Bookmarks for March 7th [Google Reader]
![Bookmarks for March 7th [Google Reader]](http://www.paulbailey.us/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/4416046812_0006942d50_b1-150x150.jpg)
Bookmarks for March 7th [Google Reader]
- Automatic Speech Recognition Class – very cool class taught by my friend joe tepperman
- U B U W E B – Film & Video: Peter Greenaway – FTW!
- Alan Lomax in Haiti | By Will Friedwald – WSJ.com – “Decades before last month’s tragic earthquake, Haiti was in the news because of an upheaval of an entirely different kind. The republic had been occupied by American troops for 19 years. But after a series of bloody massacres and insurrections, the U.S. Marines were withdrawn in 1934. Two years later, an American named Alan Lomax landed in Haiti not with weapons but with a portable recording device. He’d been commissioned by the Library of Congress to document Haiti’s ethnomusic traditions.”
- Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask. – By Michael Agger – Slate Magazine -looking forward to reading this. heard good things. also on kindle
- Guest Post: With Mixtapes & Social Media, Is The Album So Far Gone? – very interesting look at social media and marketing in music as a case study based on one artist (drake)
- The David Foster Wallace Audio Project – Interviews, readings, and more, “lovingly collected by Ryan Walsh in early 2009”. It’s a gold mine.
- How The Internet Didn’t Fail As Predicted – a look back at a famous newsweek article trashing the internet as a flash in the pan
- Keeping the Score – kyle gann’s take on the different art music cultures of publishing
access to the audience
kyle gann’s recent post that quoted cornelius cardew got me thinking about this whole alt-classical thing.
“access to [the] audience (the artist’s real means of production) is controlled by the state.”
for the past 5 years playing and composing outside the mainstream has had a lot of advantages:
1. i write what i want and for who i want
2. the time from composition to rehearsal is usually a matter of days
3. i get everything played that i write (the good and the bad)
4. i perform with who i want and where i want
cardew’s statement implies that gaining access to the concert halls (the means of production which is controlled by the state) is the primary path to gaining access to the audience. while i prefer to play in non-traditional venues it has some limitations:
1. concert halls are definitely not a priority, but it is any art music composers main access to press and reviews. its kinda ironic that we don’t really matter until we play a concert hall though our best shows and crowds are occur in the alt-venues.
2. playing in clubs works the best, but in los angeles the problem isn’t about finding a place to play, but to find other groups who share a similar aesthetic sensibility to put on a decent show. booking a show can easily devolve into a vaudeville act.
3. galleries can be great place to play, but if they don’t already host musical events getting an audience to come out to a new venue takes time.
4. of course there is no money playing these alt-venues, and the freedom that i have to write our own shows and work out my material on a consistent basis (like any rock band or standup comedian)
5. if i wanted to have a paying “career” as a composer then my options of “making a living” are all clearly controlled by the state. if i took this path i would have to embrace the “work for hire” attitude and become a plumbers of art music taking whatever commissions and projects that came my way.
there are some pretty obvious limitations to the whole alt-classical thing. this is not a path you choose to pay the bills. i was lucky to learn early when i was playing at disney that making money doing your art can be highly problematic and have embraced the model as composer as musician and educator (much like bach and vivaldi).
these days we might have the we have the power to self publish, record and perform our own music.
stale dogma
in kyle gann’s continuing description of the uptown/downtown aesthetic differences in new york i realize that these circumstances defined my early career as a musician and more recently as a composer. he sets the groundwork of what choices a young composer in training at a university must face. There is a kind of student who [...]
putting modernism behind/ kyle gann
Yesterday was a good day. Since creating my blog I have been looking for some other people that have similar experiences. In los angeles it seems that the art music world is so far away. We do have a new music scene here, but it is easy to feel that art music is irrelevant. I [...]
