I’ve been thor­oughly enjoy­ing Hans Abbing’s Why Are Artists Poor?, which formed an impor­tant source in my last two arti­cles. Abbing is an econ­o­mist and a visual artist, and he tack­les the broad ques­tion of artist poverty from the per­spec­tive of both dis­ci­plines, try­ing to fil­ter out the biases and myths that color tra­di­tional interpretations.

As a part of his dis­cus­sion, Abbing brings up the ques­tion of what con­sti­tutes a pro­fes­sional artist. Accord­ing to econ­o­mists, pro­fes­sion­als are peo­ple who earn some non-negligible por­tion of their liv­ing via their pro­fes­sional activ­i­ties. This def­i­n­i­tion works for a lot of the activ­i­ties humans do, but it’s prob­lem­atic in the arts. Con­tinue read­ing “Is There Such Thing As A Pro­fes­sional Composer?” »

A self-help guide to becom­ing a composer

In the first part of this arti­cle, I talked about some of the prob­lems with study­ing com­po­si­tion in acad­e­mia, and I offered some alter­na­tive ways that com­posers might cul­ti­vate their craft more effec­tively (and prob­a­bly less expen­sively too). Here, I’m pro­vid­ing a sort of Top 10 list of life lessons for com­posers. Real­iz­ing that you have no rea­son what­so­ever to lis­ten to my advice, I’m try­ing to couch this in terms of wis­dom I have received from oth­ers or that I can back up some­how, with attri­bu­tion when pos­si­ble. This is by no means com­pre­hen­sive, but these are def­i­nitely issues that I think every com­poser needs to inter­nal­ize for them­selves in one way or the other. Con­tinue read­ing “Why Com­posers Should Drop Out of Uni­ver­sity (and What They Should Be Learn­ing), Part 2” »

The chal­lenges of learn­ing com­po­si­tion in academia

I’ve always said that I learned despite my edu­ca­tion and not because of it, and after my master’s degree I decided to put my money where my mouth was and not pur­sue a PhD—much to my relief, the com­mis­sions and com­pos­ing con­tin­ued any­way. A few months ago I read a great arti­cle in Slate by William Pan­na­packer that really struck home for me. The basic premise was not that new: uni­ver­si­ties are mak­ing them­selves irrel­e­vant in the human­i­ties, arts, and sci­ences. What was refresh­ing, how­ever, was that this wasn’t an anti-intellectual rant, it was just an hon­est exam­i­na­tion of what higher edu­ca­tion as an insti­tu­tion is try­ing to do and how it thinks it should fit into soci­ety. So what if your goal is to be the best com­poser pos­si­ble and to have your music heard by other peo­ple who are inter­ested in sim­i­lar types of music? Should you get a degree in com­po­si­tion? Con­tinue read­ing “Why Com­posers Should Drop Out of Uni­ver­sity (and What They Should Be Learn­ing), Part 1” »

Like most com­posers, I absorbed cer­tain widely accepted musi­cal axioms from my uni­ver­sity stud­ies, but they’ve never been entirely sat­is­fy­ing. As a con­se­quence, I con­stantly search for bet­ter expla­na­tions, in the process hope­fully becom­ing a bet­ter artist. One of the issues I’m increas­ingly focus­ing on is how music his­tory is inter­preted. Although I have pre­vi­ously argued for an enhanced role for music his­tory in com­poser edu­ca­tion, I also think we need to re-examine how we use (and abuse) that his­tory. In my own prac­tice, let­ting go of false history-based causative asso­ci­a­tions, what I see as a kind of com­po­si­tional his­tori­cism, has paid cre­ative div­i­dends. Con­tinue read­ing “Let­ting Go of 20th-Century Historicism” »

Recently I dis­cov­ered the amaz­ingly addic­tive new web­site Quora, where peo­ple ask ques­tions on cer­tain themes. After a basic setup, I was instantly directed to a very intrigu­ing ques­tion for me: Why do peo­ple study music the­ory? I argued that music the­ory helped per­form­ers make more informed inter­pre­ta­tions. I also argued that com­posers were gen­er­ally hin­dered by music the­ory, because it’s a ret­ro­spec­tive dis­ci­pline and com­pos­ing is inher­ently forward-looking. Lots of peo­ple dis­agreed with me of course… Still, I’m going to advance the idea that if we want to cre­ate bet­ter com­posers (though I’m not sure we really do—the com­pe­ti­tion is already pretty fierce), we need to reduce the empha­sis on music the­ory, increase the empha­sis on gen­eral analy­sis skills and crit­i­cal think­ing, and make music his­tory the cor­ner­stone of musi­cal edu­ca­tion. Con­tinue read­ing “Improv­ing Com­poser Edu­ca­tion: Less The­ory, More History” »

In a pre­vi­ous post, I dis­cussed the dif­fer­ence in our reac­tions to music when we choose it (active selec­tion) ver­sus when some­one else chooses it for us (pas­sive selec­tion). I claimed that the end­less choice we expe­ri­ence thanks to Inter­net tech­nol­ogy was mak­ing it harder to enjoy pas­sive musi­cal selection.

Upon fur­ther reflec­tion, how­ever, I see that I am actu­ally mak­ing less active music choices nowa­days than I used to, and tech­nol­ogy is part of the rea­son why. So I’ve decided to con­duct an exper­i­ment: How long can I avoid mak­ing active lis­ten­ing choices, and what will that do to the way I hear music? Con­tinue read­ing “Exper­i­ment: Can I Com­pletely Stop Choos­ing What Music I Lis­ten To?” »

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. Con­tinue read­ing “The Starv­ing Artist: Full Time ver­sus Part Time” »

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. Con­tinue read­ing “Eco­nom­ics vs. Art: Why a good fit has never existed” »

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. Con­tinue read­ing “AudioMi­cro: Musi­cal Value Online” »

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. Con­tinue read­ing “The Fal­lacy of the Classics-of-the-Future Argument” »