This is a reprint of the first edition of my e-mail newsletter.

For some time I’ve had a newsletter signup form on my website but this is the first time I’m actually sending a newsletter out!

I plan on doing this 2–3 times per year. For more frequent info, see my website or Twitter. Unsubscribe link at the bottom.

Contents

• Upcoming Concert: Halo Ballet Première – 24 Oct 2010 – Toronto
• Upcoming Concert: Hockey Story – 20 Jan 2011 – San Diego
• Oksana G. Opera Development Workshop
• Results of Experiment: Can I Avoid Choosing the Music I Listen to?
• Help Me Help You: Collaborative Audience Building

Première of Halo Ballet — Toca Loca, X AVANT Festival, Toronto

Gregory Oh and Toca Loca première my new piece, Halo Ballet (Bipolar Disorder NOS) on the X AVANT Festival’s all-dance pro­gramme. Choreography by Julia Aplin. Halo Ballet is a piece for live performers (piano, electric key­board, percussion, and harp) and electronic dancers, per­formed in real time within the Halo videogame environment.

It’s much more common to have live dancers with synthesized music, but we’re doing it backwards. The synthesized "dancers" will be performed by a team of videogamers, clicking away in sync to Toca Loca playing live. The programme also includes works by the legendary John Oswald of Plunderphonics fame and French composer Georges Aperghis.

Toca Loca always put on an awesome show, so don’t miss it!

If you can’t make it to Toronto, hopefully the performance will be on YouTube before too long, or be repeated live in your town. There’s a version of the piece that uses electric guitar too.

www.musicgallery.org www.ticketweb.ca

Hockey Story Performance — Luciane Cardassi, Sonic Diasporas Festival, UC San Diego

Thursday, January 20, 2011 Conrad Prebys Concert Hall, UC San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, San Diego, California Concert 10:30am (yes, that’s am) Free admission

Luciane Cardassi and I have the privilege of opening UCSD’s first Sonic Diasporas Festival, featuring the works of the music department’s alumni. On this concert, Luciane gives a repeat performance of Hockey Story, which she commissioned in 2009. The piece, for piano, electronics, and the voice of the pianist, takes a look at hockey in all of its dimensions, from the pro level to young children, players to fans, suspense to stats. All of this from Luciane’s perspective as an expat Brazilian transplanted to the Canadian Rockies.

Luciane has premièred several of my piano works now, and she is a sensitive, diverse, and moving performer. You can see video of her doing the piece in studio on YouTube, linked to in the Musical Works section of my website.

musicweb.ucsd.edu/concerts

Attention video artists: I have been looking for someone willing to collaborate with me to make a live video component for this piece. If you have time and are interested in hockey, let me know. We can include video on this concert if it’s ready. Otherwise, on a future performance.

Oksana G. Opera Development Workshop in Toronto

In collaboration with Colleen Murphy and Tapestry New Opera, I have been working on a large-scale opera over the past few years. We’ve had a number of exciting developments lately and I’m currently working toward the completion of the first 7 scenes, or about 45 minutes of music.

Highlights:

Aug 2009: Piano–vocal workshop of scenes from Act 1 at the Banff Centre.

Feb/Mar 2010: Orchestral workshop performance with the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra and Chorus in Toronto.

Feb/Mar 2011: Workshop of new scenes in Toronto, stay tuned for more details.

If all goes well funding-wise, we are looking at a full production in the next two or three years.

Synopsis: The Enslavement and Liberation of Oksana G. is set in 1997 and is the story of a young Ukrainian girl, Oksana, who is tricked into prostitution. She escapes in Italy and finds herself at a Catholic safehouse set up for Kosovo War refugees. Meanwhile, her pimp has fallen in love with her and risks everything to find her again. At the same time, she and the priest who runs the safehouse fall for each other. The three eventually come together in tragedy.

Results of Experiment: Can I Avoid Choosing the Music I Listen to?

For those of you who visit my website, you will have noticed that I maintain a blog on the philosophical, social, and pragmatic aspects of composing in the 21st century.

Inspired by, ahem, my new smartphone actually, I wrote a post titled, Can I Completely Stop Choosing What Music I Listen To? I was interested in seeing how my perception of music would change if I completely stopped using my collection of CDs and MP3s. Would I appreciate music more? Would I pay more or less attention? Would I stop listening to music or listen to more of it?

The results of my “experiment” are now available as a comment to the original post. In short, I think it’s a good palate cleanser and worth doing from time to time. I actually bought some new music as a result of not having access to my regular collection.

Other recent blog posts: The pros and cons of relying entirely on your art to pay the rent, reviews of concerts in San Francisco, why money and art have never been good friends.

Help Me Help You: Collaborative Audience Building

I’ve been trying to find ways of making composition more visible to the culturally inclined public at large, and I’d like your feedback. Arts organizations are getting better at finding strategies—the Globe and Mail had a great article about it a few months ago—but individual artists still largely work in isolation, waiting to be discovered or sucking up to the people they think will advance their careers.

Yet more and more, I believe artists have a responsibility to be organizers of culture and not just creators. We are drowning in music. Nobody cares if you write a fantastic piece, even if you’re the next Beethoven. But people do care about transcendence, about having meaningful experiences.

We need to find ways to bring what we do to the people who will be moved by it, and to present what we do in a format that is flattering to its strengths. After all, even the best piece can be unbearable on the wrong concert. We have to put on really good shows and invite the right audience.

Lots of people say social media will save the arts, but as was pointed out astutely on Chamber Musician Today, having a blog or a Twitter feed doesn’t do anything unless it has a purpose. I enjoy writing, so I’ve been trying to make my purpose the creation of interesting content; texts that will enrich the musical experiences I create.

So tell me what you think. We have ensembles. We have festivals. We have websites, blogs, and other Internet resources. What can we do to make these work better together, to support each other—and not just to promote our careers, but to genuinely touch the hearts of listeners? I’m not talking about putting on a concert, but about building a better music scene.

If you’ve got ideas, feel free to share, or post them on your blog and let me know so I can link to them. I will continue to post my ideas on by blog or on Twitter.

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.

Both approaches have their merits, but they lead to different kinds of experience. Passive interaction with art, in my experience, is more likely to lead to serendipity: We are more likely to have transcendent “ah-ha!” moments, as if the universe were in tune with our feelings at the moment. That’s why when the perfect song comes on the radio, it’s so great. If you had chosen the song from your iPod, you would not have the same satisfaction.

On the other hand, directed experiences that require a lot of effort also tend to be rewarding. This is one of the main reasons I enjoy composing more than doing the dishes. This is also probably why any artistic or athletic activity is enjoyable.

The Internet gives us an easy directed experience most of the time, and I’m not so sure that’s good for art. Or at least, it might change the kinds of art we use. Back before recorded music, people were much more receptive to any kind of musical sound, because it was relatively hard to hear music—basic economics at work. But people also rarely had a choice of what to listen to, which affected their relationship to the music. Once people have choice, they become more picky.

Having instant access to anything, as we now have de facto, is incredibly powerful. But it also imposes limitations on us. It degrades the quality of our experiences with the things we do choose, because we know there’s so much more available. In order to really enjoy art—which is the point, after all—we occasionally need to purposefully let go of purpose.

For me as an artist, this is tricky. I imagine it’s even harder for people who don’t think about the arts all day long. I hope that as our relationship with “everything all the time” matures, enough people will realize the need for purposelessness to make it easily accessible for everyone.

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?

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.

The blog is hosted by classical music station, WQXR, in New York, which puts it into the radar of people who would potentially be interested in what composers do and how they think. It’s also an example of reciprocity in content creation. For artists like composers who tend to be relatively obscure, it helps make them more accessible to those who might be interested. And for the readers, it’s a source of quality, genuine content. I’m certainly not big on self-aggrandizement on the web, or ads disguised as stories. But people create music because it is valuable to other people, so if we can find ways to create secondary materials—in this case a blog—that increase the value of our musical work for listeners (through greater understanding, providing of context, etc.), then that is a good thing and everybody wins. Composers increase their audience base and audiences have more fulfilling encounters with new work.

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!