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.

Other dis­ci­plines have done a bet­ter job. For instance, I love to cook and am able to find a myr­iad of great recipes online. I recently found this blog when search­ing for a recipe for lamb chops with pome­gran­ate sauce. From what I can tell, “Kevin from Toronto” is just a guy who likes to cook and is good with a cam­era, but he’s got nearly 1700 fol­low­ers on Google Friend Con­nect at the time of writ­ing. I’m not even sure how many com­posers know what that is…

Some musi­cians are fairly web savvy but the major­ity aren’t. The vast major­ity of com­posers’ web­sites con­sist of bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion and audio/video exam­ples of their music. Ensem­bles do slightly bet­ter by giv­ing con­cert list­ings as well. But rare is the music web­site where inter­ac­tiv­ity and inter­con­nect­ed­ness is really the norm. Music is equally well suited to shar­ing via a blog for­mat, as evi­denced by YouTube or Last​.fm or sim­i­lar sites, so why is it that cook­ing is light years ahead?

Copy­right law is cer­tainly part of the issue, but this doesn’t stop elec­tronic musi­cians from inter­con­nect­ing. For exam­ple, there is the sc140 project, in which enthu­si­asts of the open source audio syn­the­sis lan­guage, Super­Col­lider, have banded together to release a col­lec­tion of pieces that could be sent in a sin­gle text mes­sage (140 char­ac­ters or less). It’s a great idea and it even pro­duces inter­est­ing music! This is some­thing as worth­while to share as any­thing else—and it’s even licensed using a cre­ative com­mons license, which makes this pos­si­ble. Yet when I click on some of the com­posers’ web­sites at ran­dom, I get the same col­lec­tion of sta­tic pages of text and sam­ples of music.

So what I’m propos­ing is sim­ply increased shar­ing and greater com­mu­ni­ca­tion between mem­bers of the new music com­mu­nity. Below are some of my thoughts:

• Enable com­ments for your web­site: Peo­ple should be able to write about your piece, or your con­cert, or what­ever else after­ward. There should be a forum for feed­back between composers/ensembles and their audi­ences. You should also enable ping­backs so that your blogs can talk to each other.
• Com­ment on other com­posers’ or ensem­bles’ web­sites: links between blogs are the best way to build author­ity and increase the like­li­hood of being found. We should sup­port the other artists we respect by com­ment­ing on their web­sites and/or link­ing to their sites on our own site posts. Serv­ing as each oth­ers’ crit­ics also has the ben­e­fit of help­ing to cre­ate paths for new lis­ten­ers into the music.
• Write about your cre­ative process: Some kind of dia­logue in terms of our daily process of cre­at­ing is inter­est­ing, and it cre­ates a greater body of web mate­r­ial that peo­ple may find. It’s eas­ier to stum­ble across text than it is sound­files, so use the text to draw peo­ple to the sound.
• Share music: To the extent pos­si­ble, par­tic­i­pate in com­mu­ni­ties like CCmix­ter where musi­cians are already col­lab­o­rat­ing dig­i­tally. Per­haps some com­posers already are… When I went to CCmixter’s site to get the link for this post, I saw that their cur­rent fea­tured artist, DoKashiteru, claims to blend con­tem­po­rary elec­tronic music with min­i­mal­ism à la Philip Glass et al. So, what are other com­posers wait­ing for?

Even­tu­ally, I would love if there was a sort of Tech­no­rati of new music, where you could search the com­mu­nity of com­posers work­ing today and see their thoughts, lis­ten to their music, and see how they are con­nected. But it’s not nec­es­sary to start that big. I think we could do a lot to bring good work in new classical/avant-garde music to inter­ested lis­ten­ers sim­ply by tak­ing advan­tage of the tech­nolo­gies that are out there already. And you can start by com­ment­ing here or writ­ing some­thing on your blog for me to com­ment about!