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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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? (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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? (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…)

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…)

I was intrigued last month when I received a message from website AudioMicro.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…)

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…)