Bookmarks from November 2nd through November 6th:[del.icio.us]

• Lefsetz Letter » Blog Archive » Streaming -
  “Ownership is for pussies. Oh, don’t e-mail, you same people who said we should save the album. Notice what a few years do? Radiohead says no more albums, Rush the same thing. So, when your favorite acts give up on the long form format, don’t you too? I know you do. Because you’ve stopped sending me hate mail in quantity. If I write the album is history, I now only get a couple of e-mails complaining. Whereas I used to get hundreds! How many years until when I say streaming is the answer that I get the same miniscule response? How long until you nod your head and say I’m right? The major labels are confused. They were for streaming a decade ago, then they were for ownership, and now they’re afraid somebody’s gonna come up with a streaming solution and become the new MTV and have all the power. But maybe not all the profits, the majors are investors in Spotify.”
• Your Carnitas Wonderland – Los Angeles Area Digest – CHOW
  “Metro Balderas is a family operation with four locations in Los Angeles, each run by a different member of the family. exilekiss visited the Highland Park branch, run by Jasmine Guzman. Every Saturday and Sunday, Metro Balderas offers eight types of pork carnitas in the Distrito Federal style for a barrage of carnitas taco glory.”
• WitnessLA.com » Blog Archive » ON BEING BLUE: A Cop Talks About Cops – Part II -
  2008 Witness LA interview with the new LAPD chief of police, Charlie Beck
• Benjamin Smith: Improvisations -
  “Benjamin Smith is an improvisor currently living in West Orange, New Jersey. Smith ventures far beyond the standard idea of jazz improvisation, into a sound world equally influenced by modern classical. All of the pieces are free improvisations invented at the time of recording, and feature Smith alone at a Yamaha P-70 digital keyboard. He say…”
• Kalvos and Damian Show #557 with The Brick Elephant Festival of Firsts – ImprovFriday -
  “David “Damian or is it Kalvos” Gunn traveled to Valley Falls, New York, to join M J Leach at the Brick Elephant for the “Festival of Firsts”. MJ co-hosted the K&D show for the four-hour concert that included music by Karl Korte, Dan Evans Farkas, Nicholas Chase, Alfred Brown, Al Margolis, Doug Van Nort, Petr Machadjik, Kjell Perder, Conrad Kehn, and Richard Lainhart — as well as David and MJ’s music. The show is up on the K&D site in four parts. http://kalvos.org/shows-2009.html There was a lot of interesting partial and full improv on the concert — full program is at ReSoundings.Net. “
• Newspaper first to go live with public Google Wave | Media Owners | Revolution -
  “Following the hype around the launch of Google Wave, German newspaper Welt Kompakt has become one of the first to launch a public Wave, helping readers interact with the title”
• The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave -
  The Complete Guide to Google Wave is a comprehensive user manual by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash. Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that’s notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you’ll learn how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. Because Wave is such a new product that’s evolving quickly, this guidebook is a work in progress that will update in concert with Wave as it grows and changes. Read more about The Complete Guide to Google Wave.

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2. Bookmarks for August 17th through August 22nd [del.icio.us]
3. Bookmarks for October 12th through October 15th [del.icio.us]

some pieces you ‘compose’ and other come out fully formed. “Principle of Sufficient Irritation” (POSI) is one of those pieces that sprang out of me almost fully realized almost exactly 4 years ago.  even though i’m just a part-time adjunct teaching monkey, fall has always been very busy for me and not really a good time to compose and by the time november rolls around i’m itching to get some new pieces written. thinking back in 2005 it’s pretty telling that i remember most of the details around this piece.

Background

i know i had some rehearsals coming up with the PBE and really wanted to get some pieces written, especially something modular and improvisatory. besides having played terry riley’s “In C” the lloyd rodgers group had been performing many of his very simple and effective ‘black book‘ improvisations. i had already written one decent modular improvisation (tong aesthetics from the music from summerland CD), and i really wanted to explore another approach than the large through-composed pieces that were common in the late 60’s and 70’s.  the funny thing is that when POSI was created (we originally referred to it by the day it was created. 11/25/05 was the original title)  the particulars really didn’t matter anymore, i just needed a piece for a rehearsal and using improvisation as process sounded like a great way to create something new in a short time.

Writing Process

the process creating POSI was pretty simple; play a lick on my trombone, plug it into the sequencer and loop it while i improvised another one. i pretty quickly realized that the first gesture worked so well in canon that it was almost a piece by itself and after the initial inspiration my only goal was to “make it change”. my luck/the god(s)/karma must have been smiling on me that day b/c although i have never been good at writing canons, that day i figured out that i’m pretty good at improvising them (at least in this modular style). the rest of the piece pretty much wrote itself and needless to say i was pretty excited for my upcoming rehearsal.

1st rehearsal

well… here’s where i tell you that i took it to rehearsal and the group ‘got it’ and we played it down the first time. but actually the group was pretty stumped and it took us 3-4 rehearsals to get the hang of it. and it took a few tries of figuring out how to move from section to section and what the “rules” of the piece are.  the main thing i remember is that when we finally played it like it was in my head i had that feeling of completion and pure joy that i experienced when i first wrote it and immediately became the piece that we ended all rehearsals with promising a frolicking good time at the end of every rehearsal (and performance)

Improvisation, Performance and Recording

even though the licks are written out, one of the best feeling of performing a modular improvisation (like POSI) is the ability to not worry what to play, but how to play it. each performance is like you get to visit something musically familiar, but each time you can experience it differently. i think performing a modular improvisation is very similar to giving actors an outline for a scene and telling them what needs to occur.

this recording of POSI was our last take of a two day  session and in which we were all pretty mentally tired and loopy. if you were listening to the piece while looking at the score i’m sure it would be pretty hard to follow along, but if you listened a few times you should be able to hear that we are basically playing variations of variations of what was originally written down.   i think its a great example of the pure improvisatory and musical joy that the PBE creates during many of our live show and i know that getting it on tape in a semi-artificial studio setting (in which the vibes and clarinet were recorded in separate rooms without being to see anybody else) is a testament of the great musicianship of scott, ryan, carl, bruce and eric. overall the way we were playing that afternoon i think we could have recorded the album over the phone and still have captured a great performance.

enjoy,

paul

Principle of Sufficient Irritation (originally 11/25/05)

* Paul Bailey, Trombone
* Bruce Gallego, Electric Guitar
* Eric Hendrickson, Keyboards
* Scott McIntosh, Clarinet
* Ryan Nunes, Vibraphone
* Carl Stronach, Bass Guitar

Recorded and Mixed by Paul Bailey and Marlon Luna
Recorded at California State University Fullerton and Swing House Studios Hollywood 

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1. principle of sufficient irritation @csuf 04/11/07
2. minimalist/postmodern listening list
3. going to rehearsal

Bookmarks from October 24th through October 31st:[del.icio.us]

• Brow Beat : The DORF Matrix: Towards a Theory of NPR’s Taste in Black Music -
  “In the weeks since the publication of the All Songs Considered list, I have been puzzling over NPR’s musical coverage—in particular, its approach to black music. I wondered: Could NPR’s musical taste be as lily-white as the “The Best Music of 2009 (So Far)” list? After scouring NPR’s Web site and studying its broadcasts—All Things Considered profiles, Fresh Air interviews, even the music interludes played between segments on NPR’s marquee programs—I can report that the answer is no. It’s not that NPR doesn’t like black music. It merely maintains a strict preference for black music that few actual living African-Americans listen to.”
• why i’m not afraid to take your money« by amanda fucking palmer -
  “I know this for myself – it’s something you’ve done since you were six years old, and there’s a sense that if you stop giving 100% you are doomed to failure, and that is unacceptable. No wonder so many players hate their sport – the surprise is that so few admit it.” And despite all the kudos, money and silverware, there’s a reason it’s the top players who suffer most – because they’re the ones playing the most tennis, as they don’t get knocked out in the first or second round. So they have the least free time, the most mental stress and suffer the most physically. Agassi’s avowed hatred for his sport is far from exclusive to tennis. British cyclists Chris Boardman, the former Olympic pursuit champion, and Tour de France star David Millar have both admitted to not really liking cycling. “In Boardman’s case,” says William Fotheringham, the Guardian’s cycling correspondent, “he liked the winning not the cycling itself, and he drove himself to win.”
• Why did Andre Agassi hate tennis? | Sport | The Guardian -
  “I know this for myself – it’s something you’ve done since you were six years old, and there’s a sense that if you stop giving 100% you are doomed to failure, and that is unacceptable. No wonder so many players hate their sport – the surprise is that so few admit it.” And despite all the kudos, money and silverware, there’s a reason it’s the top players who suffer most – because they’re the ones playing the most tennis, as they don’t get knocked out in the first or second round. So they have the least free time, the most mental stress and suffer the most physically. Agassi’s avowed hatred for his sport is far from exclusive to tennis. British cyclists Chris Boardman, the former Olympic pursuit champion, and Tour de France star David Millar have both admitted to not really liking cycling. “In Boardman’s case,” says William Fotheringham, the Guardian’s cycling correspondent, “he liked the winning not the cycling itself, and he drove himself to win.”
• don’t care about old composers-rogerbourland.com -
  “I asked Aaron Copland what he was composing in fall 1976: “Nothing, and I am not accepting commissions; if people want to play my music, there’s plenty of it available in my catalog.” Today I went through an old journal, listing old UCLA Music faculty and their appointments and salaries. I looked at all the composers and saw their careers over a span of decades. I sighed and thought about how none of their music is heard these days. And I’m sure that this is true for every music school in America.”
• Brand (Dis)Loyalty « The Quick and the Ed -
  “A couple of days ago a message popped up on my Tivo informing me of a new service, “Blockbuster on Demand.” Ah, Blockbuster. That takes me back, to that period of about four years when all of the mom and pop video rental stores had been driven out of business but Netflix hadn’t yet arrived, so the only way to rent a movie was to drive to the nearest Blockbuster, spend ten minutes trying to find a place to park, discover that your first eight choices were unavailable, wait in line for fifteen minutes, and be informed by a surly, inattentive clerk that you owed the Blockbuster corporation 27 dollars in late fees and other assorted charges. snip This is what happens when organizations use their monopoly status to mistreat customers. Sooner or later the world changes, your monopoly is gone, and you pay the price… If there’s one thing that’s pretty certain, it’s that people will have more education choices in the future than they’ve had in the pas
• Music review: ‘Einstein’ at the beach | Culture Monster | Los Angeles Times -
  So “Baby Einstein” won’t make your kids smarter after all. Last week, the Walt Disney Co. confessed that plopping kids in front of its video does not count as instant education and offered to refund gullible parents their money. But the few enlightened parents who tried “Einstein on the Beach” instead may have a wiser tale to tell. Saturday night, Jacaranda, the West Side’s new music series, concluded its first concert of the season at First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica with excerpts from Philip Glass’ groundbreaking opera he conceived with director Robert Wilson in 1976. Glass offers the option of replacing the women’s voices at the end with a children’s chorus and that is what Jacaranda did. Asking youngsters to show up late at night to sing the last eight minutes of a five-hour avant-garde work is, obviously, unreasonable. Then again, little about putting on “Einstein on the Beach” has ever been practical…”

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2. Bookmarks for October 12th through October 15th [del.icio.us]
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i was very surprised to get a mention in the new yorker online, so if you haven’t visited her before let me please introduce myself:

although i’m a “blogging composer” it’s probably easier to keep up with our bigger conversation with other wide range of very interesting and uniquely individual composers that i follow on twitter:

• shane cadman
• jc combs
• corey dargel
• alan morse davies (doesn’t tweet much, but i really like his music)
• andrew durkin
• randy gibson
• david seidel
• david toub

• in the meantime i’m having fun making music with on james comb’s ImprovFriday group. you can find a mp3’s of last weeks program here
• i also participate in the NetNewMusic group (created by jeff harrington) where we like to debate and argue about almost anything you could think about relating to new music
• i’m currently working on figuring out how to make music (live and improvised!) using my laptop, iphone (buddha machine, scruti box, bloom…) and kaossilator.  below is the latest result;

Music for Controllers V

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2. Music for Controllers I
3. Music for Controllers III and IV

What Soundcloud is and isn’t:

Soundcloud isn’t a site to build a new audience. yeah there might be some bleeding edge enthusiasts who come looking for great undiscovered tracks, but in essence its a place to build a communities around shared musical tastes and micro-genres

Soundcloud is a place for people to share music and network with each other. for me i think it could become a social network based create/post/listen to music based on aesthetics/micro-genre as well as place to post works in progress and side projects.

with Sequenza 21, NetNewMusic, and even NewMusicBox there are now a wide variety of places on the interwebs for the new music community to gather and share ideas, but Soundcloud is the first step (although problematic) where we can share our music by by genre, aesthetic and performance practice.  it allows you full control of how your music is streamed and downloaded and there are also moderated groups where you can upload your music and hopefully find others that have similar aesthetic sensibilities.

conceptually there are a lot of possibilities in this service. you can join or organzine groups by genre (art music, pop, rock,dance…) or micro-genre (alt-classical, electronic, drone, field recording, microtonal…), and even performance practice (improv, Csound, max/msp, ableton), the possibilities are endless.

overall i think its a big step in the right direction for composers to find and share music with each other to most importantly it needs wider influx of people to fully realize its potential. and after using it for three weeks here are my observations:

1. strengths
   1. the ability to create groups based on micro-genres are its strength
   2. more international
   3. ability to follow artists you like is easy way to passively keep track of their music
   4. comment on specific sections of tracks
   5. easily share and post music across the interwebs
   6. statistics of listens and downloads
2. weaknesses
   1. it feels like a beta
   2. right now its mostly dance music
   3. free version you can upload only 5 tracks a month, pay version is expensive
   4. limited tagging/genre search functions
   5. lot of spam, need to have private groups and block spammers

in essence, if i want to discuss new music i go to NetNewMusic and if i want to listen to it (in theory) i go to Soundcloud.

In Soundcloud the social networking features do most of the work for me. first i can search for tracks by group, then by popularity and favorites (although i wish their search and tagging features were better). once i find a few composers i like i can also search and see what tracks they like and are commenting on and most importantly i easily download those tracks into ITunes to listen whenever i wish. it’s far from perfect, but right now makes the process of finding composers who are making interesting music much easier.

right now the biggest problem is there a lot of crap. if more people (especially NNM) started using the site… it might get a lot better. by using the site for a few weeks it’s easy to see what the future of music social networking holds. whether its Soundcloud or somebody who does it better i can see the benefits.

even though there is a lot of dance music, here are a few diamonds in the rough:

heinali – To Live (with Maria Navrotskaya)

ALONE TOGETHER – MUSIC DADA (bara no kodoku)

iamanasterix – Chopin played on a Broken Piano

Mark harris – I am a long way from home

randygibson – Mujeres de Juárez

so here is my official invitation to come aboard and try out Soundcloud. at first i suggest to only upload a 2-3 tracks (you only get 5 free tracks a month), join a few groups and maybe start your own (you could even create a group for those Spoken Word/Glitch/Noise projects you have been working on!)

my moderated groups
http://soundcloud.com/groups/alt-classical
http://soundcloud.com/groups/post-whatever

other groups that are worth checking out
http://soundcloud.com/groups/art-music
http://soundcloud.com/groups/sonic-art
http://soundcloud.com/groups/drone

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3. Bookmarks for June 26th through June 29th [del.icio.us]

Bookmarks from October 16th through October 22nd:[del.icio.us]

• Space, movement and Rudy Perez — latimes.com -
  “The Times cited Perez as “the conscience of Los Angeles dance.” That he continues choreographing is something of a minor miracle. Not only is the arts economy dire, but Perez also has been visually impaired for the last decade. Moving slowly and burdened with hazy vision at best, Perez says the work keeps him going. The Armory engagement is particularly meaningful, because it was there, in 1992, that the Center first presented “The Dance-Crazy Kid From New Jersey Meets Hofmannsthal.” clip “The site-specific concert is dedicated to Cunningham, who died in July at age 90. It features two works with original music by longtime collaborator Steve Moshier, performed live by the composer and his Liquid Skin Ensemble.”
• WitnessLA.com » Blog Archive » The Arrest of Alex Sanchez – Part 5: A Game Changer?- UPDATED -
  “FIRST LET’S RECAP THE BACK STORY: Alex Sanchez is the El Salvadoran-born, former MS-13 gang member who transformed his life to become a nationally respected gang intervention leader. Sanchez founded and is the executive director of Homies Unidos, and has been praised in cities across the country as someone who has helped turn around the lives of many, many young men and women. Then this past June, Alex was arrested by the FBI as part of a federal racketeering indictment and accused of plotting the murder of another gang member among other charges. It was not that the Feds accused Sanchez of shooting anyone himself, or personally dealing in drugs and guns. Worse, the indictment maintained that Sanchez is a shot caller—AKA a leader—of a particular clique of MS-13 who ordered such things done. He was, said the Feds, leading a double life and had successfully pulled the moral and psychological wool over the eyes of his myriad friends, admirers and supporters…”
• Big teaching cuts this week at CSUF – College Life OC – OCRegister.com -
  “Faculty at Cal State Fullerton will be on furlough Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week as part of a larger move by the California State University system to save hundreds of millions of dollars to help balance the state budget.” The furloughs will affect thousands of students and hundreds of professors and lecturers at Orange County’s largest university, and will be followed on Friday by a general furlough for management and staff workers who aren’t on the faculty.
• Là ci darem la mano- A Conversation October 18, 2009 -
  “Joe: seems weird to me that the entire genre of classical music is being portrayed as this sort of backwards, insecure entity it seems to me that the person who wrote it comes from the point of view of an outsider me: yeah except she doesn’t, i mean she knows classical music pretty well Joe: I’ve learned from the school that musical taste is extremely personal and if there are overall “musical trends” it’s more a result of music that either appeals to everybody by being kind of soul-less or music that captures the thinking of a particular time period to me, the 21st century is tech-obsessed, and preoccupied with nostalgia and particularly reworking the classics so these musical trends don’t surprise me at all. They’re just a product of the times…” …. Joe: it’s not new me: but 1. none of these artists are new they’ve been around Joe: though to some it may be great… … me: there’s no angle on this article that makes me care. none of the content or position is interesting”
• The Random Band Game – ConceptArt.org Forums -
  This is incredibly fun and addicting… 1 – Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random” or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band. 2 – Go to “Random quotations” or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album. 3 – Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover. 4 – Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.
• LA Eastside » Target’s humorous “illegal alien” costume -
  ‘Dear Target, What’s up with this “Illegal Alien” costume? I don’t get why a corporation that boasts about giving back to the community (can’t say I didn’t thoroughly enjoy the ¡Bienvenido Dudamel! concert a few weeks ago) and celebrates Nuestra Gente would sell such a despicable costume. (I know not all undocumented immigrants are Latino, but we do make up a plurality of the population.) Is it to make a buck? Is that enough to alienate (no pun intended) undocumented immigrants, their allies and our dollars? Couldn’t you make a buck by not selling “humorous costumes” that demean and make light of the situation faced by many undocumented immigrants and advance dehumanizing language? Is it humorous that thousands die trying to cross the US/Mexico border? Between 1998-2004 1,954 migrants died on the perilous journey north source). Since 2004, the Arizona Star Border Death Database has recorded 1,193 deaths at the border. Funny, no? ¡Chistoso!”
• Artists Paid-Spotify -
  “I love Spotify as much as the next music fan, but its struggle to extract value is in danger of becoming a spectacle. To consumers it’s a miracle, to the industry it’s a problem to be solved. The strategy looks right – drive a developing ad-products business as much as possible, while trying to upscale users to a pay model for a better experience. It has to be the test case and I would strongly argue, deserves all the help it can get from its music partners. We need to begin to realise though, Spotify’s potential. It has the potential to generate revenues equivalent to a large niche, while at the same time eating further into CD revenues. This is the future music market – fragmentation into a number of niches.”

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3. Bookmarks for October 24th through October 31st [del.icio.us]

buyer beware, the cloud is not your friend

Update: (10/21/09)

after 6 days my service was restored and i recieved the following email from Renee in CrashPlan customer support

1. Is this an isolated incident that is affecting a small number of CrashPlan customers or is this a bigger issue?

The issue is isolated to a small percentage of users on a single server.

2. What is the eta of having our data restored and when we can use the service again?

End of day

3. Are we going to get a credit for the downtime?

We are extremely sensitive to our quality of service. First we want you to be satisfied with the service. We are doing are best to rectify the existing situation. In light of your particular situation, we’d be happy to provide you one of following options:

Credit you three months of service

OR

Provide a full refund if you simply do not wish to continue with CrashPlan.

Please let me know how you’d like to proceed.

4. Does CrashPlan have its own CrashPlan?

CrashPlan does have its own CrashPlan. All our servers are redundant at the hardware and disk level. Central 8 is in the final stages of revalidating data.

overall my concern is still the same. I understand a service going down, for a backup service 6 days is a big deal and I might have been able to chill out with some updates and communication along the way.  Good customer service is about transparency and being able to admit things are complicated. hopefully this is a lesson learned.

Cloud Computing Fail?

Maybe cloud computing isn’t quite ready yet?

Since last January I have uploaded over 100GB to two separate online backup services. I first started with Mozy last January and overall it seemed to work just as advertised. Every night for a couple of weeks i uploaded all my data to the “cloud” and then voila; I have a safe off-site backup.  Of course nothing tech is ever that simple.  The first problems started back in July when mozy’s client software wasn’t syncing with the cloud and their customer support  was only vague and scripted responses by email only. After about 3 weeks of no joy I finally got hold of some domestic customer support and by then I had given up on their service.

Next up… CrashPlan

CrashPlan on the other hand seemed much better at the start. uploads were very snappy, and one of the things i was able to do was to move my folders from one drive to another and CrashPlan would recognize it and not upload it again. Unfortunately (like much on the interwebs where much is promised and little delivered) I really should have looked beyond the basics and checked them out further (but more on that later)

funny… as i write this a new client is downloading automatically, but it still says my files are unavailable

The Current Situation

So as I’m writing this there has been no official word why I have not been able to backup for 5+ days. It’s also ominous that this afternoon customer service closed a forum topic (Central8 unavailable) with the explanation that the topic is “wandering off” and suggested that we all individually email customer support. (smells like behind the curtain damage control to me)

I’d say its a pretty shitty way to treat customers who depend on this service as a pretty vital need. I myself have 2 albums worth of “digital masters” and am uploading the mixes of my latest album daily so that if there is a catastrophe that destroys my laptop and external drives (I live in Los Angeles;  Fire, Earthquake, Riot… Hello?) than at least I have a backup in the cloud.   Their  suggestion in the forums to buy a terabyte drive for $100 as a secondary backup is what? throwing in the towel?

“frankly, the entire reason we support multiple destinations is because we don’t believe in relying on ANY single provider, that includes us.  If you care about your data, back up to at least two destinations.  CrashPlan is consistent in recommending this.  Given cost of a 1TB drive is now < $100.. it really makes a lot of sense.”

The whole reason I use this service is that I don’t have to make daily backups of my mixing and carry a drive back and forth to my job so I can have my own personal “off-site backup”

At this point I also feel pretty dumb about the whole thing. With just a cursory review of their customer service forum (or should I say forums here, here, and here) show that they seem to setup and have the habit of quickly abandoning customer service when times get tough. My experiences with both CrashPlan and Mozy show that a consistent online consumer backup service is still really a bleeding edge technology. (or maybe it’s  financially not viable for a company to create a stable and scalable back-end) It’s one thing to suffer through problems of inconsistency with a photo editing program like Pixelmator (which i really enjoy even though it still has some quirks (like when my toolbar goes missing now and then)

So at this point I still don’t know any of the following:

1. Is this an isolated incident that is affecting a small number of CrashPlan customers or is this a bigger issue?

2. What is the ETA of having our data restored and when we can use the service again?

3. Are we going to get a credit for the downtime?

4. Does Crashplan have its own CrashPlan?

No related posts.

A.M. updates her original post and expands her confusing alt-classical umbrella to include most everybody

Alt-Classical Addenda

anne can call it whatever she wants, but the commissioned, academic music they have to play is always going to be toothless and banal.

the big problem about article’s like this is that it promises the moon (yet again), and pulls out the rug on the those more adventurous early adopters who pay decent money to catch “the new music scene” which in turn makes it harder for me to get people to come out to my shows.

just to be clear i’m not saying the groups mentioned in these articles are poor performers or all the music the play is shite, but i’m very clearly pointing out at any one of their concerts you do have to suffer through at least 1-2 commissioned pieces they must play to “pay the bills” and keep the grants coming in. the audience has no idea that this pay to play is going on (it’s just like selling prime shelf space at the supermarket to the highest bidder) and yet comes away from the whole experience wondering if they must be stupid b/c they “didn’t quite understand the music”

on the other hand…

thank goodness most kids today don’t read the paper

p

Related posts:

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Bookmarks from October 12th through October 15th:[del.icio.us]

• Views: Professors Should Embrace Wikipedia – Inside Higher Ed -
  “I propose that all academics with research specialties, no matter how arcane (and nothing is too obscure for Wikipedia), enroll as identifiable editors of Wikipedia. We then watch over a few wikipages of our choosing, adding to them when appropriate, stepping in to resolve disputes when we know something useful. We can add new articles on topics which should be covered, and argue that others should be removed or combined. This is not to displace anonymous editors, many of whom possess vast amounts of valuable information and innovative ideas, but to add our authority and hard-won knowledge to this growing universal library”
• Terminal Degree: Is he kidding? -
  “My previous employer just blogged about the need for a “health care solution that will enable a healthier place for all of God’s children.” Longtime readers of this blog will get the irony: While I was an adjunct there, I couldn’t get health care through my employer. Maybe that sentence should read “all God’s full-time, tenure-track children.”
• Betty Draper Affair Advice: Not That You Asked | Unsolicited Advice -
  “Betty. Betty, Betty, Betty. I’m not going to recap your various travails here. I’ll leave that to the experts. But I can give you a few concrete pieces of advice (or plot developments, or whatever) that might exponentially increase your happiness. Ready?”
• The music of Los Angeles on CitySounds.fm -
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  “Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather”
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• Acclaimed composer Terry Riley celebrated at Bard — Page 2 — Times Union – Albany NY:3351: -
  “Most composers notate a piece to perfection — hoping for a masterpiece, perhaps — and then move on. But Riley is a dabbler. “I’ll present a piece before it’s finished, then it will be different at the next performance,” he says. “Then after 10 years it will take a new shape that I’m happy with and maybe change again after 20 years. It’s because I improvise so much.” …his roots in jazz and Indian ragas should both come through on Saturday. To him, the term improvisation seldom means starting from nothing and just seeing what happen “They’re improvisations but built on existing structures, maybe not chord progressions (as with jazz), but modes and rhythmic cycles and looplike patterns,” Riley explains. “We’ll have a little rehearsal the day before (at Bard), but also a bit of flying by the seat of the pants. I like that and I think these players do, too.”
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• Cloud Eye Control joins the traditional and futuristic — latimes.com -
  “On the fifth floor of the Los Angeles Theater Center in downtown L.A., the members of Cloud Eye Control are trying to create poetry out of collaborative technology. On one end of the large studio, makeshift tables hold laptops and electronic equipment, with a cluster of musical instruments nearby. The middle of the room is dominated by two free-standing screens… It’s only days away from the debut of the full-length version of “Under Polaris” at REDCAT, and there still are snags to work out, transitions to be smoothed. This performance combines live action, recorded animation, multiple projectors, mobile props, and a five-piece live band, so there’s still much to do. And, in the spirit of what Chi-wang Yang, the director of the group, calls do-it-yourself aesthetics, they somehow pull it all together.”

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besides mixing up the alt.classical genre with the alt.classical transcription bandwagon. (Alarm Will Sound’s Aphex Twin transcriptions and Christopher O’Riley’s Radiohead piano music) she tries then label group like the Absolute Ensemble,  8th Blackbird, and A Time for Three being alternative.

as alternative to what? the Kronos Quartet (aren’t they the same, but with mouthpieces), the Philip Glass Ensemble (maybe a step backwards) Terry Riley (now come on!!!)

to cut her a little slack i can agree with that performing outside the concert hall is alternative when she states it:

“represents an attempt to break down the traditional concert format, which can seem stiff and off-putting to the younger crowd whom all musicians these days would like to attract.”

anything to get rid of the old dogma… but in the next paragraph her description of these groups betrays her fundamental argument that these ensembles:

“are increasingly featured on mainstream, traditional concert series and orchestra programs. The Library of Congress series, committed to new music since its inception, has presented Alarm Will Sound and the Absolute Ensemble, both “bigger groups that are at home in so many worlds,” says Ann McLean, one of the library’s three senior producers for concerts and special projects. Young musicians today, she says, “go back and forth with more ease than you would have heard five years ago.”

anybody knows just because you can say you played at CBGB’s “back in the day” doesn’t make you punk and just because you happen to play a few record company showcases in a hip urban nightclub doesn’t change that you are selling old wine in new bottles.

but when it comes to groups like AWS, Absolute, and 8thBB what is so alternative about their ensembles and the music they play other than a “rebranding” of older”hits” from the academy. not only is most of this music funded through commissions (which are funded by grants, which is really just an updated version of the traditional patronage system), but in essence what is being celebrated is publicly funded chamber music in that is repackaged and commidfied as something edgy, hip, and dangerous.

my main gripe is that at the heart of these”alt-classical” ensembles is a patronage system made supports the institutions of the state (academy and and the government) i’m not saying the music they make is a bad thing, but supporting a system in which the composer in effect has to in effect ask for permission and approval to have his/her music performed is no innovation.  the academics can bitch about popular music all they want, but pop music gave us the greatest innovation of all. a garage band in which a group of kids with no musical training a some crappy guitars could make music just because they wanted to.

along those lines i also think she totally missed the point in her description of the Great Noise Ensemble as a garage band

“Like most garage bands, alt-classical groups have to make the most of limited resources. “A lot of the vibe we’ve developed,” says Bayolo of the Great Noise Ensemble, “is that we’ve been forced to work in a tough economy with very little money, as what I call guerrilla music makers.” The ensemble’s musicians are still working without pay, though the question of performance space has been solved since the group took up residency at Catholic University” (for pay?)

of course the alt-classical genre isn’t really that new and just describes an older tradition (lloyd rodgers, robert ashley and all the other “downtown composers” and at least back to erik satie to name a few) of making DIY art music that is self funded, free market, and communal and libertarian. all are invited and I’d like to think genres are less important than the act of creating music for yourself and your musicians first and not based on what your ‘funding’ sources are interested in paying for.

i can only assume that as these “alt-classical” groups become more “successful” others will jump on this marketing bandwagon. so what happens when everybody is alt-classical? then its just as meaningful as those cheap von dutch™ trucker hats or an ed hardy ™ signature hoodies. i wonder what robert williams thinks about the appropriation of his aesthetic to sell such hollow crap.

as jeff harrington pointed out earlier today:

“There is no influencing the spectacle. The winners are already decided.”

*this is a slightly rewritten version of a post i made yesterday on NetNewMusic titled “Are 8th Blackbird and Alarm Will Sound “alt-classical” and takes a few good ideas from the participants (Jeff Harrington, Paul H. Muller, Antonio Celaya and Steve Moshier) and weaves them into a updated and more fleshed out opinion

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