The idea of kissing takes on very different connotations in different languages, and I wanted to find a connotation that was as universal as possible. Therefore, in Kiss Around the World I decided to focus on the idea of the nurturing kiss, the kiss a parent would give a child. This was the most universal use of kissing I came across. Romantic kissing, which is what I initially thought would make the best focus, is not universal. It did not exist in much of Asia before the arrival of the Europeans; Koreans and Japanese actually use a modified form of the English word for romantic kissing.

Musically, Kiss Around the World is made up of a series of short sound units, usually one per word, that are arranged and developed into a lyrical, flowing texture. Being a composer obsessed with fragmentation and contrast, this was a novel and stimulating challenge for me that grew out of the theme of the piece and the musical materials at hand. The result is a soothing, gentle piece that has certain aspects of a lullaby, all the while employing the collage/mosaic techniques that are the hallmarks of my style. There is even a little collage surprise at the end of the piece…

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. Money, and our current economic system, was designed to handle finite commodities that can be traded. This is when classical economic theories show some semblance to reality. These same economic theories fall short, however, in correctly measuring other kinds of real value, not just in the arts, but in all areas of human activity, because many of the important things that we do cannot really be measured in monetary value. And when we do try to measure these things in a monetary way, it often causes new issues (e.g., giving away sex vs. charging for it).

A recent episode of the TV series House reminded me of this fact. A doctor wanted to know why he was being paid less than the other experts on his team when he had the same qualifications and was as useful to the team. His boss said, “Come on, you know salary isn’t based on what you’re worth, it’s based on what you can negotiate.” Because he had no competing offers of employment, he was being paid less.

Creative artists (as opposed to interpretive artists) fall into the same pit trap. A composer is always disposable, because his or her labour can always be replaced with someone else’s. Sure, a particular composer might have a profound artistic message to share that would touch a lot of peoples’ lives. But there are always hundreds of other composers with a good, if not life-shatteringly profound, message to share. Some of them will be young composers who have never had any professional opportunities to speak of and would jump at the chance to gain experience. But once they have this experience, they haven’t gained any bargaining power, because they never have real “competing offers” and there is always someone new who is ready for the next “opportunity” to work for free.

The situation is different for visual artists, because they create objects that can be sold. A painting can be treated like any other rare object and fits in perfectly with traditional economic theories: if there is only one original, then it commands value if many people want it. But for a composer or a dancer or a singer, the original does not exist: dance and sound are intangibles that can’t be held in one’s hands. True, there are some superstar performers who can turn their very presence into a rare commodity to be sold, but this doesn’t help composers or choreographers or playwrights or filmmakers—or any other artist whose work is intangible and realized through other people’s efforts (through interpretation, in other words).

This problem, to my mind, invalidates the argument that good artists will be able to survive on the merits of their work. The creative artists—the ones who come up with the vision for the art in the first place—almost all work in the intangible realm, and their work falls between the cracks of our economic system. It cannot be assigned value and hence it is assigned a default value of zero, despite the fact that we instinctively know this to be an untrue valuation. Our society avoids the issue by giving other (often menial) jobs to people who work with intangibles: Composers, your job is to get students to enroll in a university music program; singer-songwriters, your job is to perform in such a way that you can sell a lot of t-shirts. Nobody actually tries to assign value to the intangible work that makes the person valuable in the first place (i.e. creating music).

To complicate this issue, our economic system also rewards instant gratification and the production of goods that can serve the most people at the least cost, regardless of quality. The system doesn’t do a good job of distinguishing value from monetary worth, and neither do most people in the system (the “consumers”), because they have been trained to make short-term decisions based on price alone. The classic example of how this type of economics works out is the obesity epidemic. People eat a lot of fast food because it tastes good (at least in the few seconds after it enters your mouth), it’s cheap, and it’s readily accessible. Sometimes it’s the only option, as a result of monopolistic pressures on the part of the fast-food industry. But we have come to a general consensus that it is not healthy and it costs us dearly on the long run, both in terms of health and our wallets.

Therefore, in the cases where the arts do provide tangible products for sale (paintings, sound recordings, DVDs, etc), the market does a poor job of judging their value. Successful artistic “products” are those that replicate the McDonald’s phenomenon in their respective disciplines. They tend to be disposable, quickly forgotten, and easily replaceable. They become fillers or background to our lives, as opposed to adding to them. And this is a truth that is as applicable in the high-art realm as in the popular one.

Before modern media, people were much more receptive to art in general because they rarely experienced any of it. Today, they still rarely experience any of it, but they do experience a replica of art, equivalent to how fast food is a replica of real food, and which is similarly designed to take their money without providing any long-term value. So it’s no surprise that there is antagonism against supporting the arts: the economic framework of our everyday lives can’t evaluate it, and what does get presented to us as art too often is only artistic replica.

This is hardly a justification to stop supporting the arts, however. Lest we forget, there is hardly an industry in the Western world today that does not rely on subsidies to survive. Real, open, free capitalism is just too brutal. There is a strong hypocrisy in claiming that the largest banks and auto manufacturers in the world might somehow need subsidies to survive (despite public disapproval) but that the arts should be self-sufficient. No human activity, economic or otherwise, is really self-sufficient, and we should be especially sensitive to those that are poorly served by the reigning economic theories. We need to remember that these are only theories, not truths. And perhaps a wake-up call in this respect will end up being the most lasting legacy of the 2008 credit crunch. Art has never been a good fit for economic theory, but that doesn’t mean it has no value. After all, it’s been around longer than history and refuses to die despite our neglect, so art must be something pretty important to humans on a fundamental, biological level. The only question is do we want to allow as many people to access real art as possible, or allow it to get buried under a mountain of replica?

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. Unfortunately, this aspect didn’t receive the attention it should have, so while there were some great moments, there were also stretches of generic music that marred the evening and created the impression that we were somehow required to “earn” the Ligeti, as opposed to enjoying a well-rounded concert that built up to it.

To start, the Ligeti was very well done. This is a hard piece, full of microtones and delicate balances that require intense concentration and preparation on the part of the ensemble, and it was clear that their hearts were into it. It came off well and was a satisfying end to the concert, and there’s not much else to say about it. Properly done, this piece is always a winner and it was a good choice for sfSound.

There were also a couple of gems within the premières. David Coll’s Untitled II particularly stood out as a competent and interesting piece. He managed to balance extended multiphonic techniques in the clarinet with the violin and piano in a way that sounded whole; the clarinet didn’t sound like it was doing something unrelated to the other instruments, as is often the case when using multiphonics in an ensemble setting. And the musical form was convincing and elegant.

Similarly, Pen and Pencil Drawer by the composer going by the pseudonym of Canner MEFE was a strong piece, and managed to cover a lot of ground for a duet between oboe and clarinet. Most of the piece consisted of disconnected lines that met in dissonant rhythmic unisons at irregular intervals, but what really made the piece stand out was that it didn’t commit too dogmatically to this principle. Canner MEFE allowed him-/herself to stray musically as dictated by the materials, and this led to a rich development that was interesting from start to finish.

In contrast, many of the other pieces had a distinctive student-y flavour. Most stuck religiously to a pet technique or concept, giving the impression of etudes or composition exercises more than concert works. Tragically, a lot of these pieces can be summed up using a single new-music label each: sparse Webernesque Klangfarbenmelodie, or post-minimalist melodicism, or air sounds, or extended trills, etc etc. In fairness, all composers learn by imitation and experimentation, but placing these works-in-progress next to a masterpiece like the Chamber Concerto was not really fair either; they couldn’t possibly compete.

Another drawback of the format is that works by less experienced composers require more rehearsal and effort, because often the score translates the composer’s intentions imperfectly. By doing 10 such works, the ensemble set for itself a herculean interpretive task. And on top of that, sfSound clearly had to do a good job of the Ligeti—that was what was drawing the crowd. So they were really stuck between a rock and a hard place.

New music programming is one of the trickiest things out there, but getting it right is essential to the art form. Perhaps a better approach would have been to do a similar concert without the Ligeti, and then on a later concert reprogram the more successful student works again. That way, young composers get a chance to work with a high-calibre group, but they also don’t have to stand in the shadow of giants. And then the successful pieces can be presented again, later, in a context where they will shine, and where they make up part of a unified program. After all, the real test of a new piece is not whether it gets played, but whether it gets played more than once.

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. I also wonder if his music hasn’t suffered somewhat from his early career successes, as there is a palpable air of obsessive–compulsive disorder in his approach to composition, which doesn’t seem to have changed much in the last 30 years, if the two pieces on the program are representative.

First, it’s worth noting Benjamin’s impressive pedigree, not only having studied with Olivier Messaien as a teenager, but securing both the honour of being his youngest ever student and the one he called his favourite. According to critic Thomas May, Messiaen felt Benjamin had some of the characteristics of the young Mozart. He was also propelled to composer stardom (to the extent that exists) when, at 20, the BBC Proms performed his first large orchestral work, Ringed by the Flat Horizon, in 1980. He was and still is the youngest living composer to be featured on the Proms.

As a composer, Benjamin has been described as coming from a modernist aesthetic, but with softer edges and perhaps a greater sense of melodicism or expressivity. It is for this latter aspect that he has been most frequently lauded as one of the great composers of today.

He also has the luxury of not taking on very many commissions, writing a piece once every two or three years for the most part. He has stated in this regard that he likes to take a very long time to compose each piece so he can make sure every note and every detail is correct. In regard to his Duet, he says, “…it took me months to get the gears in exactly the right place.… It’s extremely complicated, like the cogs in a watch: If one tiny aspect wasn’t in the right place, it wouldn’t work.”

This kind of meticulousness raises a mild alarm for me. Not that there is anything wrong with being thorough—this is one of the things I pride myself most highly on in my own work—but composition is an extremely solitary task, as Benjamin admits, and when a piece of some 10 minutes or so, like Duet, becomes the focus of several years’ work, there is a strong danger of becoming myopically obsessed with the inconsequential minutiae at the expense of the music. This is a hold-over of the modernist tradition; that we still feel justified in judging a composer based on the rigour of his/her compositional process. Yet we now know that Iannis Xenakis, for example, got a lot of his math wrong. But Xenakis’s pieces are still great, despite the fact that not only the minutiae but also many of the larger structural processes don’t “fit”—in the end, Xenakis sacrificed rigour, whether consciously or not, to the music, and it is the music that we remember him by.

Duet, furthermore, takes on another clichéd obsession, this time the conflict between the piano and orchestra in a piano concerto. This is why the piece is a duet, because Benjamin wants to balance the two forces. I’ve never really understood why the piano is such a problem to the orchestra though. Nobody talks about the conflict of the percussion section or the harp with the orchestra, but these are instruments with similar problems to the piano in a feature role. It’s a problem of historical precedent, not of acoustics. You can write a successful ensemble piano part for orchestra, you just need to keep in mind the characteristics of both forces and use them as appropriate.

The issue seems to be more one of Benjamin confusing his tastes with acoustic reality. He decries a lot of the 19th-century piano concerto repertoire for what essentially boils down to a melodramatic approach to the instrument. Fine, but it is an approach that works for a lot of people, it’s not a “problem” of the piano versus the orchestra, but a successful take on the relationship that he happens to find distasteful.

In the end, Benjamin deals with the issue by removing the violins from the orchestra, because they are “too legato to work with the piano” or something to this effect (so much for the piano trio repertoire). The result is a piano concerto with a focus on the lower strings and winds. Benjamin does deal with these forces masterfully, and there are some great moments and colour combinations. But he fails to meet his goal of transcending the piano concerto form: the basic polyphony and percussiveness of the piano is still contrasted to the single-line sustain of the orchestra. True, they don’t double each other’s harmonies, but the orchestra serves as a colouristic accent to the piano quite often, and is that really so much different?

If anything, the piece feels straight-jacketed. Benjamin’s obsession with the cogs of the music leads to a pristine surface and undoubtedly rigorous structural core, but the piece doesn’t have a strong sense of shape. The ending comes as an awkward surprise, sort of like, “Oh, it’s done now?” For Benjamin’s criticisms of Messiaen’s limited control over form, Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques that followed Duet on the program had a much more satisfying sense of musical unfolding, ending with a long stretch of static chords that provide a beautiful balance to the chaos of the multiple layers of bird calls that make up the rest of the piece.

So with all the focus on Benjamin’s pedigree, if I were to offer him some compositional advice at this point, it would be to loosen up and to write more pieces. He could take a hint from Rihm’s experiments with stream-of-consciousness, first-draft composing to come up with greater spontaneity and perhaps a more audible sense of form. Unfortunately, Benjamin may have fallen victim to his early successes by becoming overly obsessed with his process and stifling further growth. After all, the young Mozart did not reclusively retreat to a piece every few years, he wrote prolifically until his death. Benjamin, for all his potential, would benefit from the same. As it stands, he writes competent and masterful works, but they aren’t masterpieces. One hundred years from now, the history of late 20th-, early 21st-century music will certainly remember Rihm and Murail and certain others of that generation, but will they remember Benjamin?

• On 25 Jan 2010, Brazilian-Canadian pianist Luciane Car­dassi pre­mières my new piece, Hockey Story, on the Hap­pen­ing 2010 New Music Fes­ti­val in Calgary. This piece, on the theme of hockey, is for speak­ing pianist and electronics.
• Shortly thereafter, on 19 Feb 2010, I’m off to Holland for the première of a piece commissioned by ork­est de erepris. This piece, Elegy of Others, is a collage, with quotations ranging from Vivaldi to R.E.M. and Antonio Carlos Jobim.
• Finally, February wraps up with the orchestral reading (28 Feb 2010) of a section from the opera, Oksana G., that librettist Colleen Murphy and I have been developing for several years. We conducted a successful piano-vocal workshop with Tapestry New Opera at the Banff Centre in August and now the Canadian Opera Company is doing a reading, as part of the long-term development process for this piece.

These events mark the culmination of several projects from 2009. Several other projects, including some unconventional ensembles and the use of unusual media, are under development for 2010. Additional details will be posted when available.

On the most basic level, AudioMicro sells stock music: music to be used in commercials or for other secondary purposes, which has been released from copyright by the composer for this purpose, if you pay a fee. Fine, whatever, there are a lot of these companies online. I’ve actually used them before, for a section of the opera I am developing currently with Colleen Murphy and Tapestry.

But AudioMicro goes a little further than most. First of all, anyone can upload stock music to sell on their site, as compared to most stock music companies, which employ a few composers to write all the music. Reciprocally, they are trying to reach out to audiences other than the typical stock music ones—for example, people making YouTube videos. And in addition to their stock music service, AudioMicro has a series of resources for creative artists online. They have a blog dedicated to issues surrounding online music and copyright, with topics ranging from individual artists to technology issues, copyright law, and regulations. They also have a series of links to other online resources and interesting artists, covering a wide range of interests and genres. So you can actually learn something interesting about music that interests you through their website, all while you’re finding background music for the video of your cat you want to post online (or at least this seems to be their concept).

So while I generally have not found many online music business models worth endorsing, I definitely give these people credit for trying to create real value. There’s certainly a need for stock music, although it is only a small niche within music in general. But more interestingly, AudioMicro shows that there are ways to create value around musical content online, and this is something that I have been suggesting, for a while now, that composers do. My blog shares many of the same goals as AudioMicro’s, and it’s nice to see other people thinking along the same track.