, Cage would remind the listener that she or he always had the option to leave, being in no obligation whatsoever to anyone to listen. He advised that if one was able to recognize that one is suffering, then one had the opportunity to change. Cage practiced the discipline of assuaging his own discomfort with environmental noises by no longer treating them as noise, but rather by listening more closely to them. Cage identified change with modernity, in fact with the necessary modernity, without which (said the inventor's son) "nothing would be invented." This embrace of change (Music of Changes) is always going to be uncomfortable for those who take greatest comfort in the routine, even when that routine has become, in fact, no longer comfortable.

We are in an interesting moment. For any number of pressing issues — from the economy, to global conflicts, to climate change — the greater risk may well be to stand still while the more prudential act may be to accept fundamental change. Do we really have any choice?

_____
* Let's be clear: there is only one thing more dangerous than the use of the imagination, and that's failure to use the imagination.

Don't use our Barracuda

The McCain/Palin campaign continues to have bad luck in finding theme songs. The songwriters Ann and Nancy Wilson have asked that their song Barracuda not be used in connection with Ms. Palin's appearances. As I noted in this item, this is a good argument for the assertion of an artist's control over the use of their work. With all the difficulties they've had in finding a tune whose composer will let them use, the McCain/Palin campaign may well soon discover a previously unknown fondness for material in the public domain, which thanks to McCain's earlier votes on copyright legislation, now includes only a very small amount of music composed within his lifetime.

The Democrats Could Use a Composition Lesson

[Update, 28 August: The third night of the convention was actually pretty good; the material and the performers were consistently better, and the composition much improved, with a bit more visual counterpoint and the Clintons effectively playing a resolvable dissonance in the harmonic rhythm of the evening. The discipline of the Obama campaign with regard to visual imagery is quite remarkable, btw, whether it's the Gotham-fonted posters with Bauhaus-style graphics or the ability to suddenly flood the hall with placards, standards and banners that are timed perfectly to support the message or messenger of the moment; they're cleverly color-coded as well. The network coverage remains, however, poorly composed, and each turn from the podium to the dreaded "panel of experts" is a welcome prod to return to my own composing.]

Why is the Democratic Party Convention so hard to watch? Despite my total sympathy for the project of changing regimes in Washington, try-as-I-might to watch the convention, whether on C-SPAN or CNN, even as background noise to an insomniac composer's busy work, I had to give up. The organizers had failed to create an engaging stream of television and I believe that this failure is due to some basic compositional errors.

Yes, compositional, as in music. Because music is, first, a temporal art and skill in music is skill in filling time in a way that commands, or at least, provokes, attention. There are a few basic strategies for doing this: trying to sustain a long line which, a narrative, with very economical distribution of material, or, alternatively, making sharp tactical cuts between material before anyone is aware they might be bored. In either case, the whole is shaped so that all times the listener is waiting for more, with both local global high points in interest or tension.

To be fair, the managers of the convention have some problems with their material, in that the convention is really a done deal with little dramatic tension to offer. Hillary Clinton's speech already done and no surprises due in the traditional roll call vote. Further there is the problem of trying to make a show that functions simultaneously in two formats, one on the floor of a large convention hall, where the audience is captive but obviously so restless with lack of sport or spectacle, that letting a Zamboni out onto the convention floor between major speeches would have been more effective than the canned music, campaign and videos, and the awful "up close and personal" video bios. I'd really rather have some substantial power point presentations on policy than that stuff. Worse, however, is the network TV coverage, in which, absent a compelling narrative on stage in the hall, the individual news teams have substituted the narrative of "who's the next talking head?" in the broadcast booth. I'd prefer a Zamboni there, too.

(The famous 1968 Democratic convention, for all its faults as politics, was terrific television, and the networks then used the contrapuntal possibilities of activity outside and in the hall itself, between the podium, the delegations, and the booths, to best advantage. The coverage also had compelling pacing, able to sustain attention long into the night, the result, however unintentional, of striking long-scale harmonic rhythm. The 1972 convention, in which candidate McGovern's speech was delayed until the wee hours of the morning, was an example of harmonic rhythm gone far wrong, with the little tension left at that point insufficient to command an audienceand the effect on McGovern's campaign was negative).

So the bad news for the Democrats is that their composition skills look bad; the good news is that the Republicans, who have had no tension in a convention in memory, are usually much worse.

A good argument for meaningful artist control over music licensing

John McCain can't seem to find many musicians willing to let their tunes accompany his campaign. Newsweek has the story here.