Free & Open Musicology, Publishing, Recording

The "Open Goldberg Variations" project seems to have slipped under the professional music making and scholarship radar although it's quite possible that it is providing a substantial challenge to the traditional structure of producing and publishing performing editions and recordings of music in the public domain.  The project encompasses the production of a new edition, from source, using crowd editing, of Bach's "Goldberg" Variations, in Musescore notation format, which produces a payback-able score with audio as well as independent notation and midi files and, for this particular project, a studio quality recording of the piece by pianist Kimiko Ishizaka, all of which will be placed in the public domain with Creative Commons licenses and be available for free downloading and, as open source material, unrestricted further use. The Kickstarter page is here, the page at the Musescore site with the current version of the edition is here.

The challenge that a project like this poses to traditional score and recording publication is clear, but the challenge to musicology should also be recognized.  Although the "golden age" of the production of critical editions as a central activity for musicologists is a bit behind us, when professional musicologists are involved with editing, the old conventions of editorial territoriality and priority still tend to hold — finders keepers — just like on the playground and publishers entering into multi-year (and often multi-decade) commitments to put out expensive complete editions expect, correctly, to have some return on their investment, so they expect the exclusivity afforded by a copyright on the edition.  But opening up the entire process, as online publishing and cooperation makes possible, has the potential to change everything.  Volunteer labor has already produced a mass of performance materials available free and immediately, if not in the beautiful paper editions the traditional publishers did so well. But the quality of production outside of the traditional publishing system has improved spectacularly. And, in extreme cases, as when a significant manuscript (or, as the case might well be, an insignificant manuscript by a major composer) is first located, traditionally, the finder had the right of first edition and could usually keep the manuscript under wraps until he or she is done and only then begins the open vetting process over authority, provenance, and quality. That exclusivity, I believe, is no longer sustainable. Imagine what the process would be like if a newly-discovered manuscript image was made available to crowd scrutiny immediately upon  discovery!

This Goldberg project happens to have been funded (and actually funded well in excess of what the organizers had sought) and it remains to be seen what kinds of projects will happen in the future without such a foundation. (Personally, as nice as it is, I don't think that the sponsored audio recording is also necessary. One also wonders if the public funders, which have, in the past, supported the research that effectively subsidizes many private publications of scholarly editions, will adjust to the cost-effective sourcing of this work and actually support open-source projects as well or even instead. The open aspect here, I think is key, for it has a more natural fit to the public aspect of scholarly publication.  The serious move, chiefly among scientists, engineers and mathematicians, to boycott some private journals in favor of free and open alternatives, as those journals profit from the material and in-kind contributions of academics paid by the public hand and then turn around and sell their journals at high prices to academic libraries addresses very closely related concerns..

Something borrowed?

I've noted here before my impression that the mainstream "contemporary (post-/ex-/pseudo-/semi-)classical" has gradually become — for better and/or worse — a repertoire music,* a status that in the 20th century was largely associated with genre musics. With this development, we can reckon with more examples of the current Osvaldo Golijov sharing/borrowing/stealing controversy. (This thread at Sequenza 21 is keeping up with the story.)

Now, one of the necessary conditions of the formation of a musical repertoire is that numerous musical elements will be shared. These shared elements can be more abstract or structural in character — certain preferred forms or ensembles, for example — or they can be more immediately material — scales and modes, figures, riffs, sequences, progressions, tunes, scoring patterns, rhythmic tricks, even a characteristic dynamic profile (see Mannheim School).

The identity of an individual work in a repertoire with considerable sharing is often a matter of degree, and the individual stylistic preferences of a composer — whether as an expression of individual personality or of a shared, received aesthetic, or of a market identity — can be heard as value settings for the nature and degree of sharing in each category of material. However, when a composer borrows larger stretches of material, and particularly stretches which are recognizable as products of the imagination and labor of other musicians, then there is a body of terms with which one can describe the work: arrangements, variations, parodies, pastiche, citations etc.. It's even possible to sell wholesale appropriations as conceptual works.

In all of these cases going beyond the everyday commerce in shared materials which is standard practice in any repertoire, the composer is obliged to acknowledge his or her borrowings. Now it may well be that Mr Golijov, under the pressure of a large backlog of commissions, made an arrangement of some sort with his alleged source for the commission that has come under scrutiny. It could be, for example, a form of work-for-hire, a practice with some substantial tradition in all of the arts, in which case, the commissioners may have some concerns as to whether the work delivered was the "authentic" Golijov they asked (and paid) for. I suspect, however, that to whatever degree material was borrowed, the ultimate evaluation is going to be highly subjective in character, and it will be very interesting to hear how the rights organizations and Mr Golijov's academic institutions handle this, as they have their own interests and standards, obtained over long experience with the legal and moral niceties, for the correct identification of authorship.

For all of the attractions and advantages of working in a repertoire, priority and attributions are inevitable concerns for a composer.

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* The avant-garde and radical-experimental impulses being, by nature —and also, for better and/or worse —, counter-repertorial.

Are we even having a conversation?

I just listened to a 1957 radio discussion with Pierre Boulez and four Bay Area composers, Robert Erickson, Arnold Elston, Andrew Imbrie, and Jack Holloway from John Whiting's My KPFA website. The themes of the discussion run precisely into issues of continuity and coherence which were controversial then and continue to make music (and thinking about music) lively. Once again, Robert Erickson's down-to-earth but very smart way of talking about music was most impressive, the former Webern student Elston appeared most sympathetic to Boulez while Imbrie just wasn't buying it. Given the early date, the fact that a room full of musicians was straying into philosophical territories somewhat outside their professional comfort zones, some insecure moments (i.e. when Boulez couldn't recall Heidegger's name) and a presumed orientation towards a general listening public, I'm struck by the thought that a conversation like this, which once took place on an American free-to-air broadcast, probably couldn't happen today. At KPFA or another Pacifica station, certainly, where some social/political achievements of the new left — the (in itself, necessary) opening to a diversity of minority interests — led, in the zero sum game of sharing airtime available in a radio programming day, to shutting out a great deal of the programming, particularly any musics weighed down by any degree of connection to the classical tradition, even the most institutionally fragile of these musics, the new and experimental.* (Baby thrown out with the bathtub, you know?) In principle, the resources of the Internet ought to have restored some balance to this and, to a certain extent they have. I am, for instance, able to listen to this old broadcast anytime I want, and the offerings in online recordings, interviews, podcasts, articles, composers' or performers' or critics' webpages etc. are rich in real content. But are we really having serious public conversations (and productive disagreements) anymore about complex or subtle matters, connecting to the larger cultural and intellectual life, or are we, vulnerable to some extent due to our marginality, focused rather more on the pursuit of accessibility?**

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* The Pacifica stations were VERY important for the reception of other "classical" musics neglected by the commercial classical stations, being pioneers, for example, in broadcasting early music or in composers once considered outside the canon. William Malloch, for example, of KPFA (and whose weekly analytical broadcasts were a more vital lesson in 19th and early 20th century music history than any I actually received in University), had a very important role in the Mahler renaissance. And then there are some real commissioning activities of the stations: from Cage's WBAI to Lou Harrison's Homage to Pacifica. What radio station in the US today is commissioning new pieces?

**You know what I'd really like to hear online? How about a conversation about modernity and music between Alex Ross and Charles Shere, two of our most important writers about music and two who have certainly though hard about that topic and taken home very different (if equally provisional) conclusions. And there is a huge number of composers in some wild pairings I'd like to hear converse uncensored and unplanned about technique, aesthetics, da bidniss of music, art, movies, politics, musical politics, cooking...

Manual Transmission

Before sound recordings became widely available, a primary medium for the spread of new orchestral music was the piano transcription, in particular the transcription for four-handed playing.* Nowadays, I don't think there is a major music publisher that would pay for the extraction of a four-handed arrangement of a major new piece (piano concertos perhaps excepted.) While some things were definitely gained in the change of media — timbral variety, of course, but certainly the volume and spatial presence of a large ensemble in a larger room, as well as the record of particular musicians' interpretations, with all the wonderful nuances that can be included — some things were also lost. These include a tactile relationship with the notes that can only come from playing them oneself and also — in four-handed playing especially — the joy of making music in company. But also, the fact that practice, even for the most gifted sight-reader, means working in fits and starts, moving in and out of the piece's own temporal continuity, can leads, in combination with that tactility, to a more immediately analytical and interpretive engagement with the music. This is not to say that listening to recordings can not be analytical and there is certainly music which is so technically difficult to play from the page, that one may scarcely have an instant's thought about what one is playing, but generally speaking, recordings do invite passive listening (you can, after, do the dishes while listening to a recording, but not while playing secundo in a four-hander of a Mahler Symphony) and playing from the page is a qualitatively different experience, not least because, when playing, you, with all of your experience, tastes, and talents, are an essential element of the performance.

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* I caught the tail end of the American music-making-in-the-parlor experience. My father's mother was a very good piano player and once even played Paderewski's famous Minuet for the composer who was taking his usual cure in her hometown of Paso Robles. Her favorite composer was, however, Sibelius, and she still had part of Valse Triste under her fingers in her 80s. My maternal grandparents were not wealthy, but they did afford themselves a piano, a pretty good upright Steinway, with a bench full of sheet music, mostly popular classics and the whole corpus of sentimental Irish-American popular songs. I loved to play four-handed with my grandmother, but I loved best of all, at the end of some party, when one of her school teaching colleagues would sit down to play what they called "Honky-Tonk". He played pop songs from the early 20th century and a smattering of tunes from the Methodist Hymnal (my grandmother, Irish, was R.C., my grandfather, Dutch and Reformed, but the Methodist Hymnal seemed to be preferred by all) by ear, all in F#, that is, mostly on the black keys, and everyone would sing along. To this day, I probably have a better command of popular music from the first three decades of the 20th century than of the last four.

Pematurely interred orchestras in oversized mausoleums

Word has come that another American orchestra is closing shop, this time in Bellevue, Washington.

Oh, wait... it's not exactly shutting down: "It is the board’s hope that when Tateuchi Center (PACE) is completed, the orchestra may again play on the Eastside in a venue that will support us, both acoustically and in seating capacity."

Yep, "the orchestra", not "an orchestra" but "the orchestra". The intention is clearly to revive the same orchestra, absolved, of course, of any old contractual obligations.

And yep, at the same time they're putting the orchestra down or into mothballs, a new concert hall is being built to seat some 2000 people. An orchestra whose management couldn't sustain it in a 400-seat hall is now supposed to make it with a 2000 seat hall.

There is an absolute mania for large halls in the US and while they may be useful for large public assemblies where talk or travelogues or Amway recruitment evenings are the main focus or for (amplified) music from more popular genres, I think that this has been a seriously mistaken way of testing a dubious hypothesis that (a) halls of this scale are appropriate if not necessary for orchestral music and (b) halls of this scale are required to sustain large musical organizations economically.

As to the first point, a survey of the best concert halls and opera houses in Europe will quickly show that, except for a very few representative buildings, anything above 2000 seats is rare, with the acoustically best halls considerably smaller and 2000 an upper limit for even rather large cities (examples: the Großer Musikvereinssaal in Vienna seats 1744, the Concertgebouw is just around that upper limit.) Most of the "classical" repertoire has always been played in much smaller venues, and the earlier and more contemporary repertoire has been most often played in even smaller halls. I don't doubt that the Burghers of Bellevue take pride and have mighty aspirations for their metropolis and I have even less doubt that there are architects and engineers delighted to build a prestige object of such scale. But is architectural prestige really a trump for musical utility? Unless the hall is, acoustically, truly spectacular most of the repertoire playable by an orchestra is really going to suffer as it gets lost in a cavern of such size.

As to the second point, it is perfectly obvious that the orchestra had been able to sustain itself in a 400-seat hall for more than 40 years, but there is no evidence at all that it will have the draw, when resurrected, to sustain itself in a 2000-seater. Moreover, the possible image of that hall filled to 20% capacity for orchestral concerts is hardly going to be the stuff to create enthusiasm for orchestral music. I know that the professional thanatophiles out there on the lecture and consulting circuit will be perfectly happy with a new and underpopulated 2000-seat mausoleum for classical music, but that strikes me as a totally perverse use of limited resources and an embarrassing substitute for the orchestra's management and board actually doing the heavy lifting of enough fund raising and expansion of the audience base to get over the present hump.

Why orchestras come and go but music itself keeps growing

A video chat, with physicist Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute, Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, and Life Gets Faster.

West's observed connections between growth rates and the mortality or open-ended growth of an entity, is fascinating and I strongly suspect that it might also apply to music and musical institutions. If we begin to see orchestras, opera houses, and conservatories as corporate in their growth and innovation patterns, then their inherent mortality as individual organisms ought to be better recognized and, indeed, seized upon as a structural opportunity for innovative alternatives to replace them, for the problem is not that the community around an institution can no longer sustain musical institutions or that music itself lacks in attractive, compelling and novel content, but that the institutions themselves are, through lack of innovation (i.e. programming, performance and presentation style) and unsustainable growth (particularly in bricks and mortar and administrative ballast) failing to sustain themselves.

The present classical music landscape is, in many localities, dominated by old institutions which consume resources, and, because we have a tendency to lock in long-term public and private suuport to the older and bigger institutions (i.e. in Europe where opera employees have all the protections of civil service jobs) artificially slowing down paths towards bankruptcy, they may often temporarily crowd out of opportunities for innovative start-up firms.

West: "...most companies start out probably with some of that buzz. But the data indicates that at about 50 employees to a hundred that buzz starts to stop. A company that was more multi dimensional, more evolved, becomes uni dimensional. It closes down. "

That 50-100 number looks an awful lot like an orchestra which, coupled with the archaic nature of 19th century labor relations in an orchestra, says a lot about the ability of those free-lance early music and contemporary music groups to survive without comparable institutional support. Suppose we adopted a model in which the normative orchestras were organized around core memberships of ca. 25 players with core repertoires in 18th or late 20th/21st century repertoires, with 19th and early 20th century repertoire covered by combined groups at strategically opportune moments. Would that be a model sustainable until the next alternative emerges?

Exit the CD, Gone a Reliable Gift Option

As the last hardware form of commodified recorded music, that optical medium known as the audio compact disk (forward: "cd"), makes its slow exit from the marketplace, it's probably appropriate to take a moment to consider the fact that this creates a serious hole in the list of reliable gift object. Even a notorious recording skeptic like myself has been known to give and receive — and gladly, always gladly — too many of those little plastic discs in their plastic boxes (or, later, cardboard covers). And said cd does have some real advantages over the traditional alternatives: not everyone wears ties, drinks scotch, appreciates a good wine, cigars are out of style, none of my acquaintances is yet old enough to golf, let alone have a tangible use for golf balls, and let's face it, when uncertain about the recipient's tastes, choosing a piece of music seems less risk-prone than a book. While I have never become particularly adept at rescuing a suffocating cd from its shrink rap and I'm equally clumsy at opening the so-called-"crystal case", if I may admit here to a minor perversity: I do take some genuine tactile pleasure in ejecting the cd from its clutches of the circular hub of teeth which grip the disc by its unique and thus topologically-defining central hole by pressing just gently enough on the springy central button of the back media tray. Which is a digression from my main point, which is that, when given the gift of an audio cd, I feel obliged to open and listen to the cd.* I do not regift cds. Nor do I prematurely liberate, examine and/or listen to cds which I have purchased with the intention of giving to others. I do recall, however (TRUE STORY WARNING), that one of the first cds I was given as a gift, a recording of Robert Ashley's Atalanta (which Ben.Harper happens to mention in a very sweet post, here) was given to me both unwrapped (that is, the shrink wrap had been removed; the gift wrapping was, in fact, intact) and already listened to. Which was dismaying at the time, but now, one supposes with some generosity granted by the passage of considerable time, shall we say twenty-five years and four months plus or minus five days?, was just a premature form of file sharing. An unapologetic act of what I then considered to be bad form was simply a vanguard form of a new etiquette. My failure to register, then, an appropriate amount of gratitude to the gift-giver for the gift given, given my misunderstanding of the evolving ethic of music-sharing, viewed through my antiquated and perhaps provincial view that a gift given, save for some object of antiquarian or intimate personal interest and/or worth, should be unused prior to its formal receipt by its intended recipient. (WARNING: LONG CLOSING SENTENCE, ENDING WITH PREPOSITION INDICATING AN IMITATION OF ACTUAL SPEECH RATHER THAN POLISHED PROSE: My regrets at my lack of foresight, and thus my not-bad-but-definitely awkward expression of reduced gratitude are deep but wane, now, in the knowledge that the custom of sharing music via a tangible medium which might bear some concrete signs of its prior use has gone the way of the dodo, and that we have definitely entered the age in which recordings are exchanged, often anonymously, secret Santas all of us, entirely without any indications as to whether a recording has been previously heard or otherwise interacted with.

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* As the costs of producing ones own cd went lower and lower, the exchange of cds by composers and musicians who made them has become ubiquitous. (Indeed, I probably received more cds than business cards from musicians throughout the '90s and oughts; hell, cds had become business cards.) It then became very important to remove the shrink rap from gifted cds received, as the risk of the gift-giver finding the cd still enclosed in plastic, lonely and unplayed on some shelf, when revisting the recipient was one which carried the potential of serious social awkwardness. No, no one would actually have know if the cd had actually been listened to, but left in its wrapping, it would have been absolutely clear that it had not been listened to.

An Exercise in Modern Usage

All the fuss these days about the new Modernist Cuisine volumes is an invitation to ponder that term "modern" in each of its variants (-ist and -ism and -ernity etc.) and with all of the familiar appendages (anti-, post-, pre, and prae- etc.). Let us review: Modern is clean and lean and clear except when it's messy, thick and dense. Modern is slow and low and empty except when it's swift, sky-scraping and full. Modern is both high tech, knowingly low tech, usually appropriate tech, but sometimes extravagantly tech. Modern is fresh and local except when it's well-preserved and long-traveled, often international. Modern is both futurist and primitive, forward-looking and nostalgic, cold as ice and warm as a pup. Modern is a walk in the wood and a ride in a jet-pack. Modern is atomic and anti-atomic. Modern is dissonance and noise except when it's the same time consonant and concord. Modern is specific except when it's generic, expertly handcrafted except when it's mass-manufactured, one-of-a-kind except when it's infinitely reproducible. Modern is slick, glossy black & white, but also fuzzy-edged, matte and polychromatic. Modern is rough and complex, except when elegantly simple. Modern is ambiguous and ironic, except when it's straightforward and earnest. Modern is knowing when one is acting (or eating) archaic. Modern is all ornament, except when it's plain as can be. Modern is going to extremes as well as focusing on the medium and mediocre. Modern is the 20th century except when it's now the 21st. Modern is now, except when it's that modern back then or this modern up ahead. Post-modern is not modern except when it happens to be modern. Modern is comic except when it's not. And so on (except, of course, when modern is non-sequitor.) With so much contradiction, is the term at all useful? (Have you ever noticed that when you write a word — like "modern" in this item — often enough, it begins to appear strange, misspelled, unfamiliar, even foreign?) Actually, I think modern can be useful, if one is prepared to live with the contradiction, to see it as a term that itself thrives within fields of contention and, ultimately, a term whose value or utility ultimately dependent more on local context and application than universal applicability. And, unless you're prepared to back up your use of the term with sufficient context, be prepared for it to signify nothing at all. Which, in itself, is just about as modern as you can get.

Against the Normative Order

One of the persistent arguments for the western "classical" musical tradition has been that it has a certain caché or benchmark status, marking a form of cultivation, in which listening and performing discipline, knowledge of the tradition as a larger whole and within a historical/cultural context, and the complexity or sophistication of the music itself have been valued highly. Forms of this argument frequently appear in pedagogical contexts, and often in a popular (and highly questionable) form, from the listening-to-Mozart-makes-smart-babies fad to the recent "Chinese mother" furor. Ultimately, this argument is an argument less for the particular musical tradition than for the broader cultural tradition around the music and it skirts around aspects that have contributed to the prestige which are more social that materially musical in character: the status of the opera visit, the importance of continental European immigration to the spread of the tradition, etc.. While the sophistication of the music and the level of skill required to play and listen to it (at least at a technical level) remain constant, I think this argument has weakened considerably with time and weakened to an extent that the principal argument for the tradition, as well as for its descendants (yes, even experimental music) is a no longer sustainable status as a normative form of musical production and aesthetics, but as the exception which challenges the current normative order. A "death of classical music" will happen everytime classical music ceases to be an experience extraordinary to the music which otherwise dominates our everyday experience of listening. We have to do a better job of communicating how extradinary, how strange, beautiful and, yes, difficult this experience can be, from the uniquity, vitality and risk of live performance, the precise, strange, and archaic labor of a large ensemble performance (isn't the orchestra the only form of labor-intensive 19th century European production still in use?), to the profoundly unusual use of shared-time a concert represents, and certainly to the virtues of novelty and variety, however subtle, that only a new musical work can express, once or (sometimes) on renewed acquaintance.

Innovation or Stagnation?

Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowan has a nice post connecting some threads (including Paul Krugman) about stagnation in technical innovation, with the example of the kitchen, which has seen surprisingly little fundamental innovation since the microwave was introduced (a device whose application still remains controversial; but then again, I can recall, as a kid in SoCal the '60s that there were still a couple of houses that took ice deliveries for their wooden ice boxes, so even electrical refrigeration had its (non-Amish) detractors in recent memory. (And don't tell me about those fancy sous-vide machines; it's not a big deal to hot-wire your crock pot into a working sous-vide cooker.)

How about technical innovation in new music? While we once could have taken a David Foster Wallace turn and sold off each musical year to the highest bidding sponsor (1961: Year of the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer, 1967 Year of the Time Point, 1969 Year of the Moog, 1975 Year of the REMO Roto Tom, 1977 Year of Overtone Singing, 1979 Year of the Eventide Harmonizer, 1985 Year of Midi (or was it kelp trumpets or long string instruments or the virgin sample?), 'til somewhere in the 1990's we entered the era of Laptop Gazing, with which the pace of technical innovation seems to have become incremental rather than eventful, and even when eventful (like last summer's fit of stretching) it fatigues quickly. Has anyone noticed any innovation per se of late, or have we fallen into the routines of repertoire niches? If you've noticed innovation, what examples? What are the trends and tendencies? Or have composers simply become comfortable cooking in their old fashioned kitchens? If so, is this for better or worse?

In short, what's novel, lately, about The New Music?

A Place in the Sun

I've just returned from a trip to the US, more familiar than professional, with more time spent in small towns than big cities, and more time than either in some of those now-ubiquitous communities that are in the nebulous somewhere in-between. We don't really have adequately descriptive names to fit the Rancho Cucamongas of this day and age, places with substantial population (comparable, for example, to that of Mozart's Vienna, and larger than most of the towns Bach lived in) but not yet much there, there (as Stein famously said of Oakland). Where are the great novels about such places? Who are the great composers in these places? Really talented, imaginative people come of of these places, but they don't tend to stay, making their careers if they can instead in the big cities, competing against fellow asylum seekers for the few available places in the sun. And that strikes me as a major opportunity that we ought not let go. Because there is poetry in these places, and both substance and potential in the locales and letting that go — ceding it to the anti-intellectual, anti-diversity, anti-cultural economic elite, the one with the real temporal power, the one that is steadily making over the US into a land of interchangeable strip malls filled with the same coast-to-coast chains of minimum wage-staffed shops and fast food joints — is a tragic mistake.

I would prefer not...

Someone pointed me to this presentation by Lawrence Lessig, all about the present copyright mess and the use of existing materials in new creative work (in particular the question of fair use with creative methods based on recycling, parody, plundering, mashing, remixing and all that.) It's not a surprise that Lessig, a law professor, is addressing this as a primarily legal issue, and the fact that the everyday practices of a good portion of the population are not legal is a real problem, so Lessig's clear articulation of this problem is welcome.  (This topic is also fascinating as it is essentially a conflict between two liberal positions, the first which recognized that creators have a right to claim forms of meaningful ownership over their work, and the second which views access to forms of information as a universal and necessary — to the production of new work — right.)  

However, in the larger debate, it's once again disappointing to find that the legal and economic issues continue to drown out an ethical issue which I would frame in the following way: an artist (composer, writer, choreographer, etc.) may often — not always, but often — identify with his or her creative work in a deeply personal way, and may view the manipulation of their work by others as hurtful or injurious, with this view completely independent from any question of whether or not she or he receives compensation in whatever form or amount.   Unless the work in question can be identified immediately as political in nature or the artist in question can be identified unambiguously as a public political person, I happen to believe that it is a matter of simple decency, of respect for the private dignity of the person who has created the work as well as for the integrity of the work itself, that the creator has the right to say "no, I would prefer than my work not be used in this manner."*  As long as a creative artist is still alive and kicking, and has not had the last chance to revise her or his work or put it into a final form, I believe that it is a real question of character, completely independent of legal or economic questions, on the part of the re-user, whether or not that preference is respected.   

I hope that it is clear here that I am distinguishing between an artist asserting such a right as a personal or aesthetic concern — which I support entirely even if I should loathe the work (or the person who made it) — and an assertion of rights for purely economic motives.  I well understand that, in the real world, it is not always possible to make such a distinction, but I'm not altogether certain that that should even be a primary concern.  Rather this: wouldn't it be a preferable state of affairs if an honest attempt to determine whether the original artist has a preference one way or another were a standard social convention?   

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* an echo here of Melville's Bartleby is intentional.

Follow the Money, Impending Firesale Edition

Always on the right path, Pliable has been following the story of EMI's descent.  With the latest successful claims by creditor Citigroup against EMI, what can we expect will happen to the back catalogue in classical music? I suspect that there is a real opportunity to be had here in picking up that catalogue at fire sale prices and immediately turning it into digital goods.  Sure, the amortization may be long-term — and in terms longer than any major financial concern is now willing to consider — but these goods are reliably durable audibles. (If the present UK coalition government really had their capitalist chops about them, they would find some way to claim these as assets of national interest, make the modest investment to create the platforms required to sell downloads, and then reinvest the income in contemporary music making. Unfortunately, I suspect that there are interests in the present government who actively hold any engagement by the state in culture in such low regard that they would just as soon lose money and let assets like these disappear into the portfolio of a creditor with no idea what the assets are, let alone what they might be worth, as actually exploit the potential of the assets.)

Dead-Dropped Music?

Artist Aram Bartholl is embedding usb drives into walls, buildings and curbs for public but anonymous data up- and downloads. Not surprisingly, the comments focus in on the risks of acquiring viruses or having your equipment sabotaged, making this media equivalent of anonymous sex or sharing used needles; sad how modern public life gets stuck with such risks. In any case, it's certainly one way to try to get your music out there via sound files and sound-playing applications.

Follow the money, once more

Ron Silliman's blog — which has become my reliable one-stop shop for everything in new and experimental American poetics — is approaching three million visitors.  As is to be expected, his celebratory post gets to the point, the state of the art:

Amazon’s offer to pay authors 70% of e-book royalties is, we should note, a deeply defensive gesture. What they are trying to prevent is watching the authors collect 100%.

Follow the money

This thread at The Rambler is well worth reading and ought to be fuel for some long-overdue discussion.*

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 * The degree to which "commercial recordings" of new music are actually commercially viable has, for the most part, always been small.  The exceptions are all exceptional — Harry Partch did earn some money from his own Gate Five label (taking advantage of having no middle man and minimal overhead), I assume that Phillip Glass's recordings have generally been income generating, and sometimes there's actually the odd hit that makes a speculative investment in musical obscura pay off: the Nonesuch Subotnick recordings, that Gorecki Symphony or such. 

Even in the days in which only a handful of labels existed with any interest in the vanguard, unless the label had deep enough pockets and an inventory-friendly tax code to risk a long amortization periods it was a common expectation that a composer would front the costs of the recording, either out of his/her own pocket or with grant money or the largess of the few patrons we've had.  There was really no great problem with this — indeed it put music out there in the world in a useful form that the market participants were not otherwise rushing to produce — so long as the simple existence of a recording was not viewed as anything more that it was, for example as C.V. filler for academic hiring and tenure decisions or for the awarding of grants and prizes and residencies. In the big world of commercial music making, the medium may be the message, but in our little niche, any question of substance has got to turn on the music itself, not on the arbitrary fact of whether it got captured as a vinyl, plastic or downloadable commodity.   

Nowadays, actually getting a high quality recording made and pressed, burned or uploaded is cheaper and easier than ever. (A good comparison is to my high school years, in the late '70s, when vinyl was produced by a small cartel of factories owned by multinational firms and in increasingly bad quality, often little more than cardboard sandwiches prone to falling apart.)  It has become clear that a prime function of cd recordings now is that of calling cards for composers and performers, as advertisement for the real action: getting gigs. (AFAIC, not an entirely bad state of affairs.)  (A friend recently told me that it has become a custom in circles of the well-recorded to inspect the shelves of those who have received their calling cards — to see if the plastic wrap has actually been removed from the jewel cases! No, in the privacy of their own living room, even your best friend may not be your most loyal listener...)  Yes, there will always be a small number of "serious" composers for whom a purchasing audience for their recordings exist, sometimes even approaching the conditions of a market, but let's try to be up-front about this, so we fall neither into the trap of over-estimating the prestige value of a recording nor into viewing every recording firm as a vanity press. 

Composerly Bloggery

"Some people do things before they are fashionable. Ned Rorem blogged before it was electronic." - David Feldman

Given the fact that we're supposed to be witty, wise, and creative people, it's striking how prosaic writing by composers -- and blogging composers in particular -- usually is. The weblog format is a young medium, but it seems to have already settled comfortably into some fairly rigid formal and stylistic boundaries. Too comfortably, methinks.* If I ran the circus, the model would definitely be Cage's Diary: How to improve the world (you'll only make matters worse) rather than The Paris/New York/Later/Final (...) Diaries of Ned Rorem, and invest both content and form with a little more composerly invention and a lot less confession and self-promotion.**

I've tried some modest experiments with form here, and a few readers have even caught on to the fun and games (picnic, lightning), but words have a way of failing me, and my items are a pale fire when you begin to imagine the potential bonfire of words music might ought inspire.

At the moment, perhaps the best we can expect from blogs, is precisely the same we expect from critics: a well-worded and unexpected observation, a provocation from a set of ears and eyes independent from your own. How about this one, from Virgil Thomson who, describing a production of the Ring said: "And there stood Valhalla, looking all the world like the Cornell Medical Center."

A gift certificate for a 5 lb. canned ham will be awarded to the first reader to reconstruct the algorithm and data base from which this item was composed.
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*Remember: the function of music is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable.

**There is a notion that the orginal, poetic, form of language descended into prose when it became necessary to communicate more concretely in order to survive. If that's true, then it speaks to a sorry state of affairs for new music. However, all the evidence is to the contrary: new music is not only surviving, but being made in a quantity and diversity previously unknown. Sure, there are naysayers still fighting sorry little turfwars (see this interview for an example from someone directly threatened by that quantity and diversity), and sure, it's often tough going, but when has it ever been any better?

(An encore posting from July 2, 2007)

Well, that was short...

It took eight years to go from the Leif Inge's 9 Beet Stretch to the Justin Bieber stretch-out, and from there, I reckon that it's taken about two weeks to officially become a audio production cliché, which is probably a typical rate of idea consumption and exhaustion in the transition from art to commercial music. In the past week, I've received links to about a half-dozen new stretched pieces, all made, one assumes, in the wake of the Bieber.  Now, as an experimentalist, I have nothing against the use of clichés — there still being plenty (to paraphrase Schoenberg) of good music to be made from stretched out bubble gum — but the music can't stand alone on its slow motion.  Stretching is now just additional material, and a work of music using it will have to have other compelling qualities to sustain that material. 

From the Armed Man to Single Ladies

The Rambler, Tim Rutherford-Johnson, has investigated a recent Proms score by Mark-Anthony Turnage, discovering that it is, in part, an amped-up transcription of a recent pop hit  (here and, most astonishly, here).   Between this and the 800% slowed down Justin Bieber tune, noted on this page a few days ago, one starts to wonder if we are moving into a new era in which art music parodies of popular material become a central genre.  While I'm certain that there are some intellectual property thickets to cross through here, if this phenomenon establishes itself, it would seems to be placing the relationship between commercial and art music production back onto a more comfortable plain, and a plain long familiar to composers.  Just think of all those masses built around the Renaissance pop song L'Homme Armé, many of them stretching the melody or hiding it in a dense texture beyond immediate recognition, or the complexes of remembered tunes and landscape in Ives (and, to some extent, Mahler). I've long subscribed to the notion that composers compose out of their acoustical  environments, and such popular musical material is often — and unavoidably — as much a part of the environment as the bird songs, stormy weather, or traffic noises that can appear in musical works.  

Bacon for the Ears

What bacon is for food, stretching is for electronic music.  It can make anything sound better. Here's a prime example, made with Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch.  

Slowing things down, widening the perceptual frame, was one of the initial impulses in the minimal side of the radical music.  La Monte Young's goal was to be able to "get inside the sound", to bring out all of the detail and complexity of acoustic events which on first impression may appear to  be simple, minimal.  (The ability to slow down music without altering pitch was also one of Steve Reich's initial concerns; not satisfied with the technical possibilities in the analog electronic studio of his day, this kind of process was eventually realized by real live players in Reich's Four Organs.) 

Now that stretching has become so ubiquitous, has it already achieved the status of a cliché?  In film music, I suspect that this is already the case. Fortunately, in experimental music, there are no clichés, just resources worth reconsidering.

(Excuse the sparse posting here.  My recovery is taking longer than I expected.)