I received a number of comments on this piece, most of them over email. After much discussion I've opted to put in both bar lines and time signatures.
Sincere gratitude goes out to Patrick from Ligeti Quartet for his detailed comments. He went way above board in providing the information I needed to make this a playable piece.
Performance Marks Conductor Jacomo Bairos' LACO Debut as well as PROJECT Trio’s Debut as LACO Family Concerts Artists-in-Residence
Sunday, February 26, 2012, at Alex Theatre
1 PM – “Instrument Petting Zoo”
2 PM – Performance
It will be anything but music as usual when the electrifying Brooklyn-based ensemble PROJECT Trio joins the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO) and guest conductor Jacomo Bairos for the first of LACO's 2012 Family Concerts series on Sunday, February 26, 2012, 2 pm, at the Alex Theatre in
Glendale. PROJECT Trio, with its wildly eclectic mix of jazz, hip-hop and rock sounds and appearances on Nickelodeon and MTV, performs a high-octane twist on Copland's Appalachian Spring and other original works in its debut as LACO's Family Concerts artists-in-residence for the next three seasons. Bairos, who enjoys an international career as a conductor and educator, makes his LACO debut with this performance.
Youngster at LACO's "Instrument Petting Zoo"
Photo by: Robbie McGraw
LACO Family Concerts, recommended for ages 5 to 105, are designed for children with little or no previous musical experience and include a performance prefaced by creative activities to amuse, enrich and engage them including an “Instrument Petting Zoo,” where youngsters handle and play brass, woodwind and string instruments with the assistance of students from the Pasadena Conservatory of Music; crafts with Kidspace Children’s Museum; dance-circles with the YMCA Glendale; and "create your own box harp" with the Autry Museum of the American West. Two additional LACO Family Concerts this season take place on Sunday, April 1 ("Fool for Dance") and Sunday, May 6 ("Mozart & Me").
Subscriptions, including all three concerts, are available at $51 and $30. Tickets for individual concerts are priced at $12 and $20. Both may be purchased online at laco.org or by calling LACO at 213 622 7001. Tickets to individual concerts will also be available at the venue box office on the day of the concert, if tickets remain. Discounted tickets are available by phone for groups of 12 or more.
Four stories about sopranos up next. First: Camilla Williams — the soprano believed to be the first African-American woman to perform with a major US opera company — died Sunday in her home in Bloomington, Ind. at age 92. She made her debut at New York City Opera May 15, 1946, almost nine years before Marian Anderson sang at the Met.
Second: Patricia Neway died Jan. 24 at 92. A longtime collaborator of Gian Carlo Menotti, she debuted the role of Magda Sorel in his opera The Consul — and won a Tony for her turn as the Mother Abbess in the original Broadway production of The Sound of Music.
Third: A profile of soprano Renee Fleming as she enters the next stage in her career. "She has decisions to make about how to spend her remaining years onstage. Opera singers continually assess and refine their own voices, which change over time. What roles are appropriate? When is it good to stretch yourself, and when is it reckless?"
Fourth: American singer Angela Meade has been given the Beverly Sills Artist Award. It's a $50,000 prize for singers who have already appeared in featured roles at the Met. Previous winners include Joyce DiDonato, Nathan Gunn and Matthew Polenzani.
We've had a lot of coverage of Philip Glass' 75th birthday this week, but here's more: The world premiere recording of his Ninth Symphony debuted at No. 15 on the iTunes Top 100 albums chart.
And Justin Davidson wrestles with his lack of affinity for Glass' work: "I felt that I could have walked away in the middle of an arpeggio, had a four-course dinner, and returned to find those soothing chords still burbling away. Glass may well have done the same when he was composing the stuff. Surely there's an app for that. But I also found long seductive stretches that buzzed with energy or settled into feline languor."
Now, several items on labor and financial issues. Out of the ashes of the Honolulu Symphony rises the Hawai'i Symphony Orchestra, led by JoAnn Falletta. Their first, eight-program season starts next month.
The Philadelphia Orchestra has extended its contract with CEO Allison Vulgamore — for four weeks. (Not a typo. One month.) This is the second such extension of her contract with the struggling ensemble.
Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Inquirer's Peter Dobrin continues his dedicated and careful analysis of the orchestra's situation. He says there's been "incremental but encouraging progress" in gifts and pledges, but notes that "several prominent titled players — clarinetist Ricardo Morales, trumpeter David Bilger, and cellist Efe Baltacigil — already have accepted positions elsewhere, and another wave of departures is on the way." (A late-breaking update: The principal trombonist just announced he's leaving for the LA Phil.)
The musicians of the Louisville Orchestra have withdrawn their charge of unfair labor practices against management and the board. Says the musicians' committee chair: "We hope this shows that the musicians want to work in a positive way with anyone willing to move forward respectfully."
The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra's president and CEO abruptly resigned yesterday saying he was simply "ready to move on."
The Tuscon Symphony Orchestra just debuted a concerto for ... mountain dulcimer, composed by Conni Ellisor and played by Stephen Seifert. Says a humble Seifert about his instrument: "It's the simplest instrument you can make. It's a box with strings on it."
A recording studio owner likens crowd-source funding for classical recording projects to the slow food movement: "Just as the slow-food movement encourages eaters to think more holistically about how food is grown, prepared and brought to the table, this co-producer model gives people much more access to the creative process of music."
Remember the grumbling a few months back surrounding the renovation of the Bolshoi Theatre? Apparently a gilded handle broke off in a reporter's hand during a dress rehearsal for opening night, two studio ceilings are so low that dancers bump their heads during lifts, and despite a new shock-absorbent stage surface, dancers are getting injured.
Due to the European financial crisis, Barcelona's famed Liceu opera house is closing for eight weeks. More than two dozen performances are being cancelled.
The Guardian has a bright idea: "Wouldn't it be exciting ... to have an artist talk to the audience about the music that is being performed?" (If that's a new thought, then we clearly don't go to the same concerts.)
Pianist Jonathan Biss, who released an ebook called Beethoven's Shadow in late 2011, writes about how hard it is to write about music. (Can I get an "Amen!" around here?) "This is so extraordinarily difficult because to write effectively you need to be direct, clear and specific, whereas the glory of music lies in its abstraction — its nearly infinite malleability according to the listener's psychological state — and if you don't embrace that, you are sure to miss its essence. If you err on one side, you end up with a blow-by-blow account that can read like the minutes of a meeting or, worse, a report card; on the other end of the spectrum you get platitudes about beauty and spirituality without approaching either."
There are quite a few half-baked generalizations and weird bromides packed into this little essay about Asians in classical music — Baroque music is "mechanical," and classical music, if it survives at all, "will have an Asian afterlife, much in the way washed-up American rock bands can still pack stadiums in Manila." But the points the author raises about racial diversity in orchestral management and on boards is worth reflection.
Drumma Boy — a producer big in Southern hip-hop — muses on the classical music that molded him: "My mother was a professional opera singer and my father was the First Chair clarinet for forty years in the Memphis Symphony Orchestra — the first African-American to hold that position ... When I tackle genres that many people with tunnel vision believe to be the antithesis of Hip-Hop, they don't realize that I'm not broadening my horizons or crashing into a classical members-only party — I'm merely coming back home to Memphis, Tennessee, and the orchestral roots that lie deep beneath my beats."
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"fullattribution">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
"VOX BALAENAE" George Crumb by Ensemble intercontemporain & Tero Saarinen CY
Choreography and dance : Tero Saarinen
Music : George Crumb, "Vox Balaenae"
performed by Ensemble intercontemporain soloists:
Sophie Cherrier (flute) / Hideki Nagano (piano) / Pierre Strauch (cello)
Lighting and set design : Mikki Kunttu
Costume design : Erika Turunen
Sound design : Marco Melchior
Choreographer's Assistants :Satu Halttunen / Henrikki Heikkilä / Sini Länsivuori
Recorded November 6, 2011, Automne en Normandie,
Le Rive Gauche, Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, France
"VOX BALAENAE" Georg Crumb by Ensemble intercontemporain & Tero Saarinen CY
Choreography and dance : Tero Saarinen
Music : George Crumb, "Vox Balaenae"
performed by Ensemble intercontemporain soloists:
Sophie Cherrier (flute) / Hideki Nagano (piano) / Pierre Strauch (cello)
Lighting and set design : Mikki Kunttu
Costume design : Erika Turunen
Sound design : Marco Melchior
Choreographer's Assistants :Satu Halttunen / Henrikki Heikkilä / Sini Länsivuori
Recorded November 6, 2011, Automne en Normandie,
Le Rive Gauche, Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, France
American Cosmology was designed by the LAMC’s director Carmen-Helena Téllez to showcase complementary meditations on the sky and the cosmos represented in David Dzubay’s Astral String Quartet and in Gabriela Ortiz’s Baalkah for String Quartet and Soprano. Astral, written for the Orion Quartet, was inspired by the ensemble’s name and by the constellations visible in the sky while the composer worked at the MacDowell Artsit Colony in New Hampshire. Baalkah was composed for the Kronos Quartetand Dawn Upshaw, and sets texts from Mayan cosmologyaddressing patterns of existence and the place of humanity in the universe.
David Dzubay has received commissions from Meet the Composer, Chamber Music America, the National Endowment for the Arts, the US-Mexico Fund for Culture, and the Fromm and Barlow foundations, among others. Recent honors include Guggenheim, MacDowell, Yaddo, Copland House and Djerassi fellowships, a 2011 Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2010 Heckscher Prize. His music has been performed by orchestras, ensembles and soloists in the U.S., Europe, Canada, Mexico, and Asia, and is published by Pro Nova Music and recorded on the Sony, Bridge, Centaur, Innova, Naxos, Crystal, Klavier, Gia, and First Edition labels.
David Dzubay writes: “Beginning work on a piece for the Orion String Quartet, and taking a cue either from the group’s name or perhaps from gazing upwards on evening strolls around the MacDowell Colony in rural New Hampshire, I decided to focus on the stars, composing an “Astral” quartet, movements of which would look at stars and space in various ways. Though the movements are somewhat independent, they do share musical elements and together are balanced on the curious middle movement. Like our galaxy, the quartet has a spiral structure, both in the shape of an eight-pitch ‘spiral motive’ and in the duration of the movements (roughly 5′-3′-2′-4′-3′). A recurring element, first heard in the opening bars, is a group of three evenly spaced attacks, a representation of Orion’s Belt, the tight grouping of three stars lined up in the Orion constellation.
Gabriela Ortiz is one of the foremost composers in Mexico today. Recent commissions and premieres include her new videoperaUnicamente la Verdadwith the Indiana University Contemporary Vocal Ensemble under Carmen-Helena Téllez; Altar de Piedra for three percussion players, timpani and orchestra for Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra with Esa- Pekka Salonen and Kroumata percussion ensemble; Zócalo-Bastilla, for violin, percussion and orchestra premiered by violinist Pierre Amoyal, and Altar de Muertos, a string quartet commissioned by Kronos Quartet.
Baalkah, which means ‘world’ or ‘cosmos’ in Maya, was inspired by the cosmological beliefs of the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula and of other Mexican and Central American native peoples. For over 5,000 thousand years, these Native American peoples have conceived the world as being divided into 4 cardinal directions: east, north, west and south. In each one of these directions stands a gigantic tree that supports the sky, and each one has its particular cosmological characteristics, such as its own ruling deity, its own color, a set of related plants and animals, and, more generally, its own mood or personality. The lyrics of the first four songs of Balkah are taken from a 17th century Maya book, the Chilam Balam of Chumayel, a priceless depository of centuries of historical and religious wisdom inherited by Maya priests and kept hidden from the prosecution of the Catholic church. Each member of the string quartet represents one the four cardinal directions, and the center is represented by the soprano.
The ensemble includes Madalyn and Cicely Parnas, both soloists and members of the Parnas duo that has received accolades of “stunning” and “electrifying” in the New York Times. Madalyn will play a solo piece by Timothy Dunne earlier in the evening on of Saturday February 4th. Cicely was the inaugural artist-in-residence of the radio program Performance Today last December. Violinist Tim Kantor has been a featured artist with the Banff and Aspen festivals as well as with the Cleveland Pops; and violistRose Wollman has performed all over the word with conductors such as Pierre Boulez, Fabio Luisi, Hugh Wolf, Joseph Silverstein, and Larry Ratcliff in orchestras all over the world. A fierce new music performer, soprano Sharon Harms will return later to New York for the performance of Charles Wuorinen’s It Happens Like This, which she premiered under the baton of the composer at Tanglewood last summer.
“Loving Schumann … is in a way to assume the philosophy of Nostalgia … to risk the most Schumannian word there is: Evening. Loving Schumann … inevitably leads the subject who does so and says so to posit himself … according to the injunctions of his desire and not those of his society.”
Nicola's passionate performance of Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1 was dramatic and powerful
Too often we associate "Oscar" performances outside the film industry as overwrought, melodramatic or just plain cheesy. There was none of that with Nicola Benedetti's performance of Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1 with the Pacific Symphony last night. From the opening low G spoken with an intense focus, it was obvious Nicola has something to say, and does so eloquently with the violin.
During the first big orchestral interlude, Nicola immersed herself in the music. She physically responded to the jibes and exclamations of the orchestra. This was not a performance about turning on the talent when it's her time to play; this was all about expressing herself through the music. When she takes up the violin, it is with complete commitment, playing her part as an extension of the orchestral cast. Every part of her is involved in the performance. As the phrases rise, it's as if she's trying to get the music to physically climb out of the violin, as if some how she could will it to take flight - and it does! Her long hair occasionally whips about driving the music on. Even her violin seems to just an extension of self, not a separate instrument at all. Regardless of the impending threats of the orchestra, Nicola is determined to overcome them. She is the heroine after all.
However, she isn't overly dramatic. There were no overt gestures to accentuate the music, just expression borne out of the music. Nicola gave a nuanced performance. During the Adagio I felt as if we were in a close up scene, where the camera zooms in to capture just the face. This is the important part of the story where we learn about her dreams, her ambitions and we wonder if she'll make it in the end. There isn't room to be overly expressive, or the story become trite. To capture the emotion of the scene, it's all in the subtle inflections of the voice, the tiny shifts in eyes or the smile. We believe what she's telling us; we're on her side! Nicola captured the emotion of the beautiful 2nd movement with her violin, expressing her zeal for the music and proving herself worthy as the heroine.
Come the third movement, Nicola is having such a good time every face in the house was smiling with her. It's as if she'd had the best day and was telling us all the details. Maybe this is a romantic comedy and she'd just met the man of her dreams, or a rags to riches story where she's just landed her dream job. Regardless of the narrative, we've reach the point where our heroine is finally getting her due. The more Nicola "spoke" the better her day seemed to get. This was a film with a happy ending!
Nicola has commented how important it is for each musician to find their own voice. Nicola has found her voice through the violin. We get to experience a wealth of amazing stories because of it. Thank you, Nicola, for a wonderful, passionate performance.
- There are 2 more performances at the Segerstrom Concert Hall in Santa Ana, CA this week.
Friday February 3
Saturday February 4
PACIFIC SYMPHONY
CHRISTOPH KOENIG - conductor
NICOLA BENEDETTI - violin
DEBUSSY: Petite Suite
BRUCH: Violin Concerto No. 1
BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 4
Tickets available online or through the box office. There is also a live broadcast of Saturday's performance on Classical KUSC.
In advance of a recital on Feb. 21, the splendid Eric Owens takes a few questions from fans on Carnegie Hall's video channel. His goal on any given night, he says here, is to "not phone it in." So far, he is most definitely succeeding. My question: will there be a Kurtis Blow encore?
A recent Wall Street Journal article (January 13, 2012) described how Chinese artists are now outselling artists like Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol at art auctions.
According to the article, three of the ten most expensive artworks sold at auction in 2011 were by Chinese artists. In fact, last year’s priciest art work, a delicate scroll by a Chinese artist, rocketed ahead of canvases by Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol when it sold for $65 million at one auction!
The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) is pleased to offer a unique limited edition of 45 prints from renowned artist Hung Liu, whose work is in major collections both nationally and internationally. Stylistically, her work combines traces of Chinese history with a delicate modernist sensibility.
The print is available for only $1,800, and all sales of the print benefit SFCMP. For the chance to view the work yourself, the organization will hold a special reception for the Hung Liu print at the Electric Works Gallery in San Francisco on Thursday, February 9, 2012.
There’ll be wine, hors d’oeuvres, and a performance by Chinese pipa virtuoso Shenshen Zhang. Click here for more details, and RSVP at info@sfcmp.org or by calling (415) 278-9566. Be in the vanguard!
I swear, I was going to do hourly comics yesterday (like last year)—I was going to do them on the train back from New York, but the train was pretty shaky, and then the engine broke down and we were stuck in the dark for a couple hours, and by the time the lights came back on, my brain wasn't really working that well. So instead, I did what any sane person would do under the circumstances: I doodled sketches of mid-century American composers.
Time and again, Hough's traversals of familiar works are played with such insight, probity and sage musical understanding that we feel almost as if we are hearing them for the first time … Stephen Hough's steady ascent to the summit of his profession exhibits equally supreme mastery of his instrument and the deep humanity from which it has flowered'
International Record Review on Grieg/Liszt Piano Concertos, 2011 Hyperion
Antonín Dvořák never really suited the musical rat race in which he inevitably became embroiled. At the height of his career, symphonies were commissioned for London and New York. But there was no such commission for the Eighth. This was a symphony Dvořák wrote to satisfy nobody but himself, ‘a work singing of the joy of green pastures, of summer evenings, of the melancholy of blue forests, of the defiant merrymaking of the Czech peasants’. An eye-widening sense of fun characterises Czech music of a later age from Bohuslav Martinů, heard before both of Liszt’s rapturously virtuosic Piano Concertos.
FREE Pre-concert event | 6.15pm-6.45pm | Royal Festival Hall
A discussion on the symphonies of Bohuslav Martinů with Marin Alsop.
Earlier this week via a fellow music scribe's blog, I came across a very beautiful animated short about Prokofiev. Director Julia Titova's Fourth Orange is a wistfully brilliant little film now making the film festival rounds. It includes generous doses of Prokofiev's music and imaginative evocations of iconic pictures of the composer.
Utterly entranced by the visuals, I sought help from my Russian-speaking friends — and Inna Barmash, the excellent singer who fronts the band Romashka, generously volunteered to translate while I transcribed. Read on for the translation. The ellipses indicate pauses in the voiceover, not omissions — and any mistakes are entirely mine.
"creditwrap">YouTube
Title: TALES OF AN OLD PIANO
PROKOFIEV: I died the same day as Stalin. Only my relatives and friends attended my funeral.
Title: FOURTH ORANGE — SERGEY PROKOFIEV
I was born in the village of Sontsovka on April 23, 1891. Alexander III was the tsar. Lenin was 21, and Stalin was 11.
When my mother played the 'Moonlight' Sonata, I would ask her to leave the top range for me and I would hammer out little exercises. ...
In the spring, it would rain, and then it would pour, the river would overflow, and the bridge would crumble. ...
When I was five and a half, I figured out a tune and played it a few times, and I learned how to write it down – and the process of writing it down really made an impression on me. ...
When I was eight, my parents took me to Moscow to hear Faust ...
"Mama, I'd like to write my own opera." ...
My teacher, composer and pianist Reinhold Glière, came to the village when I was 11 and he was 28. In the evenings, I would play piano, Glière would play violin, and we would play together. And when I was 13, I was led to audition for the conservatory in St. Petersburg . ...
"Mr. Prokofiev, come in." ...
We see composers Anatoly Lyadov, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov looming overhead. Rimsky-Korsakov asks, "Are these all your compositions? Sit down and play them." ...
"Mr. Prokofiev, you're admitted." ...
Lyadov asks, "Why are you studying with me? You should go to Paris and study with Claude Debussy."
Rimsky-Korsakov asks, "Why are you listening to Sibelius?" ...
My mood that morning was murky. I was asking myself, 'Why am I here. How did I get here?' I was afraid of a bad outcome in the Anton Rubinstein piano competition." ...
Glazunov says, "The contest winner is Prokofiev."
"The prize is a Schroeder piano." ...
The news of the October Revolution is confusing. Everywhere, there's talk of the Bolshevik uprising. ...
I would like to get some kind of document so I can work and live anywhere I want.
He goes to the bureaucrat's office and says, "I'd like a breath of fresh air."
The bureaucrat replies "We have lots of fresh air here. You are a revolutionary in music, we are revolutionaries in other things. We should work together. But I'll give you the permission you want."...
In New York, I had huge success: six encores. I read about three oranges – pretty awesome. I could do something with that! ...
Nevertheless, I was drawn back to Russia. So I didn't even say goodbye to anyone in New York. I left; I was no longer interested in America. ...
I wasn't used to arriving in Paris from the west. ...
We see him with impresario Sergey Diaghilev, who says, "I'd like to commission a ballet from you."
"Why should I write on a theme that you propose? I don't want to write in a style that you approve."
Diaghilev responds, "Fine, so write in a style that you want."
I couldn't believe my ears. Diaghilev had commissioned me to write a ballet on a Soviet theme. ...
Prokofiev listens to a singing accordionist. "Why the hell am I here and not in Russia? In Russia, it's much more interesting for me." ...
I chose a particularly luxurious train so that no one would feel sorry for the one going back to a Bolshevik country. ...
I had thoughts of turning back. After all, this was an important life decision. As it turned out, in my absence I'd become quite famous. ...
Eisenstein's mastery inspired the creation of music that you could see. ...
One more page, and my symphony will be over.
I died on the same day as Stalin, and only my relatives and friends attended my funeral.
!-- END CLASS="STORY" -->
D CLASS="POSTCONTENT" -->
Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
'The trouble is not that we want entertainment, but that we don't. If audiences truly insisted on nothing but entertainment, the world's theatres would: (a) be completely emptied, once and for all; (b) start delivering much more serious work.'
That observation from theatre and film director Peter Brook is relevant to the RAJAR audience data for UK classical radio stations released today. In the last quarter of 2011 BBC Radio 3's audience decreased by 5.4% against the previous year and continued the downward trend for the station. Everyone, with the exception of the BBC Trust, knows that Radio 3 is broken; so there is no point in going down that path yet again. But it is worth looking at the trend for the total audience for classical radio.
There is now virtually no difference between BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM - they both put entertainment before art, employ the same presenters and sound the same. If the audiences for the two stations are added together we find that the UK audience for classical radio declined year on year by almost half a million, a drop of 6.0%. Which means one of two things: either classical music is declining in popularity or the version of classical music served up by Radio 3/Classic FM is not what listeners want.
Views will differ as to which explanation is correct, but I opt for the latter for two reasons. First there is anecdotal evidence that audiences are flocking to 'difficult' contemporary classical music. Secondly there is factual evidence that audiences want more than entertainment: the same RAJAR data shows that news, speech and drama channel BBC Radio 4, the least dumbed-down UK station, added half a million listeners. Which means the Radio 4 audience grew by 4.8% in the same period that Radio 3/Classic FM's dropped by 6.0% - in fact Radio 4 gained almost exactly the same numbers of listeners as Radio 3/Classic FM lost.
Fortunately it appears that BBC director general Mark Thompson, on whose watch one of the biggest cultural genocides of recent years has taken place, is on the way out. Let's hope his successor reads Peter Brook's The Shifting Point from which my opening quote is taken. Header graphic is Salvador Dali's Queen Salome (1937) and Dali designed Brook's 1949 Covent Garden Salome. A little later Dalí created an opera titled Être Dieu with a score by the avant-garde French composer Igor Wakhévitch. Read about that forgotten opera here.
Also on Facebook and Twitter. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
Earlier this week via a fellow music scribe's blog, I came across a very beautiful animated short about Prokofiev. Director Julia Titova's Fourth Orange is a wistfully brilliant little film now making the film festival rounds. It includes generous doses of Prokofiev's music and imaginative evocations of iconic pictures of the composer.
Utterly entranced by the visuals, I sought help from my Russian-speaking friends — and Inna Barmash, the excellent singer who fronts the band Romashka, generously volunteered to translate while I transcribed. Read on for the translation. The ellipses indicate pauses in the voiceover, not omissions — and any mistakes are entirely mine.
"creditwrap">YouTube
Title: TALES OF AN OLD PIANO
PROKOFIEV: I died the same day as Stalin. Only my relatives and friends attended my funeral.
Title: FOURTH ORANGE — SERGEY PROKOFIEV
I was born in the village of Sontsovka on April 23, 1891. Alexander III was the tsar. Lenin was 21, and Stalin was 11.
When my mother played the 'Moonlight' Sonata, I would ask her to leave the top range for me and I would hammer out little exercises. ...
In the spring, it would rain, and then it would pour, the river would overflow, and the bridge would crumble. ...
When I was five and a half, I figured out a tune and played it a few times, and I learned how to write it down – and the process of writing it down really made an impression on me. ...
When I was eight, my parents took me to Moscow to hear Faust ...
"Mama, I'd like to write my own opera." ...
My teacher, composer and pianist Reinhold Glière, came to the village when I was 11 and he was 28. In the evenings, I would play piano, Glière would play violin, and we would play together. And when I was 13, I was led to audition for the conservatory in St. Petersburg . ...
"Mr. Prokofiev, come in." ...
We see composers Anatoly Lyadov, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov looming overhead. Rimsky-Korsakov asks, "Are these all your compositions? Sit down and play them." ...
"Mr. Prokofiev, you're admitted." ...
Lyadov asks, "Why are you studying with me? You should go to Paris and study with Claude Debussy."
Rimsky-Korsakov asks, "Why are you listening to Sibelius?" ...
My mood that morning was murky. I was asking myself, 'Why am I here. How did I get here?' I was afraid of a bad outcome in the Anton Rubinstein piano competition." ...
Glazunov says, "The contest winner is Prokofiev."
"The prize is a Schroeder piano." ...
The news of the October Revolution is confusing. Everywhere, there's talk of the Bolshevik uprising. ...
I would like to get some kind of document so I can work and live anywhere I want.
He goes to the bureaucrat's office and says, "I'd like a breath of fresh air."
The bureaucrat replies "We have lots of fresh air here. You are a revolutionary in music, we are revolutionaries in other things. We should work together. But I'll give you the permission you want."...
In New York, I had huge success: six encores. I read about three oranges – pretty awesome. I could do something with that! ...
Nevertheless, I was drawn back to Russia. So I didn't even say goodbye to anyone in New York. I left; I was no longer interested in America. ...
I wasn't used to arriving in Paris from the west. ...
We see him with impresario Sergey Diaghilev, who says, "I'd like to commission a ballet from you."
"Why should I write on a theme that you propose? I don't want to write in a style that you approve."
Diaghilev responds, "Fine, so write in a style that you want."
I couldn't believe my ears. Diaghilev had commissioned me to write a ballet on a Soviet theme. ...
Prokofiev listens to a singing accordionist. "Why the hell am I here and not in Russia? In Russia, it's much more interesting for me." ...
I chose a particularly luxurious train so that no one would feel sorry for the one going back to a Bolshevik country. ...
I had thoughts of turning back. After all, this was an important life decision. As it turned out, in my absence I'd become quite famous. ...
Eisenstein's mastery inspired the creation of music that you could see. ...
One more page, and my symphony will be over.
I died on the same day as Stalin, and only my relatives and friends attended my funeral.
!-- END CLASS="STORY" -->
D CLASS="POSTCONTENT" -->
Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
Photo by Nina Mouritzen; courtesy Julie Covello/Shakey.
In an explosion of color, buttons, keys, velcro, and fur, and coupled with a cyborg-chic eyepiece, the VoltAxe is controllerism gone Mad Max, a post-acocalyptic keytar bred from salvaged parts. And if you want to make a unique construction of your own, creator Julie Covello – aka New York’s DJ Shakey – is willing to tell all her secrets, as well as why this was important to her music.
In modeling (the basement hobby variety, not the skinny fashionista one), “kitbashing” is the act of combining bits of multiple kits to produce one finished whole. Some custom new controllers are following a similar route, taking the best bits of, say, a keyboard and a Novation Launchpad, and going a bit nuts. Julie’s work deserves special mention not only because it takes that technique to an extreme, but it couples it with a heads-up, hands-free video display to keep feedback from the computer visible without being a distraction.
To me, exploring Controllerism means trying to make my performance easier, more creative, and more dynamic. I did quite a bit of general research during this project, but with the performance controller, I focused on making a system that allowed me to walk around, not look at the controller, not look at my laptop (remove the barrier between
me and the audience and / or my bandmates), and have maximum flexibility and spontaneity with the sounds I was manipulating.
I had about 5 weeks to work, and I wanted a finished product that I could perform with, so I followed up on simpler solutions and left the hardcore hacking and studying for another time. I was also planning a huge finale party with 23 music and projection artists performing in multiple rooms, so that was on my plate as well.
Here’s a description of the final controller system…
I use Ableton Live — the way I perform, I want to see the laptop screen so I can pick clips at random to suit my mood. I don’t want to memorize my set and I don’t want to stare at my laptop screen either, so the solution was creating an eyepiece that shows my laptop screen within it. To build this I got help from VJ DoctorMojo aka Mark Alan
Johnson of Mojo Video Tech, Inc.. We experimented with a number of hacks, repurposing components extracted from the viewfinders of old camcorders. These experiments yeilded a number of functional miniature low-voltage displays, however these units were all black-and-white and a color image was what I needed. Very long story short, the final solution was to buy a pair of Vuzix
personal video glasses (US$250), flip them upside down and attach ONE screen to a regular pair of glasses so that only one of my eyes is looking at the screen and the other eye is looking out into the world. What I see with both eyes open is my laptop screen floating in the air on top of what I normally see. It’s amazing how easy this is to use!
Photo by Mojo; courtesy Julie Covello/Shakey.
There was more to do to make this work:
1. I had to run the output of my computer to a scan converter ($100) about the size of a cigarette pack and then run a wire to the little box that manages the glasses, adapters and cables were required.
2. I had to power the glasses, so that meant making the power cable about 10 feet longer so it could be plugged in while I walked around.
3. The image in the glasses was upside-down, since the unit was mounted upside-down (to avoid my nose!), so I rotated it 180 degrees via my Mac OS preferences.
4. The cursor size was too small, so I enlarged it with the Mac’s “Universal Access” preferences.
5. The image of my laptop screen was pretty low resolution, so low that I couldnt read any of the clip names, I referred to the Universal Access preferences to determine key commands for zoom in and zoom out and then programmed
my mouse keys to do the shortcut keys for these functions. Zoom out and I can see levels and stuff; zoom in and I can read type. I also fooled around with the screen resolution so it would be as clear as possible.
Speaking of the mouse, I did more research on the mouse than anything else! I wanted to attach it to my controller, which I was planning on hanging over my shoulders like a keytar. It had to have basic mouse functions AND I wanted buttons that could be programmed to do a series of keystrokes with one touch. There were some pretty cool mice on websites for the handicapped, but they were either absurdly expensive or they didn’t have all the functionality I wanted. I ended up using the one I had on my desk, the Kensington Expert Pro Turbo Trackball. I’ve had several over the years and I love them. They don’t make them any more, so they are hard to get and costly. (US$150 – 300) Also, the trackball is not secured in the socket. I basically just duct-taped this to my controller backing, and secured the trackball (with help from Mojo) with a piece of silver solder and a rubber band so it could move freely but securely. The mouse comes with programming software and I programmed the buttons to do — whatever I wanted!
The controller backing is 3/4 foam board ($5). I need this thing to be light! It is solid and doesn’t flex at all. I attached a number of controllers to this backing, a Novation Launchpad (triggering clips, punching clips in and out), Korg nanoPAD 2 (fx, samples), Korg nanoKONTROL 2 (mixing, fx), and two Vmeters (fx). I also messed around with a Keith McMillen Softstep foot controller which I like a lot and am still incorporating into the set-up. All of these run into a “Plugable” -brand 10-input powered USB hub on the back of the unit. I had to add a 12-foot usb extension to reach my laptop, as well as extending the power brick cable. All these long cables were bound into a single cable sleeve running to the laptop and power strip.
A controllerist on the roof … sounds crazy, no? Trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking her neck looking at her laptop. It isn’t easy. You might ask, why do we stay up there? Are we checking our email? That I can answer in a single word: improvisation! Photo by Nina Mouritzen; courtesy Julie Covello/Shakey.
In an effort to use the controllers without looking at them, I added textures to many of the keys so I could find them by touch (velcro, rubber, fur). I covered up the keys that I had no plan to use so I wouldn’t hit them by accident. I divided the Launchpad up into 4×4 quandrants with miniature wire and ductape ridges. I’m still adapting to this set-up.
After the whole thing was put together, I hung it from a strap I grabbed off a gear case I had in the room. It took some trial and error to determine where to place the ends of the straps on the controller so that it would hang properly and my hands reached all the controls comfortably. I spent some time with the prototype attaching and re-attaching items until everything was in the right place before cutting out the foam board into the final shape. At this time, everything is attached with checkered duct tape from Home Depot; soon I will upgrade this to velcro (but keep the checkers as
decoration!).
The VoltAxe was ready to test play at midnight the day before the huge event where I was going to perform! Thanks to
Moldover and Mojo, who were with me doing ongoing troubleshooting, configuring went quickly and I was able to rehearse for a few hours and pull it together just in time! At the show, everything went as planned and I couldn’t have been happier – it was
so much fun! I can’t wait to evolve this set-up! My next move is to make it mobile and take it to the subway station to do some busking.
After publishing Why You Should Give Your Music Away for Free here on Music Think Tank, I have been inundated with articles, comments, and other assorted replies decrying that the new digital music business models are killing the music industry. It got me thinking about a crucial distinction that is being overlooked, and the consequences of doing so are preventing many from seeing the opportunities that are abound. It boils down to one main concept.
The Music Industry is different than the Recording Industry, and these terms should not be used interchangeably.
Allow me to explain.
The Music Industry is a huge, overarching behemoth that includes all kinds of different smaller industries. For example:
Recording
Licensing
Touring & Live
Merchandise
Print & Web Design
Publishing
Marketing, Advertising & Public Relations
Video Production
Magazines & Newspapers
Instrument Design & Manufacturing
Music Hardware & Software
These are just the ones off the top of my head…I could go on if I kept thinking about it. The bottom line is that any business that is involved in music in any way can be considered part of the music industry. If you are a graphic designer who spends their time designing album art, or a bus driver who drives tour busses all over the country, then you are in the music industry.
The Record Industry is just one small subset of this larger “music industry.” Within the business world, it’s known as a vertical. The record industry is in the business of making money off the recordings of music. That is why the companies who participate are called “Record Labels.” They sell records, i.e. recordings. You may have heard of the RIAA, a political lobby whose mission it is to protect the major record labels. Notice that its called the RIAA – the Recording Industry Association of America. They are not called the Music Industry Association of America. That’s because they represent only a small subset of the industry as a whole.
It is critical to make the distinction between these two terms. Mind you, I am by no means the first person to bring this to light. But too many people are crying about the death of the music industry lately, and I wanted to remind everyone that the sky is not falling. The Music Industry as a whole is fine. There is a new wave of innovative business models that take into account the new economic realities of the industry. It is the Recording Industry that is in trouble, and without some serious innovation by the interested parties, it’s likely to get worse for them.
Jeremy Belcher is the Editor of Think Like a Label, a magazine for musicians & their people. Prior to that, he co-founded FoxyMelody Digital Distribution in 2005, one of the first companies that distributed independent music to the online music services (which we shut down this year). You can follow him on Twitter @thinklikealabel or visit Think Like a Label
Also on Facebook and Twitter. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
When Armando Bayolo asked me to perform on his New Music Series at the Atlas Theater in Washington D.C., I immediately thought: what am I going to play at the NATION’S CAPITAL? …the place that’s home to the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center Honors, and the place from which we all imagine sending time capsules to other planets.
Something I’m proud of is having commissioned more than a few stellar pieces that could take their places in the 21st Century piano repertory. Particularly, I would cite the multimedia works, with sound tracks and, sometimes, video. Not only are they great virtuosic vehicles with all those challenges and rewards, but they have soundtracks that are original, evocative, and infectious. Send them to the moon!!
Also, I saw this as a time to REPRESENT: it’s an America that is about quilting as well as about Steve Reich’s “Different Trains”, about Quaker revival meetings as well as the Metropolitan Opera. I wanted things that reflected the American musical language in some way, and I also wanted to reflect the American sense of humor.
Here’s the program:
“Isabelle Eberhardt Dreams of Pianos” by Missy Mazzoli
“The Same Sky” by Carolyn Yarnell
“On Track” by Anna Clyne
“What Remains of a Rembrandt” by Randall Woolf
“Digits” by Neil Rolnick
You can’t find a better example of the American vernacular crafted into art music than Missy’s piece; Carolyn’s piece is quite simply one of the best piano works of the last 20 years. Anna Clyne may have been born in London, but here she demonstrates a truly American sense of humor and appropriation of found sounds; Neil’s piece exhibits all of the above with an American aesthetic that perhaps finds it roots in Scott Joplin and other early ragtime artists.
These are not the only pieces that I love and am proud to program, but they certainly represent a kind of hit parade for me. But I also wanted something new. What fun is performing without that? Here’s where Randall Woolf’s piece came in. Full disclosure: he’s my husband. He hadn’t written a piece for me in a decade, but did so this fall. It was premiered two weeks ago in Florida (a commission by New Music New College), and I wanted to add it to the mix. The piece is part of a large project on which I’m embarking called Digital Debussy, in which composers create works that either subject Debussy fragments to modern electronic processes or, in some way, realize a 21st century Debussy. Randy is one of those maverick Americans, who is always pushing his and the world’s envelope a little. I knew he wouldn’t disappoint on this.
I can’t wait to see what the audience in Washington D.C. will be like. I’m pretty sure they won’t be bored. Now, to figure out what I’ll wear and what I’ll say…….
The lesson I’ve learned through all this is that there are two truths that we must face.
Truth #1: it’s possible to do everything right and still get injured. Playing an instrument is athletic, and spending many hours a day doing it is tough on muscles, tendons, and ligaments.
Truth #2: what I do with my body when I’m not practicing is almost more important than what I do while practicing.
After all, I really only practice for a couple hours a day. I spend a lot more time slumped in front of the computer. Even so, I treat my body as an athlete would. The better shape my entire body is in, the better able I am to deal with the demands of playing the violin. This is working so far. Strength training keeps my shoulder girdle and back strong so things stay in the right place whether I’m playing violin or checking my email. And when something hurts, I treat it and stop using it if need be.
my pain treatment arsenal
Have I stopped searching for the Holy Grail? Of course not. Even though I’m not in pain now, I just started seeing a chiropractor three times a week. I’ve ditched my shoulder rest and am currently trying out an arsenal of chinrests loaned to me by the violin setup guru Andrew McCann, who uses a custom chinrest built for him.
Andrew's monolithic chinrest
I might get one built for myself. But I’m no longer under any illusions that a certain chinrest or shoulder rest is the key to never getting injured. While I can make playing the violin more comfortable to a point, I accept that it is inherently an awkward endeavor – the only magic fix is to quit.
The track was made available for free download by Yeti, the magazine in whose latest issue it appears as part of an enclosed 7″ (along with three other songs, apparently not available for free promotional download).
Found via xlr8r.com and thefader.com. More on Grouper at her site. The original can be heard on youtube.com. It is redolent with a particular quality of guitar playing, one that is at once lackadaisical and jarring, and is distinct to a certain realm of non-hardcore punk
Hilary Hahn is at it again, working her way through chats with all of the composers commissioned for her “In 27 Pieces” collection of encores. This time up it’s a bright, young up-and-comer by the name of Jennifer Higdon (OK, maybe not quite so young, and maybe she’s pretty much arrived, but she’s still pretty darn bright!)
Tickets: Tickets are on sale now at www.coloradosymphony.org, the Colorado Symphony Box Office: (303) 623-7876 or (877) 292-7979 or in-person in the lobby of Boettcher Concert Hall in the Denver Performing Arts Complex. Hours are Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m.
(Talk Like An Opera Geek attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.)
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Know your rallentando from your accelerando? Opera singers must follow the composer's musical road signs.
cs like speed limits to STOP, YIELD and KEEP RIGHT, traffic signs tell us how to navigate the road ahead. The same is true for opera singers. Their roadmap is the composer's score, and in it lie plenty of explicit directions (usually in Italian) on how to drive a voice or any other instrument through any given stretch of music.
This week, buckle up for a brief tour past a few of the dozens and dozens of musical road signs, with examples from some of opera's greatest chauffeurs.
Have a bit of operatic jargon that confuses or delights? Let us know in the comments section.
Song: Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), opera, K. 492 Act 1. Se vuol ballare
Think of staccato as a bumpy road, but with each bump clearly delineated. Staccato comes from the Italian "detached," meaning that notes should be articulated cleanly and completely separate from one another. In Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, the cavatina "Se vuol ballare" finds Figaro alone and feisty, talking trash about his boss. Figaro sings: "If, my dear Count, you feel like dancing, it is I who will call the tune." Notice how each note is shaped by baritoneThomas Hampson.
Song: Carmen, opera Act 1. Près des remparts de Séville
The opposite of staccato is legato — a very smooth road indeed. The word refers to being "bound" in Italian. The singer's job here is to connect each note seamlessly, phrasing the music in a flowing, apparently effortless style. Breath control is key, in that it should sound as if the singer never takes a breath. The sinuous opening notes of the "Seguidilla" from Bizet's Carmen need to pour forth easily, as mezzo-soprano Jennifer Larmore displays in this example.
Song: Boris Godunov, opera Act 2. Mon fils, mon cher enfant!
There are times when you need to step on the gas, as it were — that would be an accelerando. It comes from the Italian, "quickening." The direction here is to pick up the speed, often over several bars of music. In this example, baritone Ruggiero Raimondi, as the title character in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, sings about the "splendor of unlimited power" in one relaxed tempo, then makes an accelerando as he begins to fret about "secret underhanded plotting." The speed gradually quickens like a racing heartbeat.
Song: Otello, opera Act 4. Piangea cantando nell'erma landa
Rallentando is the opposite of accelerando. It means applying the breaks, with the word in Italian referring to gradually slowing down. Back in the 18th century they often used the term lentando, and even today there are a number of directions that mean roughly the same thing, the closest being ritardando, and also ritenuto, which generally implies a more sudden slowdown. Near the end of Verdi's Otello, Desdemona (sopranoRenata Tebaldi in this excerpt) sings her haunting "Willow Song." Note the slight crescendo (see below) on the word "amarlo" in the opening phrase, and then a smooth slowdown on the words "e per morir" (and to die) — a portent of what awaits her in the opera's final scene.
Song: Manon Lescaut, opera Act 4. Sola, perduta, abbandonata
Crescendo comes from the Italian crescere (to grow), and in this case we're talking about growing louder. Decrescendo (or diminuendo) is the opposite. There are various ways to turn up the volume: crescendo il forte means simply get louder, while crescendo sin'al forte requires an increase to the dynamic level marked "forte." The precision and sculpting of the crescendo is also an important factor. At the end of Puccini's Manon Lescaut, the heroine, played here by soprano Angela Gheorghiu, is suffering and near death (of course,it's Puccini!). After she sings "Io la deserta donna (I'm a deserted woman), the crescendo comes on the phrase "Ah, non voglio morir" (I do not want to die), and the volume increases with each note up to a B-flat. Afterward, a decrescendo on the second "morir."
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Investing in Creativity: A Study of the Support Structures for U.S. Artists (2003), an Urban Institute publication authored by Maria-Rosario Jackson, Florence Kabwasa-Green, Daniel Swenson, Joaquin Herranz, Jr., Kadija Ferryman, Caron Atlas, Eric Wallner, and Carole Rosenstein,sheds light on the economic and employment situation of individual artists in the United States following the cessation of NEA funding to individual artists in 1995. The report reflected several years of research, which included interviews with artists with arts leaders in nine cities, a national poll on attitudes towards artists, and expansion and analysis of a new NYFA Source database, in partnership with the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).
Investing distinguishes itself by “providing a new and comprehensive framework for analysis and action, which views the support structure for artists in the United States as a system made up of six key dimensions of the environment in which an artist works:”
Validation: The ascription of value to what artists do.
Demand/markets: Society’s appetite for artists and what they do, and the markets that translate this appetite into financial compensation.
Material supports: Access to the financial and physical resources artists need for their work: employment, insurance and similar benefits, awards, space, equipment, and materials.
Training and professional development: Conventional and lifelong learning opportunities.
Communities and networks: Inward connections to other artists and people in the cultural sector; outward connections to people not primarily in the cultural sector.
Information: Data sources about artists and for artists.
This is a helpful framework for further research on artists’ conditions in any given region, and also marked a new understanding that it is not be enough to simply restore cuts to funding for artists.
Some especially salient findings and recommendations in the report are as follows:
Individual artists are undervalued by society, in comparison to art itself. Artists’ societal contributions are not well understood, documented, or publicized—but if they were, it might be easier to make the case for allocating resources to individual artists.
Individual artists feel overshadowed and neglected by large urban institutions, and are frequently left out of arts-based urban planning initiatives.
There is a perceived inequality of opportunities for artists (such as exhibitions or awards programs) based on factors such as race/ethnicity, and art form.
An artist’s career spans multiple markets and disciplines: this is especially important when assessing artists’ needs.
Many artists face the economic uncertainties of irregular employment, lack of health insurance, and lack of affordable work or living space.
Training in the practical side of working in the arts, and in specialized or hybrid fields like arts education/community work, is limited. Training should be expanded and diversified.
Grants and awards need to be more accessible, equitable, and relevant for artists. An “information clearinghouse” with data on resources, and the capacity to support further research, would be helpful.
Various arts organizations, arts councils, and artist networks are meeting some of these artists’ needs described above, but these organizations need strengthening.
It is also important to cultivate stronger networks of people from both arts and non-arts fields advocating for artists’ needs.
Investing was commissioned by the Ford Foundation and supported by consortium of 37 other funders, some of whom were committed to acting upon the findings of the research. Therefore, the study is notable for having led directly to the development of several concrete initiatives to increase support for artists:
A new NYFA Sourceonline database allowing artists and other users to access customized, up-to-the-minute information on awards in all arts disciplines 24 hours a day
Investing is also cited in the development of the United States Artists (USA) grant making program, which gives unrestricted $50,000 grants to artists in all disciplines.
Investing in Creativity did raise several critical questions for me: first of all, whether it is problematic to build a case for increased support for individual artists so heavily on the idea that artists benefit society, when there was little research to back up this claim. I also believe that Investing pinpoints many challenges in the employment system for artists, yet never suggests that an entirely new system is needed. Instead, the implication is that conditions for artists can be improved through better information-gathering, networking, and training.
Whether or not the fundamental situation for artists has changed significantly since this report’s publication, Investing at leastpaves the way for more dramatic changes by suggesting ways in which the existing nonprofit sector can be better equipped to meet artists’ needs.
Tarik’s work resurfaced after a presentation in the UK. Reader janklug writes:
I’m just back from the M4_u Max/MSP/Jitter conference in Leicester (was great, btw), where Tarik Barri presented his project ‘Versum’, both as an installation and as a performance.
The user (and in case of the performance, Tarik) navigates through this incredible 3D-space-sequencer-universum with the help of a SpaceNavigator; glowing objects floating in this space produce sound, and as you approach them, they even give this nice doppler effect…
It was totally amazing to be able to float between pulsing rhythm-planet-objects and shiny drone-beams; navigation was easy and natural. Tarik uses a combination of Processing and Max/MSP; don’t know which one the SpaceNavigator is connected to.
Having tried this, I immediately ordered one; I think it also could be a great interface for M4L…
Significantly, it’s really the act of flying that controls the music. That remains interactive, but it’s the movement through the three-dimensional space that determines what you hear. As the artist explains:
This virtual world is seen and heard from the viewpoint of a moving virtual camera with virtual microphones attached. This camera, controlled in realtime by means of a joystick (or any other kind of controller) moves through space, similar to how first person shooter games work. Within this space, I place objects that can be both seen and heard, and like in reality, the closer the camera is to them, the louder you hear them. So when the camera moves past several visual objects, you simultaneously hear several sounds fading in and out. Consequently, the way the camera travels past them actually causes melodies and compositional structures to be seen and heard.
The visual position of each object coincides with the panning of its sound: objects to the right of the camera will also be heard on the right, and those behind the camera will be heard from behind in case a surround speaker setup is used. This principle also applies to the Z-axis, meaning that sounds can be heard coming from above and below if the speaker setup supports it.
That’s the essential question, to me, when looking at 3D environments for music. What about the dimensionality will interact with the music? Is it something spatial, or will there be other sorts of interactions? (New Zealander-turned-Berliner Julian Oliver worked extensively with game engines, for instance. One solution for him was modifying the “gun” in those games to be an implement for doing things in the space, turning swords into plowshares after a fact by making the gun produce music rather than kill virtual entities.)
So, now you’ve seen some of the technical demonstration. But Tarik uses his work as an environment in which to make audiovisual performances. Here’s what some actual live playing looks like, in a beautiful, meditative piece called “Eleven”:
In fact, the biggest challenge to me of a piece this awesome is that you want an immersive environment, not just the small, rectangular screens that are often all festivals and venues can afford.
Most notably for new music fans, the concert features the world premiere of Harold Meltzer’sKreisleriana, for violin and piano, commissioned by the Library of Congress’ McKim fund. The concert also features Meltzer’s Pulitzer-Prize finalist work Brion, commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for the Cygnus Ensemble.
The concert begins at 8:00 p.m. at the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium. There will be a pre-concert discussion by Mr. Meltzer and Cygnus founder William Anderson at 6:15 p.m. at the Library’s Whitall Pavillion. No tickets are required for the pre-concert talk. Tickets to the main concert are free but require reservations and may be obtained by contacting Ticketmaster online or at 202.397.7328.
Last night I was afforded opportunity to watch a rehearsal of Nicola Benedetti and Christoph Koenig with the Pacific Symphony
I've see the Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1 performed lived a half dozen times. Nicola has performed it at least ten times that amount, recorded in and put in countless hours prior to that learning the piece. What all that time and effort has done is to internalize the music, to the point there is very little thought as to what's the next note. Watching Nicola go through the various passages, starting and stopping, repeating sections and moving on drove home how very familiar she is with the music.
Nicola had a music stand with the music, but this was only as a reference point so when Maestro Koenig asked for the orchestra to start 8 bars before rehearsal letter "A" she could find that point in the music. After a quick glance to determine what phrase she would start with, the rest of that portion of the rehearsal as introspective, Nicola connecting with her instrument and the music. It was obvious from watching her, she didn't need to focus on the printed music, so she was free to put more of herself into the "performance."
I liken Nicola's rehearsal with walking down a dirt path. Unless you two or three years of age, you don't really spend any time thinking about where you're placing your feet. Even if you're walking down a path you've never been before (rehearsing with an orchestra and possibly a conductor you've never played with before), you aren't think, place my foot here, move the next food forward, balance, step there! The process of walking is more internal than that. You are somewhat conscious of the vagaries in the path, so you don't just plod along willy-nilly. But the actual thinking of each and every step isn't something that occupies your brain. Your brain is free to take a look at the surroundings, enjoy the journey.
Nicola has achieved that same internal aspect with her performance of the Bruch. The importance of this kind of internalization is that it allows Nicola to focus on the orchestra --what are they doing, and the music she's playing --where should it go emotionally. This means every performance is slightly different, allowing the "path" of the music to wander where it will (even if you walk down the same path every day, your feet won't land in the same place every time). The technical aspects of the music are still virtuoso, and I don't want to say Nicola has become so complacent with the music, she's just going through the motions. It was obvious last night how very passionate she was even when starting with a phrase half way into it, or going over a section for the third or fourth time. Even in the rehearsal Nicola was putting more of herself into the music that just walking the path. She was truly enjoying the journey.
Maestro Christoph Koenig was in a much different position. I have no way of knowing how many times he has conducted this piece, or even if he's ever conducted with Nicola Benedetti. Still, his role as Maestro is to lead a rather large group down a path following Nicola's lead. He has to path attention to the path and all the little vagaries so to point them out during rehearsal to the various musicians. Second Violins, "that was the right intensity, now ten times softer." And when they went over that section again, the scenery of the music blossomed into a beautiful landscape. Like Nicola, Christoph needs to be familiar with the piece to the point he isn't having to worry about time changes and or tempo markings. He knows they're there; rather he is focused on the trouble spots in the path where he needs to guide the musicians through, adding emotional emphasis to the notes on the page.
These very different approaches to rehearsing the same piece of music helps me understand how important it is for a composer to detail each and every aspect into the music. The more detail we can provide allows the perform more information they can internalize. This way, during the performance they can add their own emotional response to the scenery I've provided allowing for a complete experience.
I am looking forward to Thursday and walking the path of the Bruch Violin Concerto with them!
The most popular searches (searches that didn’t yield null results) were: harold budd live, junto, autechre, best of 2010, In the Echo of No Towers, souns, mark harris, saito koji, Kahlen, weir, would-be messiahs, airport, brian eno, Carrie Underwood, compilations.
Investing in Creativity: A Study of the Support Structures for U.S. Artists(2003), an Urban Institute publication authored by Maria-Rosario Jackson, Florence Kabwasa-Green, Daniel Swenson, Joaquin Herranz, Jr., Kadija Ferryman, Caron Atlas, Eric Wallner, and Carole Rosenstein,sheds light on the economic and employment situation of individual artists in the United States following the cessation of NEA funding to individual artists in 1995. While not the first study on individual artists, it distinguishes itself by “providing a new and comprehensive framework for analysis and action, which views the support structure for artists in the United States as a system made up of six key dimensions of the environment in which an artist works.” Commissioned by the Ford Foundation and supported by consortium of 37 other funders, the study is notable for having led to the development of several concrete initiatives to increase support for artists, among them a comprehensive NYFA Source database and the Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC) initiative.
SUMMARY
The report begins with the premise that artists bring value to society, but “the public often views the profession of ‘artist’ as not serious. The way artists earn a living may seem frivolous, and artists are often seen as indulging in their own passions and desires which bear no relation to the everyday experiences of most workers. This too contributes to a devaluing of the artist as a citizen with the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else.” Investing asserts that artists should receive the same consideration and benefits as any other professionals.
Background and Methodology
Investing in Creativity reflects several years of research, including:
Case studies of artists in nine cities (the primary source of data), featuring interviews with more than 450 people. The cities–Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington D.C–were selected based on their large populations of artists, as well as the interest shown in the study by funders in those cities.
A corresponding rural inquiry with two components: interviews with artists, arts administrators and funders operating in rural areas in California; and the convening of conferences of artists, arts administrators, funders and community leaders in rural areas in Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Maine, California, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina.
Expansion and analysis of an of a comprehensive database – NYFA Source – that provides national and local information on awards and services for artists, through a partnership with the New York Foundation of the Arts.
A national poll of attitudes toward artists in the United States as well as site-specific polls in case study cities. This poll addressed additional issues related to demand for what artists do and how they are valued (or not) in our society.
Advisory meetings with artists, leaders in diverse sectors of the arts, and researchers. The study authors attended various conferences and professional meetings for artists, vetted preliminary research findings at conferences, and continually investigated research in related areas.
Investing considers geographic location the primary framework in which to assess the supports available to artists –i.e., what is available in the artist’s local community. Recognizing that the cultural sector “doesn’t operate in a vacuum,” parts of the study also examine the arts in non-“arts” settings. For the purposes of the study, “artists” were defined as “adults who have received training in an artistic discipline/tradition, define themselves professionally as artists, and attempt to derive income from work in which they use their expert artistic vocational skills in visual, literary, performing, and media arts.”
Key Findings
One of the most important conclusions of Investing was that simply restoring cuts to government funding would not be enough to improve artists’ overall conditions. Instead, the research identified six core elements of an artist’s support structures:
Validation: The ascription of value to what artists do.
Demand/markets: Society’s appetite for artists and what they do, and the markets that translate this appetite into financial compensation.
Material supports: Access to the financial and physical resources artists need for their work: employment, insurance and similar benefits, awards, space, equipment, and materials.
Training and professional development: Conventional and lifelong learning opportunities.
Communities and networks: Inward connections to other artists and people in the cultural sector; outward connections to people not primarily in the cultural sector.
Information: Data sources about artists and for artists.
Investing in Creativity is broken into chapters on each of the six elements, each one describing in detail past research, current conditions, and future recommendations for each area. Rather than summarize each section individually, I will present what I see as the most salient themes in the overall findings:
Individual artists are undervalued by society, in comparison to art itself:while 96% of Americans value art in their communities and lives, only 27% value artists. This statistic is cited constantly in subsequent articles referencing this report.
Individual artists feel overshadowed and neglected by large urban institutions. Even institutions meant to serve local communities may not offer sufficient presenting or employment opportunities for local contemporary artists. Furthermore, “a general observation in all…cities was that on many fronts New York City sets the standards for critical review,” sometimes at the expense of developing a “local artistic heritage.” The authors urge the cultivation of stronger regional support systems.
Individual artists are frequently left out of arts-based urban planning initiatives(which tend to emphasize “large institutions and the traditional artist-audience relationship”): “Our review of city and cultural plans revealed that they tend to focus on the physical infrastructure of presentation venues –often to the neglect of artists’ contributions and needs.”
Artists’ societal contributions are not well understood, documented, or publicized, partly because of the inability of busy arts administrators to engage in reflective practice around this topic. Investing makes frequent mention of “the various ways in which artists contribute to society – as community leaders, organizers, activists, and catalysts for change, as well as creators of images, films, books, poems, songs, and dances” but acknowledges a lack of substantive data to back up these claims. Investing implies that if artists’ social and economic contributions were better understood and documented, it would be easier to make the case for supporting individual artists in various areas—for example, why artists need affordable workspace space as much as other low-income or “at risk” populations.
There is a perceived inequality of opportunities for artists (such as exhibitions or awards programs) based on factors such as race/ethnicity, and art form. For example, “several artists of color felt that large organizations seek them out only during designated times – such as Black History Month or Cinco de Mayo,” and folk artists and artists working in new media/technologies felt that mainstream galleries do not have structures in place for exhibiting their work. The study comments that “demographic, artistic, and career-stage diversity are not well served through mainstream awards, arts criticism, and media coverage.”
An artist’s career spans multiple markets and disciplines:“Artists do their work – sometimes simultaneously, sometimes over the course of their careers – in and across various parts of the arts and other sectors.” The report compares artists’ experiences across the nonprofit, commercial, public, and informal arts sectors. For example, the nonprofit sector is more conducive to risk-taking than the public or commercial sector. The sectors also interact; for example, artists may pursue more lucrative commercial work to support their more experimental nonprofit work. Furthermore, many artists contribute to non-arts fields like health and education, but this so-called “hybrid” work often goes unnoticed and lacks clear evaluation criteria.
Networks are extremely important in artists’ career advancement and support. Networks are, in fact, key to obtaining almost every type of resource in the six categories. While peers and “intermediaries” such as agents were most often mentioned by interview participants, partners outside the arts community are also essential arts advocates (such as anthropologists who ascribe value to immigrant artists’ work, or local sheriffs supporting artist-in-prisons programs). Partnerships with professionals in fields like real estate development or city planning can be especially valuable to artists, since artists usually lack the knowledge and skills to advocate for themselves in those arenas.
Many artists face the economic uncertainties of irregular employment. Some of the report’s findings on artists’ employment and material supports—that artists make little income from their creative work, juggle multiple part-time jobs to support themselves, and lack decent health insurance coverage in relation to the national average—are no surprise. Access to affordable work and living space is one of the major struggles. Contrary to popular belief, however, there is “little evidence that artists get a ‘thrill’ from risk-taking, or that they underestimate the extremely long odds of winning the jackpot of commercial success.” Rather, “artists feel an inner drive or calling to become and remain working artists, whatever challenges they may face.”
Grants and awards need to be more accessible, equitable, and relevant for artists. The report’s section on funding aggregates data on the different types of competitive awards offered specifically to individual artists, through a partnership with the New York Foundation of the Arts’ Visual Artists Information Hotline (which was to become NYFA Source). This section contains the most comprehensive quantitative data, as summarized in the tables below:
As seen in the above charts, this analysis identified clear discrepancies in awards available to artists; for example, “the small number of awards available to artists making work that does not neatly fit into categories based primarily on Western European standards is a problem.” Awards are also unevenly distributed according to artistic discipline and geographic region.
Many artists choose not to participate in the awards process, citing the difficulty of applying, the unlikely chance of winning, or the feeling of exclusion.
Training in the practical side of working in the arts, and in specialized or hybrid fields like arts education/community work, is limited in traditional universities. Training for artists should not be limited to artistic skills alone, but should encompass business skills and specialized skills for the “hybrid” sector. Especially notable is the fact that “unlike programs in law, medicine, and business, arts training institutions often do little job-matching and placement of their graduates.”
Various arts organizations, arts councils, and artist networks are meeting some of these artists’ needs described above, but these organizations need strengthening. In each of the six categories, the report cites some examples, in different cities, of helpful organizations and resources. However, programs that serve individual artists’ needs are vulnerable to funding cuts. Furthermore, sometimes organizations offer professional development for artists outside the scope of their regular programming, in a way that is not sustainable.
Investing in Creativity concludes with several “priorities for action”:
Encourage better public understanding of who artists are, what they do, and how they contribute to society. This involves moving beyond an “art for art’s sake” argument for individual artist support.
Strengthen artist-focused organizations that are already addressing the critical functions and deficiencies the study has identified.
Establish broad-based networks of stakeholders at national, regional and local levels and convene those who are already working to improve artists’ support structures.
Create an information clearinghouse that brings together existing research and data and can capture new information. Partner with university departments and policy research organizations doing similar research in all the fields identified as important.
Strengthen the capacity of artists to advocate on their own behalf for the many crucial aspects of their support structure.
Cultivate existing and potential diverse markets for what artists do and make—especially hybrid markets.
Encourage changes in artists’ training and professional development to better address the realities of the markets in which they operate.
Strengthen the awards and grants system by making the application process less cumbersome and more responsive to different artists’ needs.
The report ends on a hopeful tone, suggesting that its findings will “help to illuminate the condition of artists as well as promote the creation of a more comprehensive and robust environment making possible their contributions to society.”
ANALYSIS
Investing in Creativity provides a comprehensive summary of previous research on artists, new findings, and current gaps in our knowledge. It also suggests new ways to approach researching individual artists. Investing is thorough because of its research not only on what artists think, but on how artists are perceived by others. Because it was a multi-city study, encompassing not just diverse urban communities but rural regions, Investing has the capacity to highlight similarities and distinctions between different regions, and identify nationwide trends. As I will discuss shortly, Investing also led to the development of some concrete initiatives to help artists.
Despite these strengths, one of my main critiques of Investing is its failure to provide more detail on how the research was carried out. For example, while the report describes “fieldwork through more than 450 extended interviews with artists, arts administrators, arts funders, critics and media representatives, and selected persons outside the cultural sector, and in 17 focus group discussions around the country,” it does not provide any information on the selection of these groups. Similarly, the report lacks detail on how the national poll on attitudes about artists was distributed, and who actually filled it out (and whether the respondents can be considered a representative sample). At the least, appendices in the report showing the poll and focus group questions would have been helpful. Instead, the figures and charts from NYFA Source data are the most comprehensive quantitative information provided.
The framework for understanding and meeting artists’ needs is arguably the most helpful result of this study, as well as its emphasis on the overlapping spheres in which artists function. For example, recognizing that artists may work in more than one arts (or non-arts) sector is the first step for training artists in more viable career paths, or for building the types of services and networks that are appropriate for artists’ varied careers. The framework itself can be used in any geographic region in the future, to assess ability to attract and retain artists, and to identify opportunities for improvement.
The suggested action steps for arts organizations in the report are rather general, though the authors claim that they are not aiming to make a comprehensive set of recommendations. As I will explore in the “Implications” section, most of these suggestions have to do with strengthening access to opportunities for artists through better networking, cross-sector partnerships, information-sharing, and training, rather than radically altering the system of artist funding and employment.
The report was designed for its findings to be disseminated and funneled into concrete actions through continued partnerships with the funders and arts leaders in the different geographic regions of study. In this respect, it was remarkably successful, perhaps one of the most successful arts research initiatives in history. Three outcomes in particular—the expansion of the NYFA Source artist opportunities database from the New York Foundation for the Arts; the creation of the ten-year grantmaking and research initiative Leveraging Investments in Creativity; and the birth of the United States Artists grantmaking program—show a study whose impacts are still being felt long after its original publication.
Expansion of NYFA Source
According to NYFA’s website, NYFA Source originated as a phone service,the Visual Artist Information Hotline, founded in 1990. When this hotline caught the attention of the Urban Institute in 2000 during its research for Investing, UI collaborated with Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for Arts Management and Technology to create the new NYFA Source online database. According to the NYFA Source website:
The new database was conceived with several new features in mind. First, it was expanded to include programs serving artists working in all disciplines. Second, it was built as an online database allowing artists and other users to access customized, up-to-the-minute information 24 hours a day. And finally, it was built to enable funders and researchers to acquire information about patterns and trends in artists’ support…Today, NYFA continues to research and update information in NYFA Source…Additionally, as part of NYFA Source’s ongoing development, UI will regularly produce analytical reports about the patterns of support represented in the database. These reports will enable the arts field to monitor trends over time.
NYFA.org, which includes NYFA Source, is an essential resource for artists and organizations today, with information about more than 8,000 opportunities and resources available to artists in all disciplines. NYFA.org, much more than just an online awards database, is now functioning as what the report’s authors might consider an “information clearinghouse” convening a “broad based network of stakeholders.” As its website suggests, NYFA Source is also used for research purposes, to allow the continued monitoring of opportunities available to artists. According to Investing’s principal investigator Maria-Rosario Jackson, the Urban Institute did a follow-up assessment of NYFA Source in 2009, which verified its continued suitability for research.
Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC)
Investing led directly to the creation of Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC), a ten-year national initiative to improve the conditions for artists working in all disciplines. LINC funds, researches, and aggregates information about three core areas identified as key artist needs in the report: Creative Communities, Artist Space, and Health Insurance for Artists. According to Jackson, many of Investing’s 30+ funders, in particular the Ford Foundation, were committed in advance to “doing something about the results of this study,” though they left this open, based on what the study would reveal.
Reports/findings published since Investing, available on LINC’s website, illuminate examples of Investing’s recommendations put into practice. Most notably, the 2010 publication “14 Stories” summarizes the impact of LINC’s Creative Communities program in fourteen different cities. The programs, run by local arts nonprofits usually in partnership with non-arts agencies, are all providing a broad range of services for artists, strengthening training, networking, and material support opportunities.
One example is Cleveland’s CPAC – the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture. In a region striving to retain a vibrant artist community in the face of economic depression and unemployment, CPAC used its $190,000 LINC grant to found Artrepreneur, which sought to “treat artists like entrepreneurs.” In partnership with COSE, the Council of Small Enterprises, Artrepreneur morphed into the COSE Arts Network. “Over the course of three years, nearly 500 artists have either joined COSE outright or been reclassified as artists within the existing membership.” In exchange for annual dues, COSE helps artists access things like discounted health insurance, business and marketing workshops, and networking events.
LINC also conducts periodic research in target areas. One main area is health care; in 2009 LINC commissioned Helicon Collaborative to design and conduct an online survey of artists, administered through 40 different artist service organizations across the United States. Another study was conducted in 2010, forecasting the potential impact of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA) on artists. Both studies also incorporated general data on artists’ employment. The findings in this report imply that artists’ overall insurance and work conditions have not changed substantially since Investing’s publication in 2003. For example, “artists who earn from 21%-80% of their income from their artwork are those most likely to earn under $20,000 a year…and are likely to have inadequate health care.” The report goes on to describe changes that could occur under PPACA and the crucial role of arts service organizations in equipping artists with information and assistance.
Whether or not artists’ conditions have fundamentally changed as a result of LINC’s work, it is commendable that Investing resulted in a structure for continually updating research in core areas, especially as new federal policies have arisen. Unfortunately, LINC’s 10-year run is slated to end in 2013, so this banner will need to be taken up by someone else if it is to continue beyond next year.
United States Artists Grants
Investing in Creativity highlighted the importance of large, unrestricted grants: “Many respondents told of the life-changing impact of a large fellowship and, more generally, of the relief from constant fund raising that a large grant provides…As well as remarking on the value of large grants, many respondents made the related point that they value grants of long duration, because they provide some relief from the uncertainty of having to continually piece together a living. Specifically, respondents indicated that they want multi-year funding.” This particular element of Investing is cited in the development of the United States Artists (USA) grant making program, which gives unrestricted $50,000 grants to artists in all disciplines.
IMPLICATIONS
Despite the commendable efforts and increased awareness that resulted this study, the report itself raised a few important questions for me:
Is it problematic to build a case for increased research and support for individual artists so heavily on the idea that artists benefit society?
Investing claims at its outset to be more focused on “artists’ contributions to society” than previous studies (and makes the broad recommendation that such contributions need to be better understood), but the report doesn’t offer many ideas for how to conduct such research—most of its statements about artists’ contributions seem to be assumptions or generalizations. The study is much stronger in its analysis of the working conditions, material supports and training available to artists. Though the purpose of Investing was not to develop a methodology for studying artists’ societal impact, is it dangerous to put so much emphasis on investing resources in an area that may not be easily researchable? There is a sort of chicken or egg dilemma in this report: the researchers seem to be relying on the “value of artists to society” argument to justify putting time and money into researching how to serve artists better—including researching the very question of why artists should be valued.
As an example: the chapter about artist space states, “In response to the question of why artists should get special treatment around affordable space when others are dealing with similar issues, for example, the case often rests on the assertion that artists are somehow special and intrinsically valuable to a community. This entitlement argument does not resonate particularly well with city planners when there is no hard evidence to back it up.” The report goes on to say,
The social impact argument that artists contribute to various aspects of community improvement such as social capital and civic engagement, crime prevention, youth development, and education is potentially the most persuasive to people who are already stakeholders in a community or potential stakeholders. But it cannot be made very strongly as yet because the contributions of artists are not well documented but rest largely on anecdotal evidence.
While the report does not offer any specific formulas for how to measure the contributions of artists, it suggests ways that the public can interact with and understand artists better, such as arts education and open studio programs.
I agree with the authors’ assessment that artists make important contributions to communities and deserve to be valued and treated as productive citizens. But I would also worry about this type of argument resulting in a bias toward supporting artists whose work has more obvious “functional” benefits, i.e. artists who teach youth, or create projects that generate a lot of tourism revenue in obvious ways.
To what extent does the report advocate for a radical overhaul of the current system?
Investing in Creativity pinpoints many challenges in the employment system for artists, yet never suggests that an entirely new system is needed. Instead, the implication is that conditions for artists can be improved through better information-gathering, networking, and training. But should we still only be “training” artists on how to get by in an employment system that is fundamentally flawed?
Investing mentions, in passing, some past government programs that provided more stable artists’ employment. For example, many older artists interviewed for this study lamented the end of the federal Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) of the 1970s. CETA opened up many new employment opportunities, even though “it was not an explicit arts-directed program.” I found myself wishing for more discussion of how CETA operated, and whether the United States government could institute something similar today, perhaps even a discussion of the WPA programs for artists of the Great Depression. Investing does not seem to call for a major shift in federal policy toward artists; instead it is primarily focused on strengthening local communities.
Arguably, the advent of social media, crowdfunding, and other recent, market-driven technological developments have had more impact on the way artists do their work than the policy-driven interventions coming out of this study. The report could not have anticipated the widespread use of social media platforms among artists in the years following 2003, but at least it highlighted the importance of online information resources like NYFA Source.
Another recurring theme in the report is that while there are some good awards and service organizations available to artists (for example, Creative Capital in NYC, CellSpace in San Francisco), they are not distributed proportionately to the number of artists in need. Even if artists were better trained in accessing resources, would there be enough to go around? For example, if the award application process were made even more accessible to artists across the board, would this just mean that more artists would apply and competition would be even steeper?
I was especially intrigued by the question, posed briefly by the report, of how artists can be better trained for sustainable employment, i.e. through university-level programs in more specialized fields like community arts—and how organizations can tailor mutually beneficial jobs towards artists. Some of the report’s most compelling personal accounts are from artists whose “day jobs” (even those completely unrelated to the arts) are actually favorable to their creative development. For example, teaching jobs where school administrations encourage integrating art into the classroom. Other artists find inspiration for their artwork’s content in mundane service industry jobs. This “day job” discussion has interesting implications for the field: for example, what if arts organizations designed more staff positions for artists that allow them to both work steadily in a teaching or administrative capacity, and receive things like health benefits and workspace in exchange? Should all artists be trained in more lucrative professions that can be done side by side with their artistic work? Beyond a limited number of unrestricted grantmaking initiatives, could there be other programs that pay artists to do creative studio work without a tangible end product?
Based on my own observations of artists, and current debates around artists as a creative labor force (for example, those raised by the Occupy Wall Street movement), it seems like the fundamental situation for artists has not changed significantly since this report’s publication—artists still face issues like underemployment, lack of affordable space, and the burden of grantwriting to support their non-commercial work. Nevertheless, Investing at leastpaves the way for more dramatic changes by suggesting ways in which the existing nonprofit sector can be better equipped to meet artists’ needs.
NYFA’s website contains up-to-date information about NYFA Source, as well as other listings helpful to artists, and recent articles about the business side of the arts that are helpful to all types of individual artists.
Indie Ambassador TV is an educational series produced by Indie Ambassador. Through our video panels, industry profiles and articles, artists and music professionals can educate themselves on general business topics, new technology and current industry trends.
When Jeremy Denk began blogging at Think Denk, it quickly became apparent that he was the liveliest writer-pianist since Glenn Gould. In this week's New Yorker, Denk makes his formal debut as an essayist, writing about his experiences recording the piano sonatas of Charles Ives. Here is a sample:
My Ives addiction started one summer at music camp, at Mount Holyoke College. I was twenty and learning his Piano Trio. There's an astounding moment in the Trio where the pianist goes off into a blur of sweet and sour notes around a B-flat-major chord. I knew the moment was important, but I wondered, was my sound too vague or too clear? (A recurring interpretative problem in Ives is discovering the ideal amount of muddle.) I was also puzzled about where this phrase was going. I'd been taught that phrases were supposed to go somewhere, yet this musical moment seemed serenely determined to wander nowhere.
One afternoon, the violinist of the group and I were driving off campus and happened to cross the Connecticut River. Looking out of the window, he said, "You should play it like that." From the bridge the river seemed impossibly wide, and instead of a single current there seemed to be a million intersecting currents — urgent and lazy rivers within the river, magical pockets of no motion at all. The late-afternoon light colored the water pink and orange and gold. It was the most beautiful, patient, meandering multiplicity.
Instantly, I knew how to play the passage. Even better, Ives's music made me see rivers differently; centuries of classical music had prettified them, ignoring their reality in order to turn them into musical objects. Schubert uses tuneful flowing brooks to murmur comfort to suicidal lovers; Wagner has maidens and fateful rings at the bottom of a heroically surging Rhine. Ives is different. He gives you crosscurrents, dirt, haze — the disorder of a zillion particles crawling downstream. His rivers aren't constrained by human desires and stories; they sing the beauty of their own randomness and drift.
out Ives in a conversation on the New Yorker podcast. On Feb. 13, he will appear at the Housing Works Bookstore Café, in a new series pairing musicians with writers; the writer in question will be the New Yorker literary critic James Wood, who is, as readers of Best Music Writing 2011 know, also a brilliant musical commentator. I may be obsolete.
The idea of using an ice cube in the glass had several points of inspiration. For one thing, given the long-running precedent of the Stones Throw Records Beat Battles, which meet once a week and use a shared sample as the starting point for competition, there was reason to distinguish the project; requesting that Junto members create their own sample, rather than employ the same exact source material, seemed like a good way to accomplish that. But, in a nod to the Beat Battles, I wanted a touch of hip-hop, and the sound of ice cubes heard in the Alkaholiks’ classic “Hip Hop Drunkies,” produced by E-Swift and Marley Marl, has long been a personal favorite (the song, which features a cameo by Ol’ Dirty Bastard, is from the 1997 album Likwidation; the instrumental is on youtube.com). In addition, the contact-mic experiments of musician Joe Colley came to mind. And, of course, there is Erik Satie’s furniture music, which is classical music’s strong precursor to what we now call ambient music: what could be a more casual everyday domestic sound than ice clinking in a glass?
The deadline was set for the following Monday, January 9, at midnight. In subsequent Junto projects the deadline would be moved back a minute, to 11:59pm, since some people weren’t sure if “midnight Monday” meant the midnight with which Monday began or with which it ended. Given that simple assignments are at the heart of the Junto, the fact that something as basic as “midnight Monday” was up for interpretation was an important lesson unto itself.
Pianist Garrick Ohlsson has finally recorded the notorious "Rach 3," Sergei Rachmaninov's extremely tricky Piano Concerto No. 3.
a href="http://www.npr.org/artists/91234132/garrick-ohlsson" target="_blank">Garrick Ohlsson launched his career in 1970, when he became the first American to win the International Chopin Competition. Since then, he's performed and recorded an exceptionally wide range of piano literature — Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and much more. But there's one romantic warhorse he's avoided in the recording studio until now: Rachmaninov's flashy and notoriously finger-twisting Piano Concerto No. 3.
All my piano heroes share a common tradition — that showmanship can hinder the honest interpretation of a composer's intent. That dedication to pure music-making is what most characterizes Ohlsson.
At one time, it was fashionable to dismiss Rachmaninov as a second-rate composer who wore his heart on his sleeve, but this pianist shows that there's plenty of muscle in Rachmaninov's musical craft.
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When Ohlsson walks on stage, at six-feet-four, he's an imposing figure. He looks like he could crush the piano with one big chord, and he does have a massive technique that makes short order of Rachmaninov's famously difficult passages. But Garrick Ohlsson can move from thunder to silk with extraordinary ease.
This is music composed on a grand canvas; its opulent textures and rhapsodic melodies require exquisite interactions among pianist, conductor and orchestra. And the Atlanta Symphony, with conductor Robert Spano, joins Ohlsson in this deeply inspired collaboration.
Ohlsson's recording of the "Rach 3" has given me new interest in this very familiar piece. I can't stop myself from repeating movements, even skipping around to sections just to get another taste of their emotional impact. Rachmaninov's third piano concerto is a heroic work, certainly, and Garrick Ohlsson is the piano hero who has brought us one of its finest performances.
llattribution">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
Dewanatron’s Brian and Leon were on-hand with their unique inventions. Photos by Marsha Vdovin for CDM.
For the lover of musical instruments and technology, southern California’s NAMM show is a giant toy shop. It’s work for many of its attendees, of course, but we know many of our readers dream of the objects that will make their next creations. And sure, inspiring lust is not our aim; on the contrary, there is some love that goes into these things. In the ideal, that’s the relationship of creator and consumer. These are things not to be bought and discarded, but kept and really used.
So, we have a different look at the NAMM show, through the lens of CDM contributor Marsha Vdovin, who has been at this show more times than she might like to count. I’ve added some comments about what these devices are and why they’re important. And the next time we see them, these inventions pictured in silence here, we expect them to be working hard on music far from the din and flourescent glare of the trade show floor.
As always, click for larger images. Photos by Marsha Vdovin; words by Peter Kirn:
Roland’s V-Guitar marks a surprising collaboration, bringing the famed American guitar maker Fender together with the Japanese electronic maker to make an “electronic guitar,” merging the two company’s tech on a digitally-augmented Stratocaster. More on this soon – but the extended playing techniques won over many guitarists.
The Danish design aesthetes of AIAIAI have improved upon their TMA-1 headphones with a studio model. Same drivers, same basic design, but a “flatter” response to sound (rather than beefed-up, DJ-ready bass) and closed ear design. It’s impossible to hear anything at NAMM, but I can attest that the new design is far, far more comfy to wear. Actually, if I could have kept these on the whole show to drown out the sound, it would have been great.
An easy place to spot a talented celebrity was at the Dave Smith Instruments booth, at which artists clustered around Dave and Roger Linn. They were on-hand with plenty of tweaks to their stellar Tempest drum machine.
Teenage Engineering’s OP-1 grew up, with new features (drum sounds! MIDI sync – at last), and grew out, with a companion product for connecting sensors and USB host mode that could be a boutique item for music DIYers. We’ll go hands-on with each this year, and while readers were disappointed on a lack of some details (will the OpLab be open source?), we expect to get more details from the Teenagers when the product is ready in the coming months.
Readers of tech blogs (ahem) may miss out on the fact that the vast majority of NAMM is really for guitarists, drummers, and traditional instrumentalists. And yes, that includes glittery, pink products from Daisy Rock Guitars. We’ve concluded this model will be perfect for Sparkle Pony. (And really, if you’re not watching Portlandia to get that reference, get on it. Also, Jenny Conlee is crazy awesome.)
Thin, responsive, and expressive, the QuNeo from Keith McMillen – funded on Kickstarter – proves it’s really happening. With continuous pressure response on its touch controls and bi-directional control, it could be the most anyone will ever have gotten from a US$200 controller. Yes, we’ll be watching.
Pioneer wasn’t showing anything new at this show — they timed those launches over the fall with new controllers like the Ergo. But they did have a glossly all-white lacquer set of limited-edition devices that looked absurdly gorgeous. Now if I want to do my flat over in the style of a Stanley Kubrick set, I know what DJ gear I’ll be buying. (If you don’t know what I mean, watch the end of 2001 again – or the living room in Tron: Legacy, which is more or less a copy.) White is the new generic-dull-charcoal.
Akai’s MPC Renaissance is unlike any other mass-market controller we’ve seen. It’s actually substantial, something that feels like a vintage MPC even though it’s designed to work with software (pictured). The audio circuitry is straight out of the modern MPC, but there’s a switch for “vintage” modes – think 12-bit output when the MPC60 is enabled, for instance. Akai told CDM they built the software in-house, but we also learned at NAMM that they licensed time-stretch tech from iZotope, giving their upcoming MPC software generous audio-manipulation abilities.
The Renaissance will cost you, with a street expected well over a grand, but that makes it even more welcome that the same superb pads and response curves are also on the maker’s MAX49 keyboard and cheaper MPC Model.
Just expect to wait: these were prototypes, and there were still some bugs to work out.
The Renaissance is for the MPC die-hard; the MPC Studio is the model that will directly take on Native Instruments and Maschine. It’s slim, sleek, and still has great-feeling controls. And while that makes it compelling competition for Maschine, I’m gratified to see this whole market expanding, new workflows for performance and production, and a push to better quality in the controllers. The days when computer gear meant “cheap and plastic-y” are mercifully at an end. Speaking of which –
Akai’s MAX49 keyboard could be a new model to beat. The keyboard action is satisfyingly springy, with a new keybed not seen in previous models. The pads are identical to those on the Renaissance, and feel more the way proper MPC pads should. Not everyone will love the light-up, touch-sensitive resistive faders, but I found with a bit of pressure, they worked well – and that means never having to worry about a fader catching up with the value in software. You also get serious features: Control Voltage, a full complement of MIDI ports, and aftertouch. Did I mention Control Voltage? It’s nice to see a controller keyboard with a slightly premium price, build, and features.
The last surprise from Akai was this MPC DJ. The company says it’s a prototype only, and had little more to say about it, but it’s fascinating to see the MPC and turntable controls converge.
Moog’s Minitaur was my favorite synth of the show. It just sounds consistently brilliant, no matter which way you turn it or play it – and I accordingly noticed it was the synth the most people were actually playing on the show floor.
This is what a 24-karet KORG MonoTribe looks like, alongside a silver-plated model. There’s little more one can say. It is, of course, one of a kind — and already spoken for.
The other thing of beauty at the KORG booth: a limited-edition reverse-key SV-1 keyboard.
iOS accessories were numerous, but a few were genuinely useful. IK Multimedia’s iRig Mic “Cast,” for instance, is coupled with handy software for podcasters, as a quick tool for interviewing or podcast recording.
It’s not a new product, but one of the reviews to which I’m most looking forward is this Eers product. It promises custom in-ears you make yourself, rather than the enormous cost of getting them custom-made. Stay tuned on this one – protecting your hearing and making on-stage gigs go well is perhaps as essential as gear can get.
The just-intonation Hymnatron from the Dewanatron crew was one of the most compositionally-compelling instruments at the show, with a unique sound, tuning, and key layout. And it looks mighty handsome in this one-off wooden case.
LiveWire’s modular was among the many dreamy modular rigs at Big City Music and Analog Haven, two Los Angeles hotspots for analog modulars. Did we mention space was more plentiful and inexpensive, and gigs more generous, in LA than in NYC, Chicago, or San Francisco? Funny coincidence, that.
Many modules graced this show, but the most intriguing was not analog, but digital – think digital algorithms in an analog, patch-cord-modular hardware workflow. Tom Erbe, maker of long-beloved SoundHack (the app, and then more recently the plug-ins) put some of his sonic wizardry into a module, collaborating with one of our favorite modular builders, MakeNoise. The result: the MakeNoise Echofon. As such, it’s a perfect emblem of our Create Digital Music, Create Analog Music philosophy. Dear Berlin friends: let’s plug this into your monster modulars, okay?
Big City Music is a wonderful place. The other candidate for best new module: brilliant creations by Metasonix, as previewed here. We’ll be watching for these to be patch-able, too.
Casio had its classic CZ-1000 synth on-hand at its booth. The Casio XW isn’t quite a successor to the CZ, though it does include some of those waveforms and phase distortion sounds. What it does appear to be is a very affordable, do-just-about-everything workstation at a fraction of the price of any of its rivals. For someone who wants a jack-of-all-trades gigging keyboard, this could very much be a contender.
Our friends at Beatport are evidently getting into the hardware business. The most interesting launch wasn’t a set of TMA headphones with Slimer-green cords (I’ll take the Studio model, thanks, or just a non-Danish set of studio cans). Instead, I was intrigued by the eminently-practical line of gigging cords Beatport is working on with Hosa. They include features live digital musicians and DJs badly need, like color-coded cords you can find easily at a show, and hinged USB cords you can cram into tight spaces. More on those soon.
Thanks, all. Lastly, I want to thank everyone I got to spend time with at the NAMM show, and particularly Marsha Vdovin, who is responsible for these photos and keeping our schedule together. NAMM is always too crowded and too short, but it can lay groundwork for a whole year. And I’m excited for this Year of the Dragon. Be seeing you.
My interview with Dennis Russell Davies, who is conducting the ACO concert, is up on Musical America’swebsite (subscribers only).
If you’re looking for a terrific way to celebrate PG’s birthday, Brooklyn Rider’s latest CD on Orange Mountain Music includes Glass’s first five string quartets. The earthiness with which they play the music may surprise you at first, but it provides a persuasive foil for some of the more motoric, “high buffed sheen” toned performances of minimalism that are out there. In a 2011 video below, they give a performance of a more recent work, a suite of music from the film Bent.
'I think there is a great deal in The Kingdom that is more than a match for Gerontius, and I feel that it is a much more balanced work and throughout maintains a stream of glorious music whereas Gerontius has its ups and downs.'
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The Junto assignment is to record a live performance on the glass harp, and to employ live processing in the performance. There should be no post-production. And there is no length limit for the piece, though I would suggest that anything over 15 minutes may limit the size of your potential audience.
We could just as easily — more easily, really — used samples of glass harps and harmonicas as pre-made building sonic blocks for the piece. But the goal was to be true to Franklin, whose Junto lent its name to our collective endeavor. Franklin was as famous for his inventions and scientific inquiries as he was for his role in the development of the United States government. (An inveterate constructor of organizations — not just of his Junto, but of fire departments, militia, schools, and lending libraries — it’s quite possible to see the U.S.A. as the largest club he helped invent. Our ambitions are not so large.) And since the armonica was developed by him as an instrument for live performance, it seemed only right to use the glass harp in a live setting. (Just as a side note: the title of the piece was inspired by the concept of “expanded cinema.”)
Here, for further background, is an excerpt on the armonica from the Benjamin Franklin biography written by Walter Isaacson:
The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, January 19, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, January 23, as the deadline.
View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0003-glass. As of this writing, there are 35 tracks associated with the tag.
Performed by the Bruckner Orchester Linz, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies.
!-- END CLASS="CONTAINER PLAYLIST" ID="CON145995146" PREVIEWTITLE="PLAYLIST" -->
All that uptown establishment glamor still seems — even after all these years of sparkling accomplishments — a slightly uncomfortable fit for one of downtown's high priests, whose churning, dreamy music mesmerized the New York loft scene of the 1960s and 1970s. The birthday party thrown Sunday night by the composer's friends and his record label, Orange Mountain Music, at the Greenwich Village nightclub (Le) Poisson Rouge, felt cozy, comfortable and friendly even while it glowed with serious star wattage. (Over here, Paul Simon; over there, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, and the latter was even spied smiling.)
As one might expect in Glass' company and in such a setting, most of the celebration revolved around music. Some but not all was by the man himself. Pianist and Glass consigliere Michael Riesman played a piano quintet based on Glass' score to the film The Hours with members of the Signal Ensemble. Violinist Tim Fain and pianist Bruce Brubaker played a 2010 piece, Pendulum, in which Fain's brilliant performance posited Glass as an 21st-century Paganini-style showpiece composer. The Kronos Quartet played both Glass' moody arrangement of Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" and the "China" movement of Orion, the culture-hopping piece Glass wrote for the 2004 Olympics in Athens. For "China," the quartet was joined by Wu Man, the stunning Chinese pipa player, whose confidently bent and twisted notes give Glass' score a pronounced piquancy.
As Glass himself remarked later on in the evening, "All music is ethnic music," and there were plenty of other examples of how wide a variety of friends and collaborators Glass has cultivated. There were warm and delicate melodies from Gambian kora player Foday Musa Suso (another Orion collaborator), whose web address was painted in blazingly large letters on the audience-facing side of his custom-made instrument. Fiercely talented Cape Breton fiddler Ashley MacIsaac stomped out a string of Celtic tunes (the most recent of which, MacIsaac explained, was written in 1937, the year of Glass' birth). Meanwhile, bringing "ethnic" music to a more familiar American terrain were The Raybeats, the arty neo-surf band founded in the early 1980s, whose Glassfest set culminated in their cover of the 1961 Link Wray tune "Jack the Ripper."
The warmth radiating from the club on this frigid January night came from Glass' own extended family as well. The composer's cousin (and our public radio sibling) Ira Glass served was the evening's genial emcee, while Glass' adult son Zack sang and played a wistful slide guitar.
The evening's formal portion ended with Glass' very young two sons, Cameron and Marlowe, presenting their dad with a small cake sweetly topped off with two candles marking out "75." But there was another, much more unusual fondant-festooned cake. Emblazoned with Glass' own signature in the middle, it was draped with his scores rendered in frosting and studded with edible pencils. Glass peered at it in front of this gathering of friends and fans and said, "Wow. That's actually some of my music. Someone worked very hard at this." Then he plunged back into the crowd, where the wine and conversation continued to flow.
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"fullattribution">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
Writing about music may indeed be like dancing about architecture, so why not give music a listen?
If you’re not already familiar with the terrific Los Angeles label Brainfeeder, founded by Flying Lotus, now’s the time to discover its artists. If you are familiar with them, you barely need read this blurb before skipping ahead to a lovely compilation.
Onboard: Thundercat, Martyn, Samiyam, Tokimonsta, The Gaslamp Killer, Jeremiah Jae, Taylor McFerrin, Teebs, Austin Peralta, Matthewdavid, Mono/Poly (the artist, not the synth, but we can love both), plus (exclusive) Lapalux.
And the timing is fitting: Brainfeeder has won well-deserved recognition in the Gilles Peterson Worldwide Awards 2012. (Other fine labels in the runners-up — Numbers, Hotep, R&S, Young Turks.) These awards dig through our world’s plentiful quality music to find things that are really special; you can check out some of their picks in the award setting in London in the short film below. It was also gratifying to see Machinedrum (Travis Stewart, also of Sepalcure) take home the “John Peel Play More Jazz Award,” as one of our favorite musicians of 2011.
De:Bug is one of my favorite reads in music technology. And while I can fake my way through French and Spanish, De:Bug is also the one non-English publication I read daily. So I’m gratified to get to write a byline for the publication, which someone was nice enough to translate into German. For our German-speaking readers, you actually don’t have to read this one in English (though there’s an English version, to)
In this story, I pick out the major themes in new music tech at the NAMM show this month in Anaheim, California:
Peter Kirn von CDM ist für uns über die NAMM gelaufen
It’s also a pleasure to get to meet the folks from De:Bug. Believe me, I’ll be practicing by reading your work, though I’d best leave the translation to the pros for now.
The suggestion of a fog horn sample was not a surprise to anyone who had spent more than a day or two observing my twitter.com/disquiet feed. I live in the Richmond District of San Francisco, where we are serenaded, when the climate is right, by deep fog horns that sound like Zeus left his phone on vibrate (and dozens of other haze-induced similes). Fans of contemporary classical music will associate that sound with the field recordings that form the basis for the Fog Tropes of composer Ingram Marshall, and Marshall’s masterwork was indeed very much an inspiration for this project. As for the train, it had no particular consequence sonically, except that the sample I located seemed aesthetically compatible with the fog horn sample. Instead, the train was intended as a cultural contrast, the implied rhythm suggesting rock’n'roll against the classical element of the fog horn. None of this was described in the assignment. It merely informed the dimensions of the project as it was being developed in advance of its announcement. No, the real crux of the assignment is this portion of the instruction: “You can only use those two samples.” If all the participants were to share the same source material, then the real challenge was to see how they would make that source material their own, and how better — in the spirit of constraint — than to limit their palette to that source material?
The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, January 12, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, January 16, as the deadline.
View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0002-duet. As of this writing, there are 50 tracks associated with the tag.
The idea of using an ice cube in the glass had several points of inspiration. For one thing, given the long-running precedent of the Stones Throw Records Beat Battles, which meet once a week and use a shared sample as the starting point for competition, there was reason to distinguish the project; requesting that Junto members create their own sample, rather than employ the same exact source material, seemed like a good way to accomplish that. But, in a nod to the Beat Battles, I wanted a touch of hip-hop, and the sound of ice cubes heard in the Alkaholiks’ classic “Hip Hop Drunkies,” produced by E-Swift and Marley Marl, has long been a personal favorite (the song, which features a cameo by Ol’ Dirty Bastard, is from the 1997 album Likwidation; the instrumental is on youtube.com). In addition, the contact-mic experiments of musician Joe Colley came to mind. And, of course, there is Erik Satie’s furniture music, which is classical music’s strong precursor to what we now call ambient music: what could be a more casual everyday domestic sound than ice clinking in a glass?
The deadline was set for the following Monday, January 9, at midnight. In subsequent Junto projects the deadline would be moved back a minute, to 11:59pm, since some people weren’t sure if “midnight Monday” meant the midnight with which Monday began or with which it ended. Given that simple assignments are at the heart of the Junto, the fact that something as basic as “midnight Monday” was up for interpretation was an important lesson unto itself.
Looks like there were some shenanigans behind the construction of the High Line, NYC’s well-known elevated park. Reminiscent of James Gray’s The Yards, if anyone saw that movie.
The Danish government has merged three national agencies – the Danish Arts Agency, the Heritage Agency of Denmark, and the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media – into one Danish Agency for Culture.
Yikes! longtime conductor, author, and inspirational TED talker Benjamin Zander was let go by the New England Conservatory this month over a cover-up involving a videographer who was a convicted sex offender, as NEC clearly wanted no part of any Joe Paterno/Jerry Sandusky redux.
Interesting new curator time share model being pioneered by the Detroit Institute of Art and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
When the IRS dumped hundreds of thousands of organizations from the nonprofit rolls last year, people hardly batted an eye – mostly because they assumed those organizations (who had failed to file required forms for three years in a row) were either no longer active or not accomplishing any good if they were. Yet my cultural asset mapping work has suggested that at least some of those organizations who had their tax-exempt status stripped were real and continuing to provide public programs. Thomas A. Kelley provides one such example in this account of an African American community center that is fighting to get its nonprofit status back.
Jerome Weeks notes the difficulty that Dallas-area arts organizations are having with recruiting top leadership talent, and correctly follows the breadcrumbs to the lack of attractive opportunities for earlier-stage arts professionals:
Jose Bowen says one reason the pickings remain thin is that the starting jobs for arts management graduates generally don’t pay well. And the punishing costs of college don’t help, either. Bowen is dean of SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts. It’s one of the few that offers a double master’s degree in arts management – in the arts and business administration.
Bowen: “Our students graduate and are immediately faced with a choice. Come work for Goldman and make more money or go work for a nonprofit and make less money. And when you have loans, right out of school? That’s a hard choice to make.”
It’s really very simple, people. If senior leaders with demonstrated records of accomplishment don’t want the job, it’s time to consider either senior leaders without demonstrated records of accomplishment, or junior leaders who haven’t had a chance to demonstrate accomplishment yet. If arts professionals below the leadership ranks are never given an opportunity to take initiative, manage people, or own projects in their roles, they’re never going to be in a position to fill those positions effectively, after the person who did so for so long is gone. And that’s assuming they stick around on low salaries waiting for their big break. Something to think about.
ng>BIG IDEAS
I’ve been wondering for a while about the effect on the bottom line that election season must have for struggling traditional media companies – especially in the wake of the Citizens United decision. Well, Dave Copeland takes that thought further and notes how well-positioned online audience gatekeepers – such as Google – are to benefit from campaign ads.
ArtsJournal hosted one of its blog debates last week called Lead or Follow, featuring Diane Ragsdale, Michael Kaiser, and others. Doug McLennan continues to experiment with the form of these fora, and though I don’t think he’s quite nailed the perfect formula yet, the process is fascinating to watch. As background to this conversation, the Wallace Foundation published 54 stories of audience engagement arising from its Wallace Excellence Awards grant program from the previous decade, as well as four more in-depth case studies on its own site.
Is your brain constantly bloated because it’s trying to take in too much information? Maybe you should go on an information diet! Beth Kanter reviews what looks to be an important book for folks like me who are constantly trying to drink from the fire hose.
RESEARCH CORNER
Add a feather to Randy Cohen’s cap: the Americans for the Arts researcher’s National Arts Index project has inspired an imitator across the pond, the UK Arts Index. (h/t Mark Robinson)
Kickstarter is out with its annual project stats. Kickstarter projects attracted nearly $100 million in pledges in 2011! Also of note, the number of high-volume donors (people who contribute to hundreds of projects a year and presumably seek them out as a kind of hobby) is growing.
Nonprofit Finance Fund is conducting its fourth annual survey of nonprofits, analyzing how they are responding to and recovering from the financial crisis. The survey is anonymous and takes 10-15 minutes to fill out, and they’re looking for as many respondents as possible. They are taking responses through February 15 and you can participate here.
Look out, American Red Cross! GiveWell is on the warpath to get you to release your evaluation of your own organization’s relief efforts in Haiti.
ETC.
We haven’t had any silly links in Around the Horn for a while. Well, that’s about to change…
“I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry as I needed it. This space of time is organized. We need not fear these silences. We may love them.”
The first sentence of that quote is one of the most famous Cage quotes, but the sentences that follow are just as important. They create a rule to live by that not only applies to the listening of Cage’s music, but the rest of our lives.
At the Focus! Festival, Cage’s Third Construction, for percussion quartet, was played. This was the second time I had heard this piece in the past week. The first time was truly live, with the conch’s actual sound waves running through my ears at Sunday Chatter’s Cage/Reich percussion day. It was easily one of the most breathtaking performances I’ve ever seen—and I am talking about all performances. However, before this piece, three people got up and left. They had heard Living Room Music by Cage and Marimba (Piano) Phase by Reich. Living Room Music has indeterminate instrumentation, employing any object from one’s home. This particular performance included a lamp, a map, voice, and other objects.
Cage, as well as other composers of the like, is famous for being someone who induces walk-outs like these. Wolff, Feldman, Tudor, Brown, and countless others lived by the paradox of achieving so much with of music that so many hated (and still do, as demonstrated by the three I saw). This music is well-known, and there is no need to explain its philosophy, but the reactions and realizations it brings are infinitely telling. It’s puzzling, but at the same time, this family of pariah sounds shows us more about our cultures than most forms of music labeled as “beautiful.”
When Cage says “We need not fear silences,” he is, to some degree, talking about sound. Sound is a blanket of comfort. We turn on the TV or radio when we are home alone, some use white noise machines to sleep, “awkward silences” between people are hurriedly filled with small talk.
An aural example of the fear of the “silences” of music occurred at the world premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Frescoin 1969, when the Bonn musicians rebelled against the music. The piece was meant to last four-and-a-half hours, using the orchestra in four different places in the foyer of the performance hall. The musicians were said to stand by their beloved classics and, with “glissandos no faster than one octave per minute,” were puzzled and captured in the silence of unfamiliarity and fear. The musicians were furious with Stockhausen, despite the fact that he described to them his vision (“music internally animated through the concentration of the musicians”). On the day of the performance, the musicians left a hand-painted sign on the warm-up room, reading: “We are playing, otherwise we would be fired!” During the performance, the musicians were taunted by audience members, and many left only an hour in. The concert was stopped about 20 minutes short.
Scandals like this show how the fear of the unfamiliar can bring out the bitterest side of humans. Even the notes of an acclaimed composer can be rejected because they aren’t arranged in comfortable ways. Contemporary music is being accepted more as time goes on, but there are still the ones who walk out of theaters or question the need for it.
However, Cage is also talking about life in his quote, we can assume. Silence is a synonym for worry and unfamiliarity. Humans hate being in different situations in which their personal boundaries are pushed. The poetry that Cage talks about comes through his acceptance of these moments of silence and fear. Because time is balanced, he says, silence is just as important as sound. This is musically known, but in life, uncomfortable, idle, or hard times are thought of as unnatural and evil. Perhaps we need this silence, however, to understand and appreciate the sound. Often, when we push ourselves outside of our comfort zone and come out successful, the results are more rewarding than any familiar deed. Ideas, literature, art, opinions, and thousands of other concepts are improved when people initiate. Initiation cannot be done without the acceptance of the silences of life.
After the intermission of the concert where the three people left, Cage’s Child of Tree and, of course, Third Construction itself were played. Not only did these patrons miss out on a particularly musical cactus and a life-changing performance, they missed out on the opportunity to accept the silences in life. Does this mean their lives are unbalanced, as Cage said? No. Their silences just took the form of the absence of the performance.
As for my role, among other things I had the pleasure of interviewing Mexico-born sound artist and musician Guillermo Galindo, who lives in San Francisco, about his participation in the project. As seen up top, in a pair of photos by Andria Lo, he performed at the dinner — not only his own mix of sounds, but also deep shuddering bass lines that drew from Varo’s interest in resonance and vibration. What follows is an excerpt of the full interview, “The Sound of Dreams,” which can be read at engine43.org:
I have found that for most people it is difficult to remember the sound, or sounds, of their dreams. Most people, including me, have an easier time remembering music: music that accompanies the dream, music that is played by someone or, in my case, composition ideas that appear by themselves or performed by myself or someone else. As in real life, dream components have sounds: an explosion, someone walking in high heels, the sound of the rain etc. Having said this, I do think that sounds have their own significance in dreams — a significance not necessarily attached to the visual or narrative elements of a specific dream. In other words, I believe that sounds in dreams do have their own specific symbology.
Weidenbaum: Are there parallels between food and sound you’d like to discuss?
Galindo: I had a Chinese music student who, in order to reconnect to her homeland memories, recorded the sound of herself cooking of Chinese dishes, which she would cook one day each month. Then she would present random photographs of the dishes with the audio of the cooking sounds. Different foods have different textures of sound when one cooks them. This provides information about their physical nature and about the chemical reaction that they have when mixed over the fire with other elements. I think that the purest and most enjoyable “food” sound is the sound of water. I think that the sound of the water falling into a glass is a vital element when enjoying a good drink of water, not to mention the “clink” of the wine glasses, the sound of silverware, or the sound of clay, wooden, or ceramic plates and bowls.
And this is a screenshot that Galindo provided to me of the software setup he utilized when playing live, in addition to a pair of Kaoss Pads and at least four iPods. (It is of higher quality than the casual camera shot I posted on Twitter the night of the event.)
Here, from a post-event summary, is a list of the sounds he developed for each of the courses:
0. XECATL (simulated gigantic ice flutes) independent white noise frequency bands oscillating randomly in chaos.
1. Introduction of 50 Hz.low frequency modulated by 260 Hz. and 2.5 Hz. LFO simultaneously resulting in sudden architectural shaking.
2. Harmonic content evolving from Erik Satie’s Gnossienne #1 as if reproduced by echoing crystal feathers.
3. Multiplication of Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater as if sang by a bleeding heart.
4. Intermittent triple drone in Eb and recurring patchy electric glitches emanating from pure electricity controlled by light boxes. Agustin Lara’s Veracruz emerges from the minuscule speaker of a transistor radio.
5. Modulated low frequency enters the 20 Hz realm as if entering subsonic levels. Low frequency joins polyrhythmic mass reaching a climax buildup made of electronic glitches and samples of heavy metal distorted guitars doubled with baritone sax reaching 120 bpm plus tempos. The sonic storm breaks into total silence.
II. A Brief Fiction
In addition, I served as managing editor on the project, working with the various participants on their written contributions. And I wrote a short story, “Sitting for a Dream,” that is an imaginary scenario inspired by the fact that Mexico City cardiologist Dr. Ignacio Chávez commissioned what yielded the 1957 Varo portrait “Retrato del doctor Ignacio Chávez.” This is an excerpt from the story:
y reached their chairs, they both sat down, looking at each other through the frame, as if at a painting. She gave him a little smile, which he acknowledged by removing his hat. In turn, she pulled from her coat pocket a deck of cards. She selected one card, seemingly at random, and turned it toward him. It showed an old sage with a stick, and below it, in English, was written “The Hermit.” She then pulled another card, this one in Spanish. It read “El Corazon.” It was his turn to smile. He recognized it from the lotería. The next card was “La Pera,” and he recalled the tree from the ill-fated mural she had proposed. She saw the recognition in his face, and her shoulders relaxed. Then his shoulders relaxed. Somehow, he found himself now imitating her, unintentionally but naturally. Varo reached under her chair and lifted a small goblet. Taking the hint, Dr. Chavez did the same. Again, he found himself mimicking her — how simply she had cast her spell.
This is the painting that inspired the story, which is readable in full at engine43.org:
III. Notes on Scent
One especially fascinating element of the event was smell. Each course was accompanied by a scent developed by Mirjana Blankenship (of captainblankenship.com), and these scents built one upon the previous as the evening proceeded. The terms for these elements of a collective sent, I learned from Blankenship, are musical: they are “notes.” The deepest is the “base” note, and then there are “heart” and “top” notes above, and they all “decay” over time, much as a struck chord might. The explanation reminded me of an essay by Brian Eno from the magazine Details back in 1992 (“Scents and Sensibility”), in which he described the parallels and intersections between his experiments in smell and sound. Blankenship’s scents (presented in the elegant bottles shown below) were not to be experienced in their own olfactory anechoic chamber. Quite the contrary, they were selected and constructed to mix with the scents inherent in the meal, including the rich smoke that emanated from the hearth in which meat was roasted, and the burnt sugar that resulted from pistachio pralines made on site just moments before they were served (see the very bottom of this post). By intending to mingle rather than command attention, Blankenship’s scents were like the famed “furniture music” of Erik Satie that is understood as a strong precursor of ambient music — sounds that Galindo included in his performance.
More on the exhibit and the gallery at freynorris.com. There’s a wide range of coverage of the La Alquimia de los Sueños event at engine43.org.
I previously participated in A Sors, a project the duo developed, with Norma Listman, for the Warhol Initiative.
Fuzzy Math. Many words on the history and appeal of the hot toddy, with recipes both true and speculative. A guest post for Molly Sheridan's Wonderland Kitchen, January 30, 2012.
At age 75, composer Philip Glass is as busy as ever.
http://www.npr.org/artists/15680178/philip-glass" target="_blank">Philip Glass turns 75 tomorrow. Impossible, you say? Given his two dozen operas, reams of orchestral music, virtually uncountable film scores and scads of projects in every discipline, isn't he like 90 or 100 or 110? Or, judging by his kaleidoscopic connections and collaborators, isn't he somewhere between 20 and 50, hunkered down among hipsters and plotting his next move toward musical world domination?
Glass is celebrating his birthday with the premiere of his Ninth Symphony by the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. It's the same ensemble that introduced his first mature orchestra piece, the sweetly lyrical Violin Concerto No. 1, 25 years ago. After Tuesday's festivities, life goes on as usual — an opera production in Norfolk, Va., that violin concerto in Bologna, Italy, orchestral music in Warwick, England. And that only takes us up to Saturday. He's touring throughout the year with Einstein on the Beach, the groundbreaking minimalist opera on a maximal scale he created with director Robert Wilson. (Here's a moving 2009 performance of the finale featuring the Los Angeles Children's Chorus.)
It's safe to say that no contemporary musician with classical ties has had Glass' reach or success. What other composer has been both commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and appeared as a musical guest on Saturday Night Live? But there are goals yet unreached, as in this exchange from The Simpsons:
Carl Carlsson to David Byrne (who has just walked into Moe's Tavern): David Byrne?
Byrne: And I used to wrestle under the name El Diablo.
Lenny Leonard: I thought that was Philip Glass.
Byrne: Yeah, he wishes.
No living composer has married music to a wider range of images and movement than Glass has. If you can judge a person by the company he keeps, consider that a very short sample of Glass' artistic partners includes Byrne, Paul Simon, Ravi Shankar, Allen Ginsberg, Martin Scorsese, Nobel literature laureate Doris Lessing, choreographer Twyla Tharp, playwright David Henry Hwang and filmmaker Errol Morris.
To get an idea of what makes Glass Glass, let's examine just one project, his score for the mesmerizing Paul Schrader film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. It's from 1985, when the former Baltimore child prodigy (University of Chicago at age 14) had completed his training (Juilliard and then Paris, with Copland's teacher Nadia Boulanger) and stints as a New York cabbie and plumber (he installed art critic Robert Hughes' dishwasher).
Mishima, like Einstein and the Gandhi opera Satyagraha, is built around a larger-than-life historical figure, a Japanese author whose ritual suicide is foreshadowed in the sweeping theme. The haunting score for string orchestra and percussion also has passages for the Kronos Quartet, which eventually became Glass' String Quartet No. 3. (Not only does his music resemble Vivaldi's in sound and quantity, but he also repurposes like his Baroque predecessors.)
In one memorable section of Mishima, the composer employs the sound of a surf-rock band that captures the anxious energy of postwar Japanese youth. In the slow section that follows, there's a passage that reappears time and time again as background music in This American Life, the radio show hosted and produced by Glass' cousin and fellow Baltimore native Ira Glass.
Mishima is but one moment from an international career that shows no signs of slowing down. Hear Mishima below, as well as a few other high points from Glass' catalog. What are your favorites? Have you seen him perform? Let us know in the comments section or Tweet @nprclassical.
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'As an Anchoress Julian was allowed to keep a cat for pest control, particularly to keep down the mice. Julian is often portrayed with her cat nearby, no doubt it was a great source of comfort to her.'
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This model worked okay, but it often times lead to media networks selling out to the point where they were willingly subjecting their viewers to incredibly interruptive messaging and breaks in programming, often at the most crucial times. This was not as serious of an issue for the rights holders however, because there was simply no alternative for their consumers to run to. Obviously, no longer is this the case.
So this is where the twist comes in. There needs to be a shift in advertising and marketing as it is practiced today. As Seth Godin so enthusiastically preaches, interruptive marketing is NOT the solution. The new cardinal rule of marketing should be: NEVER INTERRUPT THE CONENT THE AUDIENCE IS THERE TO EXPERIENCE. Think about it logically. The incentive for viewers or listeners to tune in is the content. When there are breaks in content, the incentives for viewers and listeners to stay are weakened, which creates the perfect opportunity for those offering uninterrupted alternative experiences that are also free, an opportunity that the internet community has never failed to capitalize on. The efficiency of the internet to provide alternatives makes any weakness in audience loyalty or incentives, a very dangerous thing for a rights holder.
But this does not have to be the end of advertising or ad-supported models, just perhaps the end of advertising as we know it today. There is in fact a new choice - a new way of marketing which will benefit all parties involved, and then some. Take a look at the Beat-Play ad model.
So just like with basic cable, artists can give away their songs (preferably trackable streams) for free, in one place - say Facebook - and fans would no longer have to bother risking viruses on torrent websites because they could go right to the artist instead, in a more convenient and safe location. Then the artists, with the right tools, could (for the first time) track not only all of their fans, but all of their actual plays.
These analytics can then be used as leverage to negotiate the price of an artist’s ad space on Facebook. The more popular the music, meaning the more it’s being shared, the more money an artist could actually make.
The real difference maker here lies in the ads themselves though. No longer can the ads be obtrusive to the user’s experience. No longer can irrelevant messages be blared in your face seemingly at random. This, again, breaks down consumer incentives, and as Freakonomics has taught us, incentives are everything.
Instead of the advertisers taking something from the viewer or listener (their time), brands need to be willing to give something of value to their prospective customers. A great way to start is to sponsor the music or content that their demographics love and care about. This is an amazing PR move for brands. The fans would be getting their music for free, and they would (even if subconsciously) know who has provided it to them so easily.
As for integrating the brand into the user’s experience with the content, this is where the interactive media comes in, or what I like to call Smart Media. This is the Skrillex Mothership Invaders Game, or the Kelly Clarkson Fashion Showdown app. It could really be almost anything, as long as it fits into 1 of the following 4 categories: Interactive, Fun, Useful or Beautiful. If an ad does not fit one of these categories, and if it is not relevant to the artist or content, it threatens to weaken the chances for retaining an audience, and it could hurt the rights holders, the brands and even the fans.
The end goal of these ads is to actually add to the user’s experience. These ads should be designed so people will actually want to click on them and interact. This encourages authentic engagement with the brand. Mix that engagement with the already established cred from giving away the music for free, and you’ve finally got a reciprotive advertising model.
The end result – The artists release their music to the world, the fans consume and share it all they want for free, the advertisers tap into those fans and utilize the artist’s momentum for effective marketing. The rights holders get paid justly with full control over negotiations with brands, the brands gain significant cred amongst their demographics, which in theory, should boost sales, the fans gain a more relevant, more useful ad experience with no needed interruption, and they get all of the content that they could want in one simple and easily accessible location. Everybody wins, and the rights holders have the potential to make even more money with this free model than with their current one, because of the viral nature of content sharing and the ability to now directly correlate it to revenue potential.
All of a sudden this argument over piracy, or file sharing, seems incredibly useless and irrelevant. There is a solution laying here untouched that makes the sharing of the content a way more profitable prospect than the selling of it. It means a shift from monetizing song purchases to monetizing song plays! What an amazingly huge opportunity just lying in wait for rights holders, most of whom are too busy complaining about why their current business model is failing for them to notice.
So this is my message to rights holders - LET THE CONTENT BE FREE! In every sense of the phrase.
Now this does not mean that every artist should go out and start giving their music away for free right away, nor does it mean that they shouldn’t. Of course some artists may never want to give their music away at all, and that is okay. What it does mean is that we need more established platforms to track online content usage, make communications with advertisers easier, make access and management of content better for the consumers, and we need to establish standards that set important precedents for everyone, in order to optimize results with emerging solutions and models like the one proposed here. There needs to be better tools to organize and manage these solutions, which will be required to make a new system function. We, as a world community of content creators, need to unify, and get started in supporting one common platform that provides solutions for these needs, and something that most importantly syncs well with existing networks like Facebook and the various Mobile platforms where the biggest support already lies.
This is what I have spent the last 4 years of my life working on. As an independent artist who dropped out of college at 18 with no plan, and decided to pursue a career in music, I have been actively attempting to develop and design solutions that would make this new model of promotion and monetization for artists everywhere possible, especially for independent artists like myself. I am happy to say that we are closer than ever to realizing the very first steps towards this new, open and profitable environment, but we cannot do it without the support of the whole community. We cannot even attempt it if we are alone. We need contributions from everyone. Contributions of faith, action and unity.
We need to spread the word of a solution to the world, and then, maybe, people will forget all about this whole SOPA business. The bill may have been abandoned for now, but there is no doubt it will be back in some form in the future. The time is now for the community to forge solutions that make the prospect for these kinds of bills irrelevant, for everyone, as the ultimate protection.
Beat-Play is still undergoing many changes. Our platform is available now at Beatplay.com. We are releasing our newly redesigned interface (shown above) next month, and have plans for a mobile app in the next few months, along with increasing options for cultivating artist-to-brand relationships, and a lot more. Currently we support 100% unlimited and free music and video uploads. We also support the Youtube and Soundcloud API’s, which create some amazing opportunities for creating playlists between the two platforms that were not possible before. This is just the beginning.
We are focused on creating sustainable solutions for all pieces of the music industry business model - Promotion, Distribution, Monetization, Organization and Playback. There is of course no one solution that is right for everyone. There must be multiple options available for every aspect of the industry just mentioned. That is why we need to enlist the help of you, the music community, to provide the proper cultivation of these new solutions, and proper stewardship necessary to transform these amazing opportunities into full-blown sustainable solutions for the entertainment industry moving forward. Help us build a thriving and sustainable world music community. Please join our efforts. The solutions are in right our grasp, we just need to act.
Contact us anytime, we would love to talk, and we will be at MIDEM this week!
With so much of the new music buzz being (deservedly) sucked up by the Ecstatic Music Festival right now, I wanted to make sure that the S21 faithful know about what looks to be a great evening coming up on February 10 at 9 pm at Joe’s Pub, featuring three of “hottest” musician/composers around.
Todd Reynolds, dubbed by ur…me, “the Eric Clapton of the electronically souped up violin,” will perform a few works from his album Outerborough, which was named Amazon’s Best Classical release of 2011, and also perform with the British cellist Peter Gregson, who has collaborated with Tod Machover and Max Richter, among many other luminaries. He will be marking the first US performance of Nonclassical’s latest release, Cello Multitracks (written by Gabriel Prokofiev), which he premiered in London in 2011. Prokofiev, who is also in the US for the world premiere of his latest orchestral work, has gained a unique status as an innovative, far-reaching figure within British contemporary music. His work as a composer has brought instruments such as turntables, electric guitars, and oil drums, to high profile concerts including the BBC Proms, earning him critical acclaim in the process. Meanwhile, as a DJ Prokofiev has carved a singular reputation, playing to audiences at the New York Met and around the world, combining his background in urban music production with a passion for 20th and 21st century classical music.
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?
Liturgy comes from a word meaning "public work"; by its performance more is expressed than can be conveyed in verbal formulae. Like music, liturgy holds more than can be explained in a commentary. The meaning is implicit and conveyed by performance. It is not a theatrical performance but more like the performance of a string quartet, not in its aesthetics, but in the thing behind the music.
Illustration shows Julien's Orchestra at a Promenade Concert in Covent Garden. Louis Antoine Jullien (1812-1860) was born in Sisteron in France and after leaving France to escape his creditors established promenade concerts in London; which means that great British tradition the last night of the Proms is in fact of pure French descent. Jullien's first concerts were popular mixed programmes but later introduced symphonies, a trend which which contemporary Promenade Concerts have reversed. There is a topical link to audience interruptions at Promenade Concerts here, and more on music as ritual here.
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The Disquiet Junto is a group I founded on Soundcloud.com. The purpose of the group is to use constraints to stoke creativity. Each Thursday evening I post a clearly defined compositional assignment, and members of the Junto are to complete the assignment by 11:59pm the following Monday. The initial Junto assignment was made on January 5, 2012, the first Thursday of the new year.
The inspirations for the group’s existence are numerous. There are the weekly Beat Battles sponsored by Stonesthrow, and also hosted at Soundcloud.com, in which dozens if not hundreds of participants craft instrumental hip-hop beats from a shared sample. There is the tradition of Oulipo, whose embrace of creative constraints is personified by one of its co-founders, the author Raymond Queneau. Several comics artists with whom I have worked, including Matt Madden, have bonded under the banner of Oubapo, and there is, in fact, a related musical tradition, which goes by Oumupo.
The word “junto” comes from the name of a society that Benjamin Franklin formed in Philadelphia during the early 1700s as “a structured forum of mutual improvement.” In Franklin’s honor, the third Disquiet Junto project explored the glass harp, an instrument he experimented with in the development of what he christened the armonica.
The idea for the Junto arose after the completion of a Disquiet project at the end of December 2011. That project, Instagr/am/bient, was more loosely curated than other such projects I had commissioned, beginning in 2006 with Our Lives in the Bush of Diquiet. Instagr/am/bient proved quite popular, with over 20,000 listens and almost 4,000 downloads in its first month, and this success suggested to me that I experiment with an even looser format — the irony being that this “looser” format is, in fact, dedicated to constraint. Much to my surprise, the very first Junto project resulted, in four days, in 56 original pieces of music by as many musicians. The assignment was to record the sound of ice cubes in a glass and to make something musical of that recording.
If for the musicians involved, the Disquiet Junto is an experiment in creative constraints, for me it is as much an experiment in what I would describe as “community organizing as a form of curation.”
Visit the group — and, better yet, sign up and participate — at soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto. There’s also an email announcement list for the group. If you would like to be added to it, send me an email at marc@disquiet.com with “Disquiet Junto List” as the subject line.
This page serves as an index of the assignments. They are listed here in reverse chronological order. The tag for each assignment links to either a post on Disquiet.com about the project, or to a search return on Soundcloud that yields the tracks in that project:
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When Armando Bayolo asked me to perform on his New Music Series at the Atlas Theater in Washington D.C., I immediately thought: what am I going to play at the NATION’S CAPITAL? …the place that’s home to the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center Honors, and the place from which we all imagine sending time capsules to other planets.
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Washington, D.C. readers may have noticed that the new music scene in the District has been exploding lately. This week brings another significant event when New York’s 
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The Disquiet Junto is a group I founded on 