A recent arti­cle in Slate by Jan Swaf­ford got me think­ing about one of the major dis­tinc­tions between infor­ma­tion on the Inter­net and off the Inter­net. As I’ve been argu­ing for years, the way we inter­act with art has fun­da­men­tally changed. Swaf­ford looks at this from the per­spec­tive of a writer to argue “Why e-books will never replace real books”.

Basi­cally, it comes down to directed or active activ­ity ver­sus non-directed or pas­sive activ­ity. When you turn on the radio, the selec­tion is pas­sive. You can choose the sta­tion, but you can’t choose the pro­gram­ming. When you search for music on YouTube, how­ever, the selec­tion is always active. (more…)

A few weeks ago, a friend’s link to a rant about a rant about the Hype Machine, a music blog aggre­ga­tor, got me think­ing about the issue of whether it’s bet­ter to do art full time or part time. The short answer to that ques­tion, of course, has to do with what bet­ter means to you. But I still think there are mean­ing­ful dis­tinc­tions that can be made between the kinds of art that get made in either situation.

The ques­tion of bet­ter can be addressed to a large extent using eco­nomic sce­nar­ios, though not by rely­ing on clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics. Basic eco­nomic the­ory would say that the more reward you get for your work, the more devoted you will be to it, hence ensur­ing value. Also, we would expect the best artists to receive the most money because their work is in the high­est demand. So full-time artists, by this def­i­n­i­tion, should always be bet­ter artists. (more…)

Rat­ing: 4.5 out of 5 stars

The San Fran­cisco Con­tem­po­rary Music Play­ers pre­sented their final con­cert of the 2009/2010 sea­son tonight, 26 Apr 2010, at the Herbst The­ater in down­town San Fran­cisco. On the pro­gram were pieces by Greek com­poser Mano­lis Manousakis, Amer­i­can Tan Dun, Chi­nese Guo Wen­jing, and French­man Philippe Hurel. This pro­gram was pre­sented coher­ently and engag­ingly, because proper atten­tion was paid not only to select­ing and prepar­ing the music, but also to light­ing, stag­ing, and tech­no­log­i­cal aspects—a rare achieve­ment. (more…)

Recently, I inter­viewed conductor/composer Chris­t­ian Bal­dini for the San Fran­cisco Con­tem­po­rary Music Play­ers. Chris­t­ian is con­duct­ing a piece by French com­poser, Philippe Hurel for SFCMP’s upcom­ing con­cert on April 26. Bal­dini is an Argen­tine musi­cian by birth, cur­rently teach­ing con­duct­ing at UC Davis near San Francisco.

Inter­est­ingly enough, in the process of the inter­view, we dis­cov­ered we have some things in com­mon, includ­ing a love of con­tem­po­rary music and new opera!

The eco­nom­ics of art is a peren­nial source of debate. Pro­po­nents of fund­ing for the arts usu­ally fol­low one of two argu­ments. The first is that art con­tributes intan­gi­bly to soci­ety by con­tribut­ing a rea­son to live, as opposed to a way to live. The sec­ond is that art actu­ally con­tributes tan­gi­bly to the greater econ­omy through the hard work that many artists do for rel­a­tively lit­tle pay. In con­trast, those who oppose fund­ing for the arts argue that fund­ing is waste of money, because valu­able art will be able to sur­vive eco­nom­i­cally on its own any­way: good artists will be in high demand, cre­at­ing scarcity for their work, and hence ensur­ing them a com­men­su­rate level of income.

But art has never been a good fit to any mon­e­tary econ­omy, because money was not really designed to han­dle art. (more…)

Rat­ing: 3 stars out of 5

sfSound’s lat­est con­cert on Sat­ur­day 23 Jan 2010 was head­lined by Ligeti’s well-known Cham­ber Con­certo, which closed the con­cert, and was pre­ceded by 10 shorter pre­mières by up-and-comping Bay Area com­posers, mainly stu­dents, but also includ­ing some inter­est­ing other per­spec­tives, like Deer­hoof drum­mer Greg Saunier. This con­cept has some def­i­nite advan­tages. It affords oppor­tu­ni­ties to a lot of less expe­ri­enced com­posers in a rel­a­tively eco­nom­i­cally way, while at the same time ensur­ing an audi­ence for them by pro­gram­ming a new music “hit” like Ligeti’s Cham­ber Con­certo.

How­ever, the for­mat also presents some chal­lenges to audi­ence and ensem­ble, because a lot of rel­a­tively diverse music is pre­sented in the course of an evening. (more…)

Rat­ing: 3.5 stars out of 5

George Ben­jamin was the San Fran­cisco Sym­phony’s composer-in-residence this month for this year’s instal­la­tion of their Project San Fran­cisco. Truth­fully, I was not famil­iar with Benjamin’s work, but it came highly rec­om­mended by many of my col­leagues, and so I looked for­ward to hear­ing it. I attended the SFS’s final con­cert with Ben­jamin on Sat­ur­day night (16 Jan 2010), where he con­ducted two of his pieces: Ringed by the Flat Hori­zon (1980), the piece that brought him to inter­na­tional atten­tion, and a more recent piece, Duet (2008; see YouTube video below). In gen­eral, while I found Benjamin’s pieces highly com­pe­tent works, I don’t think he lives up to the (per­haps unfairly) high stan­dard peo­ple attribute to him. (more…)

I was intrigued last month when I received a mes­sage from web­site AudioMi​cro​.com ask­ing if I was inter­ested in a link exchange. They seem to be an inter­est­ing mix of a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent musi­cal “ser­vices” rolled into one, and I thought they might serve as a good model for com­posers who, like myself, are inter­ested in cre­at­ing musi­cal value online. (more…)

I just wanted to draw atten­tion to col­league and friend Lisa Bielawa’s new blog, which I think is a good exam­ple of the kinds of things com­posers should be doing more to stay in the pub­lic eye. Lisa won the Amer­i­can Academy’s Rome Prize this year and has taken the oppor­tu­nity to write about some of her expe­ri­ences in Italy and else­where. (more…)

Jason Caslor has a post on his blog today ref­er­enc­ing a New York Times arti­cle that muses about whether “glitz” or other mar­ket­ing gim­micks are use­ful or hurt­ful for clas­si­cal music. The mus­ing is in ref­er­ence to the effect that con­duc­tor Gus­tavo Dudamel’s flam­boy­ant hair has had on clas­si­cal music (in con­junc­tion with his musi­cal tal­ents). Is it good for the vital­ity of orches­tras and opera com­pa­nies on the long run? (more…)

For a genre that claims to be part of the cut­ting edge, the avant-garde/new clas­si­cal music has been rel­a­tively slow to adopt online tools. I won­der about some of the ways we might improve the sit­u­a­tion. As I’ve writ­ten about before, the major issue of art today is orga­ni­za­tion, not con­tent, so if we assume there is some­thing in what we do that oth­ers might be inter­ested in, we need to find ways to reach them. (more…)

Recently I went to a con­cert of new clas­si­cal works, pre­sented by an orga­ni­za­tion that typ­i­cally spe­cial­izes in the 18th– and 19th-century Euro­pean clas­sics. The host of the evening dis­cussed the con­text of the new works, pre­sum­ably to win over the more reluc­tant of their series sub­scribers. His argu­ment was along these lines: We can enjoy the great clas­sic works of the past because they were heard in their time; peo­ple learned to love them when they were new, the works became well known, and they entered the stan­dard reper­toire. We need to pro­gram new works, regard­less of if we like them or not, because this is how we cre­ate the clas­sics of the future.

As much as I wish this were a sound argu­ment, I think it is prob­lem­atic. (more…)

Recently I read both Goethe’s and Marlowe’s Faust plays–the Faust leg­end has been a major influ­ence on many gen­er­a­tions of com­posers and authors. I found them exceed­ingly dull, except that the Mar­lowe made me think about chang­ing Eng­lish syn­tax in rela­tion to the other ger­manic lan­guages. And in the case of Goethe, I was curi­ous about the psy­chol­ogy that would lead some­one to tor­ment over this story for one’s entire career.

What they made me real­ize though, is that ideas of the value and endurance of art are tied to our world views. (more…)

Recently I had a dis­cus­sion with some­one at a con­cert, about whether or not it was good to fall asleep dur­ing a per­for­mance. She said that, although she enjoyed the piece that had just been played, she was dis­ap­pointed that it had been pro­grammed so late in the con­cert, because it made her feel sleepy. So I asked her why that was a bad thing. (more…)

So today I read in the Globe and Mail that sci­en­tists are increas­ingly find­ing bio­log­i­cal and genetic sup­port for the age-old adages of love (Siri Agrell, “Sluts and Ver­min”, The Globe and Mail, 26 Apr 2007, http://​www​.the​globe​and​mail​.com/​s​e​r​v​l​e​t​/​s​t​o​r​y​/​R​T​G​A​M​.​2​0​0​7​0​4​2​6​.​w​x​l​s​e​x​s​t​u​d​i​e​s​2​6​/​B​N​S​t​o​r​y​/​l​i​f​e​F​a​m​i​l​y​/​h​ome).

For exam­ple, female mice who play hard to get tend to inspire faith­ful­ness in their mates, as opposed to those who put out right away. There seems to be a bio­log­i­cal rea­son why women that are unavail­able are more desir­able, and this builds faith­ful­ness in men. Inter­est­ing. (more…)

I’ve thought a lot lately about the effect that sound, and par­tic­u­larly music, has on our envi­ron­ment. This is what peo­ple fre­quently call Eco­mu­si­col­ogy, though I’m not crazy about that term.

Basi­cally, do we have a right to make noise? How must it feel for a bird liv­ing on my street? Does it enjoy (or notice) the sounds of cars, air­planes, peo­ple play­ing soc­cer in the park across the street? Maybe the bird doesn’t but the squir­rel might. (more…)

This is an issue I’ve been think­ing about for a long time. Can we actu­ally jus­tify say­ing one kind of music is bet­ter than any other, or that one piece is bet­ter than another? (more…)