As soon as the posts from this old version of the blog have been merged into the new one, the new one will replace this old one at my main address, http://www.simonhewittjones.com/blog/ . That could take a week or two.

In the meantime, all new blog posts will be at the new one: http://simonhewittjones.typepad.com/

[I’m taking a month or two out to work on MusBook, and then will be back with another tour of Palestine in December - Autumn from Four Seasons (3rd of 4 year cycle!), then a full program of MP3s and concerts from January onwards. I’m also about to properly upgrade this blog.]

One luxury (necessity?) is that I’m getting to talk with - and more importantly to listen to - lots and lots of music people about what they need from digital media, and indeed how they suffer from digital media, either the lack or surfeit thereof!

A fundamental question, one of the ones that comes up most frequently, is the question of TIME .

We’ve barely scratched the surface of technical possibility, and yet we’ve already reached saturation point for each individual. We don’t have any more hours in the day.

(I was worried that I hadn’t blogged for a week, when I meant to be writing every two days. Yet the calendar says it’s been two weeks! The time just got sucked away…)

I’m as passionate an advocate as anyone for the new possibilites that digital technology brings to human endeavours. But anything that keeps me from practicing the violin, frankly, is a nuisance (unless it’s really really interesting!).

So why on earth am I involved in launching a social network for ‘Classical’ (etc.) music?

**

The best questions I think social media can ask are how to create new experiences, or improve existing experiences, by improving the connections between people. And it does this incredibly well, because the structure of a network means that it’s not long before an infinite number of possibilities exists.

But how can you fulfil an infinite number of possibilities?

Well, obviously you can’t. And many of us are dying trying!

The alternative - embracing ludditism - doesn’t seem any better either. I can think of several people who have run away from Facebook in terror, or never ‘given in’ to joining it. But that doesn’t seem sensible either - it’s more like a repressive fear- or ignorance-based action to keep at bay a set of possibilities that are completely unpredictable. But it’s totally understandable, and I have a lot of sympathy for people who have made that decision because they don’t want to be overwhelmed.

In fact, that itself does highlight the problem: there is no way of handling an exponential increase in possibility when we don’t have any increase in available time. Technology has caused this problem.

Technology also needs to solve this problem.

As well as providing us with extraordinary possibilities that we never could have dreamed of, technology also needs to a) tell us how many of those possibilities we should pursue and how, and b) pursue them for us as much as is feasible, thus limiting the actual number of actions that we need to do to make the most of the possibilities worth pursuing.

There is a balance point. But it’s so individual, that it’s probably impossible to reach. However, we can at least aspire to it through the technology that we use, and how that technology responds to us.

In the meantime, all we can do is triage .

The premiere concert, at Winchester Cathedral, was recorded for broadcast on Radio 3 and it’s finally available (for a very limited time!) on the ‘Composer of the Week’ programme.

Listen to it here:http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00mrybm

There’s more about the project here: http://www.towardssilence.org.uk/

There is one final concert that takes place in the UK in Guildford Cathedral on October 9th. We’ll also be playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (I play ‘Summer’).

It’s an amazing exploration of life and death, this work. Be sure to read Paul Robertson’s very moving essay about how he and Tavener were both deeply affected by terrible events - it’s quite remarkable that this project happened at all…

There’s something about knowing that something is happening right now that gives the possibility that, ultimately, anything could happen. I think that that knowledge makes something more exciting, and more engaging. It’s a subtle difference, because if know that you’re watching it not in real time, but still don’t know what actually is about to happen, then anything can still appear to happen.

Yet, at the back of your mind, there’s the thought that whatever has happened has already happened. Maybe it’s my imagination? (Well, it is without a doubt my imagination, that’s the point!.) But I think there is a noticeable difference in your state of awareness if you genuinely believe that something is happening in real time. I admit therefore that it is purely psychological. But I do think that there is a future of web broadcasting every bit as exciting as live TV of old, for this very reason. Either way, I’d love to hear from fans of live sports who have experienced a definite difference in the way they consume sports TV in real time to when viewing a retransmission or highlights programme.

Train of thought: I’m watching Matthew Barley live on the Plushmusic website . They’re amazing and have webcast production really right, I think. Webcasting will be de rigeur in a year or two, mark my words. It’s a massive part of the future of music.

It’s brave to birth a book in public, and he’s been doing just that on his ArtsJournal blog. After a couple of (quite necessary) false starts, he’s come up with a structure that is exciting a lot of people.

I’m excited, because it’s potentially the first academic-yet-populist work that really gets to the heart of the post-1990s reality of the Classical Music tradition, in the same way that, say, Alex Ross really got to the heart of the contextual meaning of 20th Century classical traditions in The Rest is Noise.

Sandow has published the draft of the index here: http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2009/09/unveilng_the_book.html

And I will now proceed to replicate and rip it apart here

**

My comments in bold italics, addressed directly to the author…

I — The Crisis

Chapter I –Rebirth and Resistance

Classical music is changing. The changes can lead to its rebirth. One reason for change is the classical music crisis - the fear that classical music is receding from our culture, and that its audience might disappear.

Yes, and yes! But of course that fear of losing the traditions is a proxy for a fear of change. Because inherant value of traditions keeps them relevant, therefore they will survive even if they have to adapt. Should this be made clear from the beginning, or later on?

But there’s resistance to change, and some people don’t even believe that the crisis is real.

Though this becomes less true by the day, because reality bites fast.

Chapter II - Dire Data

Why the crisis is real.

Proof that the audience really is aging. How dramatically younger it used to be. How its aging signals a very large cultural shift.

This seems very USA-centric to me. The USA is only part of the picture, because it was especially susceptible to the age of the ‘music-as-a-product’ recording industry, which is now declining to levels which will be mostly irrelevant compared to the new free-at-point-of-use music economy.

Tangible evidence that this shift really happened. The decline in classical music ticket sales. Recent data from the National Endowment for the Arts, and how it shows that the classical music audience will almost certainly shrink.

See above. Have you researched Freemium (Chris Anderson), and considered how that might relate to the pre- and post- recording industry ecosystem?

Chapter III — Falling Behind (The Problem of Funding)

Why money for classical music will become harder to raise.

Classical music in what form? I can’t wait to read this chapter

Chapter IV — Renegade Culture

The central problem — our changing culture. The world has changed, but classical music (mostly) hasn’t. Which explains why people — of all ages — have lost interest in it.

The central problem?… or the central opportunity?!?! From whose perspective are you presenting this issue………….????????

Part II –The Nature of Classical Music

Chapter V — Defining Classical Music

What classical music really is, and why we should save it. Its great tradition.

Maaaaaaaaaaaaarvelous.

Chapter VI — The Myth of Classical Music Superiority

Why classical music isn’t better than music of other kinds. Why it’s harmful to think that it is.

Too right. Hope the responses to the inevitable objections to this are watertight and comprehensive. I can’t begin to imagine how to debate the quality of, say, a moderately boring 1700s European composer against a moderately boring late 20th Century indie rock band… glad you’re writing this book not me…

Chapter VII — World Gone Wrong: The Failure of Classical Music

Why classical music - in the ways it’s presented today - no longer makes sense. Why it functions now as a refuge from contemporary life.

Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. Did I say yes? Yes!

Part III — Alternatives

Chapter VIII — Pop Music and Popular Culture

Why popular culture is smart and valuable. What it can teach classical music. Why classical music has to coexist with it.

Yes again. But to what extent does the distinction need to exist? It’s been useful up until now, but does that mean it will be useful in the future? How will people see musical genres in 20, 50, 100, 200 years’ time?

Chapter IX — Classical Music in the Past

How classical music used to be freer, and more expressive. How this can inspire us now.

Totally. Does improvisation have a place in this chapter? It’s a big and worthy subject, with many Classical links. How did people extemporize concerto cadenzas 300 years ago?

Part IV — The Rebirth of Classical Music

Chapter X — What Should We Do?

How classical music has already changed. Problems we still have to solve, and recommendations for further change.

Technology is the medium not the message. For a start, musicians should get a grip, stop moaning about ‘having’ to use the Interwebs, get used to the idea that spending a couple of hours a day using electronic media is not a bind, but an extraordinary privilege that allows for untold creative and communicative opportunites, then go and use the rest of the day to play music and to do some practice!

People should also learn how to use social media properly, recognize that the time they used to spend watching TV is increasingly being replaced by online interactions, and understand that a decade or so from now, we won’t be thinking of ‘offline’ and ‘online’ in the same way as we do today… just that we’ll all be participants in a world that in today’s terminology could be described as an ‘offline’ world, enabled by ‘online’ technology. Internet everywhere, via Wimax technologies, interactive surfaces across every type of building, object, personal and public area, etc., will offer untold possibility to everyone.

Timelessly valuable performances, recordings and compositions will automatically retain a relevance. All the rest will sink in a morass of infinite information… much like most of our blog posts [side note - that’s why books will never die!]

Chapter XI — Rebirth for Real

The future. What classical music might look like, after it reconnects with current culture, and becomes a truly contemporary art.

This could be really exciting… but how easy to predict?

But what’s clear is that this change is enabled by technology. Which means it will probably happen much more quickly than people anticipate. Get this book out soon!

Also, somebody - somewhere, somehow - needs to start a full debate on the term ‘Classical Music’. In the present ecosystem, it’s a necessary and indispensible term, and therefore any attempt to replace it won’t work. But once the entire nature of how Classical Music connects with contemporary culture changes, the true meaning of that term may need to be re-evaluated.

##

There are already a lot of great comments on Sandow’s blog post that address some of the above, and music education is something that is also mentioned.

Critical to this whole issue is the upside-down teaching of music that goes on across the world almost everywhere; most often musicians who go into teaching as a secondary choice, and don’t give it the committment and sense of responsibilty it deserves.

Music teaching at its worst is about drilling information into people about how to play, rather than nurturing creativity. It’s yet another post-industrial response to a 20th Century problem. Again, I refer you to the legendary Ken Robinson video, which explains everything.

Really, Classical Music cannot be fixed until Music Education is fixed. Because the future of both is irrefutably intertwined.

Which also gets to the heart of why musical traditions are so important for society in our newly globalized world. And therefore why Classical Music NEEDS to change.

I hope this finds you well.

I am writing to invite you to be part of a new orchestra I am launching called ‘International Orchestra of Me & Friends’, which is a vibrant ensemble of award-winning musicians with a unique mission of bringing innovative programming to the world concert scene through dynamic musicianship, hallmarked by collaborative partnerships that transform communities by creating dialogues with individuals and diverse organizations over the long term, and through the promotion of transformational experiences by way of live events that feature the top young musicians of London, second to none, and rapidly developing a brilliant reputation as some of the most imaginative, energetic performers of today’s Classical music scene, who engage audiences through our award-winning conceptual programmes, resulting in the creation of extraordinary synergy with every person that we touch through music, as demonstrated by our uncommonly expressive, critically acclaimed prize winning events that showcase our distinguished and successful young artists, the stars of tomorrow, hand selected graduates of the finest conservatoires, who in partnership of some of the most brilliant cultural figures of our time, display a passionate understanding and interpretative brilliance that only our wealth of new talent can provide, and because of whom we are already having some interest from agents, sponsors and record companies, all talking to us about possibilities for planning about some potential concerts, in the world, bringing joy and transcendence to hundreds of thousands of souls across the globe.

I would love to hear from you if you would be interested in being a part of International Orchestra of Me & Friends, and although at the moment we are still looking for a sponsor so we cannot offer you a fee, I’m sure you will see that it is a really prestigious project and great for your CV, and also I hope you will like to be part of a new and exciting top innovative group of the most vibrant musicians like yourself. Please do get in touch with me at monkey@chides.net and we can discuss further!

Best wishes,

Simon Hewitt Jones

PS - the real tragedy? I barely made more than 10% of this up. 90% of it is a word for word amalgam of the publicity material of the unique dynamic websites of the top young new ensembles of London, passionate and engaging, second to none…

“It has never worried me at all that different genres of music – classical, jazz, pop – are supposed to be separate: if I like the sound of it, I’ll find a way to play it. I always feel that putting labels on music rather misses the point. It seems more interesting to think in terms of music that dances, or that sings or weeps – these are categories that we all understand in our hearts, and which exclude nobody.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/sep/17/extreme-cello-matthew-barley

Although Kings Place (in King’s Cross, near the Eurostar terminal) has now been open for a year, I’ve only just visited it for the first time. It’s very impressive; not just architecturally, but also for it’s great mix of contemporary programming, places to eat, office buildings, and general everything-mixed-together-in-a-good-way-ness. It’s actually the home of the Guardian newspaper, who live in the top of the building, along with various other companies. The arts centre, including a gallery, concert halls, conference and music facilities, etc., is in the basement. A great public atrium fills the centre of the building.

This mush-everything-together-organically approach is totally reflected in the programming, and here’s where the venue is groundbreaking: there’s no distinction between types of genre as in other arts centers. No ‘Classical’, ‘Jazz’, ‘World’, ‘Great Orchestras’, ‘Chamber Music Classics’ type series here… there are only the deliniations music, visual arts, spoken word, and the all-important food and drink!

Artists are invited to ‘curate’ the building for a couple of days at a time. The result is an environment that is constantly changing, highly fragmented from week to week, always engaging and exciting, never looking back, always looking forward. It’s an arts centre for the Facebook generation!

In fact, Kings Place is so exactly what I always hoped concert halls would turn into, that I’m shocked how good it is… and I can’t believe that I’ve only discovered it a whole year after it opened! (Then again, I’ve been away).

We’ll be performing in the main hall, which is underground. I’ve yet to try out the acoustics but people have raved about them to me, so I’m hoping it’s going to be an amazing experience.

Matthew Barley’s work is amazing and well worth checking out at his blog, MatthewBarley.com. He’s one of these people who can’t resist grabbing traditional ideas and thrusting them into new narratives, some of which can be very compelling. Here he is talking about another event he’s doing as part of his residency next week. Cybercellist? Perhaps!…

The concert I’m playing in isn’t webcast, sadly (though do come along - Friday 25th at 7.45pm), but all Matthew’s concerts on the Saturday are, including the crazy ‘Virtual Cello’ concert (using the things in the video above) at 9pm (UK time). Exciting stuff, worth checking out if you’re online then.

It’s funny; if you think of Kennedy as a Classical artist, he was way ahead of his time — his cross-genre approach to programming has been there since the 1980s. He was way, way ahead of anyone else - Classical or crossover - when it came to reaching outside the traditional box of classical concert programs - in terms of presentation, programming, stylistic mashups… you name it.

But if you view Kennedy as a rock star, he is in fact quite a traditionalist. His musical heritage draws mainly from the fine masters from the violin and jazz traditions, and he is firmly in the populist, crowd-pleasing camp. He is a masterful act, effortlessly charming (and funny) on and off stage, and it’s great that the rest of the world has finally begun to catch up with him. But violinistically, he has led change like noone else.

Music and the City is back! The only event connecting amateur and professional musicians who love playing chamber music… Next event 10th October. As usual, I’ll be conducting the orchestra. Repertoire will include Brahms: Hungarian Dance No.5, and of course there will be the usual opportunities for drinking wine, playing chamber music and drinking wine. And wine tasting for non-playing guests! And did I mention there’s a wine bar?

http://www.musicandthecity.org/ - you can now book tickets online, too!

Colourful around here, isn’t it?!

In the meantime, For Your Viewing Pleasure:

But no matter. I am deeply committed to blogging, and I will start again in September.

Why the silence?

I have been working on many things - mostly new incarnations of the same things that I’ve been working on since 2005. The last four years (and the next 6 months) were/are the development period. The next 12 months will see all these things fly out into the real world.

It’s all big and proper now - my ideas finally have backing of either real money, or people with the resources to make them happen, or people who can get them in the places where they will really create change.

Give me a couple more months. I’ll write again before Christmas, and in 2010 the music will start pouring out. End of the beginning etc.

Thanks for sticking with me. Seriously. It’ll all be worth it. Nearly there now.

<sorry, tv no longer available>

Programme:

Stravinsky: Duo Concertant

Kreisler: Three Pieces in the Style of Couperin

Poulenc: Sonata

Piano: Daniel Swain - http://www.danielswain.com/

Love it? Hate it? Something wrong? Send a message (can’t help with tech stuff sorry… I’m playing a concert!)

<a href=”http://courtlanemusic.wufoo.com/forms/z7×4m1/” mce_href=”http://courtlanemusic.wufoo.com/forms/z7×4m1/” title=”Contact Form”>Fill out my Wufoo form!</a>

When I was blogging back in 2004, I was dreaming of a time when ‘all-you-can-eat’ music was available. Well, so long as you’re connected to the internet whilst listening, that time has come! A kind of hybrid of Last.fm and a torrent site, Spotify is a massive free-to-stream ad supported music service, which you can also pay a very modest fee to subscribe to if you don’t like the ads.

The best thing (from my point of view as a musician) is that it’s all legal, and proportionate revenues will flow back to musicians. Court Lane Music’s catalogue will be available on Spotify (Imogen Holst should be there soon!).

All that’s needed now a) is every single published track in the world to be available, and b) an upgradable subscription that allows you to download tracks to a handheld digital player (even if that’s on a basis whereby the tracks expire after a certain time, or once your subscription expires).

I’m hooked. Bravo, Spotify!

But that’s what Tommy and I are going to do!

Following on from the Imogen Holst CD, it’s clear that there is a very healthy appetite for the styles and genres of music that we know best. What isn’t clear is whether or not there is a way to produce recordings of this music on a sustainable basis, now that the traditional record label model has totally collapsed.

My hunch is that there is, and that the answer lies somewhere between the words ‘relationship’, ‘experience’, ‘multimedia’, ‘digital download’, and ‘licensing’. Quite where, I just don’t know yet.

So we’ll be turning Court Lane Music into a proper record label in April. We have just secured UK distribution for physical discs, and the existing Imo disc should be available in HMV and on Amazon (and indeed any other UK record store) imminently. More projects will materialize soon. I’ll update you again in a month or two…

Debut recital tour - Culminating in a lunchtime recital on 1 April at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, Daniel Swain and I will be performing a neo-classical programme of Poulenc and Stravinsky. Details here.

John Tavener Premiere with the Medici Quartet - Paul Robertson, the leader of the Medici Quartet (which disbanded a few years ago, but is reforming for this project), is a fascinating man, and we’re going to be working with him on a great project called Towards Silence.

He writes very movingly about near-death experience on the ‘Towards Silence’ page of his website, the Music Mind Spirit trust. It’s a fascinating resource, and I highly recommend anything and everything on there! http://www.musicmindspirit.org/

In the case of Barack Obama, Yes You Can!, not least for his book Dreams From My Father, which I have just finished reading, for it was written long before his ascent to current political heights (if not before a time of such ambitions being harnessed.)

We route (root? In British English they are pronounced the same!) back to identity and belonging.

Obama’s masterful writing, and in my opinion it is masterful, speaks of the feeling of being of something, yet not of something; being the outsider, yet having a tacitly unique connection with the inside; understanding a great deal of something through deeply close indirect experience (such as the experience of a parent, or a sibling, or a lover), yet not actually being of the same.

The more you read into individual histories, of people, of nations, of cultures, the more you can see this at play. One specific human connection, that magical moment where something happens, leads to a connection that, according to established social or national or cultural norms, wouldn’t otherwise have been there. This is the moment where boundaries – national, cultural, generational, personal – are crossed. (The American dream owes so much to this.)

[Digression 1: This is where the Barack Obamas, the Daniel Barenboims, the Ramzi Aburedwans are in their element… they connect the dots that noone else can, using a unique understanding of the relationship between certain places (or things, or people) that noone else has…]

[Digression 2: Thrice, in separate years, I spent extended time in a strange place, somewhere in continental Europe, that profoundly changed me. One of the people I met during that time was an older lady of uncommon insight; one of those who dabbles with ‘new age’ ideas that can ‘freak out’ those of a more domestic nature. I didn’t get to know her well, but I grant this: she knew as well as any layman what made a good performance. Every night, she would return to the house and present me with a concert programme. She’d point at each piece on the printed page. “Something happened”. “Nothing happened”. “Something Happened.” “Nothing Happened”. And I am convinced that not only was she right, but that most of everyone else would have disagreed with her. Such happenings are no reflection on ability or potential… or even on unsubjective reality, for there is no such thing. They are the subjective moments of personal connection. Great performers, like great gamblers, make this happen often enough to turn it into a profession. 20% of people transcended over a long period works as a Return On Investment. But one thing is guaranteed; nothing will reach everyone, and anything will reach someone. As Hugh Macleod says: the market for something to believe in is infinite. Statistics and probability work their magic, what happens happens, and the world moves on.]

There’s a chain of events at play. The flap of a butterfly’s wing… One cross-cultural connection can create a chain reaction that causes a synthesis between a greater number of people than the original connection. That’s too powerful to ignore. A fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a relationship between two separate cultural or national identities comes a step closer through two individuals, but it’s magnified many times as more people come into the equation. Repeat the same through the evolutionary process; you have the recipe for human social evolution… it will only take a million zillion billion years…

Back to our own time… as we reach a point where globalization becomes the norm [seriously… next 20 years… watch out…], it will increasingly become usual for minor connections, random associations, human interactions… things that owe nothing to anything but themselves… to become drivers for disproportionately large social changes.

Not least is this thanks to the never-before-surpassed leverage enabling the individual, via technology, to effect change.

Something happens. It appears to work. It becomes a meme in a community. It becomes a meme in the broader community. It gathers pace… it crosses national boundaries… it becomes the norm.

This could never have happened, at least not with this speed and fluency, before the age of digitalization.

But now the age of digitalization is upon us, it can.

Our age is the transition period.

Finally, everything I’ve been working towards for the last decade looks like it’s starting to happen. I think I’m a few months (everything crossed - things always turn out harder in hindsight!) from the point where lots of initiatives will start to go off into the big wide world, become much bigger than me, and cause some well needed change. And they’ll be run (and owned, and devised) by people who really know what they’re doing.

That’s the best thing, actually, the absolute best thing about my job. Getting to interact with some of the most incredible, incredible people. Several of them. And they’re beginning to take control, and it’s great. But I’m looking for more. Loads more.

Please, if you are exceptional at something, you know what good music is, and you want to get involved with some brilliant projects that will transform the music industry, then get in touch. Send me a link to your blog, or email me your CV. I desperately need you!

I’m looking for so many different types of people (and I don’t care where in the world you are - Europe, UK, USA and AUS are easiest, but Middle east and Asia will follow). I do however care very much who you are, and what you are, and what makes you tick.

You’ll need to be passionately motivated by change, see money only as a consequence, and have the perseverance and creativity to excel in whatever area you’re looking for.

[For a start, I’m looking for great musicians for performance projects. London, NY or Berlin work the best. It would be an honour to collaborate with you.]

But I’m also looking for non-performers: admin people initially in the UK (prob London) and in Australia (prob Melbourne) and eventually elsewhere (working remotely) who are exceptionally stable people with an attention to detail and a real sense of dedication and committment.

I’m looking for tech people (anywhere - you can work virtually)… inquisitive souls who when presented with a problem throw themselves at it entirely until it gets solved. People who understand the profound significance of the technological transitions we’re going through right now, and realize the depth of creativity needed to manipulate technology meaningfully.

I’m looking for creatives… writers, visual artists, animators, designers, graphic designers, web designers, and perhaps others that I haven’t thought of.

I’m looking for mentor figures - directors, investors, musical mentors - who can take an interest and leverage their experience to create change through others.

I’m looking for sales people, management people, customer service people, who are really creative in their own spheres… it’s so easy to do these kinds of roles badly; but it’s incredibly rewarding to do them well.

We [me, ensemble, court lane, musbook, etc] are also looking to hear from partners: companies or individuals whose individual visions we may be able to assist. We have the tools, we’re almost ready, and I am very happy to hear from you.

Thanks again for reading. It will be a privilege to work with you.

[this is not referring to the Classical period, but to the use of ‘Classical’ to describe ‘Western Art Music’]

In response to Peter Tregear’s blog post, and the ensuing conversation on MusBook: ‘What’s in a name?’

Peter & I, like so many musicians and academics, are constantly grappling with the question: ‘Is Classical Music still a valid term, and if not, what should we be saying instead?’. We ask it not just with the motive of musicological enquiry, but also with the more practical question in mind of what terminology we use for MusBook.

I think the problem stems from the fact that, after a certain point in the 20th century, we can no longer define what ‘Western Art Music’ actually is. We’ve kind of reached a ‘credit crunch’ of musical style. [in fact, I blogged about this analogy some while ago: check out http://www.simonhewittjones.com/blog/2007/11/15/creative-tension-in-free-markets-long-post/]

For me, this begins with… I’m not sure, maybe music of the medieval times, or perhaps written notation? [neumes!], but most definitely ends with John Cage’s 4′33”, because as a conceptual work you simply can’t get any further than that end of the musical spectrum, where the silence is the music (ok I know 4′33” is more complex than that - am just making the general point about silence being seen as a lack of noise). I think it can be argued that every musical style can be placed at some point on a spectrum between pure noise, where pitch cannot be identified, and total silence.

So much music before 4′33” could easily be defined as ‘Classical’ or ‘Western Art Music’ because it is distinctly traceable to that ‘Classical’ tradition. Whether that means ‘presented as part of’ or ’seen to be descended from’ or whatever else. Contemporary ‘classical’ composers of the 1960s and their pop contempories The Beatles would not be presented together in the same concert. There were distinct musical segments.

Now, the boundaries that used to exist increasingly don’t. I have ex-Royal Academy of Music colleagues who you would recognize as ‘classical’ instrumentalists, who work with contemporary music groups that don’t have any kind of duty to any kind of boundary. Of course you’ll get Radiohead and Britten in the same concert. Of course you will have a collaboration in a nightclub that fragments late avant garde pieces with commissioned work from an electronica artist, processed through a digital interface via a laptop and punctuated with movements of a Bach cello suite. Of course… I could go on!

Now, you and I, and I guess the musicians involved, would all consider ourselves to be of a tradition… of a tradition of ‘classical training’, or something. But does that mean we are ‘classical musicians’? I simply don’t describe myself as a ‘classical musician’ anymore as I don’t know what it means. If anyone asks, I say I’m a violinist. Yes, of course I play Classical music. In fact, it’s most of what I do! But it is certainly not all I do!

I think the root of this change lies in the social changes that we have seen as a result of technological innovation. I speak as someone who is an early adopter — I remember the first prepaid mobile phones becoming available just as I was finishing secondary education, and rushing to get hold of one, but my more distinct memory is observing over time how the patterns of communication and interaction of the communities around me changed as the new gadgets and tools became more and more prevalent.

As the multiplicity of options increased, so a kind of creative anarchy of consumption and communication came into play, as it does with every disruptive technology (accompanied by the usual chorus of moans and ‘it was never like this in my day!’). But, out of the mêlée, emerges - after a few unsettling months or years of confusion - a clear pathway that becomes the new norm. Remember how SMS messaging caught on? And then smartphones? The iPod?

Consumption of information - especially media and in particular music - is probably as profoundly affected by this kind of change as anything else. The new ways of consuming and communicating that exist now have changed so strongly the ways in which we approach music both as listeners and as creators [or indeed as both — anyone is now empowered to create in a way that never happened before digitalization], that in the future - the existing canon of undeniably ‘Classical’ forms such as symphonies or sonatas excepted - the future of development of musical form and structure (and presentation and performance and everything else) cannot be isolated from external forces as it used to be. We no longer have linear development of musical style - now, we have fragemented-guerilla-social-network-cluster development of musical style!

The facebook generation, that’s perhaps everyone under the age of 30-ish today, does not see boundaries in the same way as the generation above them.

For a generation built up on ‘mash-ups’, facebooking, multi-stream media channels, and more importantly a world wide web where everything is hyperlinked and anything can be connected to anything else, there are far fewer taboos about the need to respect existing genres when connecting forms and structures. If you interact fluently throughout the day by phone, email, sms, facebook or other social network (musbook? ahem!), and face to face, then why on earth would you be bothered by mashing up two contemporary forms from rock and classical music to form something uniquely ungeneric, yet of definite value as a piece of music?

Eurgh… semantics!

So where does my vote lie? I really don’t know. For me, ‘timeless universal music’ is that which I celebrate above all. Sure, Beethoven’s Fifth falls into that category. But doesn’t also Sergent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? [any examples I use here will to an extent be subjective!]. I think this is the nub of the problem; that we have a useful kind of canonization of certain pieces of music that is made highly subjective by long-established boundaries of genre.

At the moment, two potential ways forward I see:

1) to completely reclaim the meaning of ‘Classical’ to mean not ‘Western Art Music’, but instead ‘music which is universally valuable over and above its original cultural context’. Hmm, even already I see several ways to pick that apart as an intellectually faulty statement. But even it were possible, surely to reclaim a word such as ‘Classical’ is a completely insurmountable task. Hang on though: isn’t that what ‘classic‘ means?

Do you listen to Classic music?

2) The other option is to find a new terminology, or indeed to avoid it completely (which is what we seem to be doing with MusBook, at the time of writing).

Is either of these effective? Or are they both completely futile?

I didn’t realize they were blocking the road completely, so I walked up to them. Only when I was fairly close did I become aware of their ferocious beating; pounding on their shields, they were marching slowly forward to a rhythm, like primal warriors advancing into battle. Bang, bang, bang, bang, Halt! Wait!… Forward! Bang, bang, bang, bang, Halt! Forward! Bang, bang, bang…. And so forth. It was mesmerizing.

And yet so timeless. This wasn’t the modern Guerilla warfare we see so often in our lives now. The urban jungle of our modern existence thrives on fragmentation, pure cells of energy, many interdependent yet independent shards of intensity.

Primal beasts aren’t like that. The power comes from the mass, the subversion of individuality into the whole, the overwhelming force of something that holds its own momentum. You get something of it with an orchestra, but not entirely, as individuality is still at play. Not with riot police. Or so I thought.

"Mr Hewitt Jones! You’ll need to turn around. You can’t come this way!"

I’m not used to riot police knowing me by name. For a split second, I was in Orwellian big brother land. But the shock quickly passed. "Who are you?"

The creature shouted back his name; it was someone I knew from school, a singer. For a brief moment the chain of menace cracked. "Oh, Hi!" "Yeah, you’ll have to get out of the way now, you can get down that road there."

Immediately, the shouts began again: "Forward! Bang, bang, bang…" and on they marched. I scuttled out of the way down a side street, and watched as the big black creatures screamed at each other and swarmed to block it off, forcing the cascade of protestors to surge onward down the main road.

That brief glimpse of an individual personality, so quickly submerged back into the whole, just highlighted the raw power of the collective motion. No one person controlled events or was entirely able to stop them. Sure, there must have been someone controlling the hierarchy of the policemen, but the crowd behind them had no such organization. A big creative tension was at play: many large structures were grinding against each other, hanging aggressively in a sustained compromise.

You can sense when a structure is greater than the sum of its parts, even in the smallest groups of people. At the one extreme, string quartets talk of a fifth personality, the essence of the group; at the other, a massed crowed such as a protest or a big celebration can cause a sweep of emotion that everyone is at the same time subject to, part of, contributing to, yet unable to control.

What a beautful thing when it has inherant control and poise, when the mood and emotion and the speed and the motion come together in a coherant rhythm, when the synergy flows without a second’s thought.

And when it doesn’t have that harmony… what a frightening, raw, powerful, dangerous, yet gloriously primal surge of energy it is then.

Either way, the individual has to give way, and dedicate themselves to becoming part of the whole.

You can’t actively destroy something that’s totally entrenched, even if it doesn’t work.

You have to render it superfluous by building something greater and more effective.

Happy New Year, wherever you are!

And so with our music; some we take in phases, some we are friendly with for years, some we love passionately for a while, then never hear again, but for the occasional nostalgic indulgence.

Pop songs are generally the latter; they encapsulate the moment; like a first kiss, they represent something you’ll always remember. But you cannot bottle emotion; it soon fades away.

A step along is the angsty Goth and her heavy metal phase (or for you, was it  Shostakovich?), a confused thrashing to outside ears, but for her, an anchor in a sullen sea of rootlessness.

It’s no surprise the passion lasts a few years, and no surprise either that she goes into a steady job in banking and has 2.5 kids, but that prized Metallica disc will never be thrown out; it is part of where she came from, and it will always have a place in her heart.

Like a parent loved unconditionally, so Mozart and Beethoven and Bach - the universals - are there for you. Maybe the Beatles, for some. You’d never invite them to the ball, but you might go bowling with them. Only on a Saturday afternoon; bring the whole family! You’re in a safe place. The memories are so deep and close that they won’t fade with time or distance: don’t listen to a Beethoven symphony again and you’ll still feel solace from its imprint in your mind. If anyone knew this, it must have been the aging Beethoven: he was devoid of ears, but not of imagination.

And then there are the pieces that are deep and lasting favourites; for me, the Tchaikovsky violin concerto; a stalwart of years of listening. Every time I will find something new; a deeper layer will reveal itself. But also, when I relisten once more after a few weeks or months have passed, it still gives me that initial excitement again; the feeling that there’s more to discover, and there always will be.

But the Tchaikovsky concerto is also my old beloved winter coat, crumpled and worn… Characters merge; the coat is part of me when I wear it, its shape cannot help but be affected by how I wear it, how I play it. I’ll still have that coat-concerto when I’m 80, and even if I get too old to play it, I’ll pick it up and run my fingers over the violin, remembering bygone arpeggios.

I haven’t been blogging my current trip to Palestine*, where the Al Kamandjati Camerata has been touring a Baroque programme throughout the country, but my experiences on this winter’s journey have been just as fascinating, hopeful, hopeless and colourful as ever.

As well as a full selection of music for strings and solo instruments by Handel, Bach, Boyce, Telemann, Quantz and Fasch , I was also playing part of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and it was a joy to perform as far afield as Nablus (so much more secure than last year), and Shaf’am, a mainly Arabic town in the north of Israel, as well as the usual haunts: Bethlehem, Ramallah, Jerusalem, and other cities.

Unlike last year, we didn’t have permission to enter the Gaza Strip, and unsurprisingly so: the situation there has deteriorated disgracefully at the time of writing, and the end of the latest ceasefire last week has only confirmed the continuation of hostility that never genuinely ceased.

But for all the terrible realities, other things improve relentlessly. It’s very moving to come back again to the same place - I have indefinitely committed to returning twice a year for festivals in December and in the summer - and see the young Palestinian musicians so much further advanced in maturity and skill. There is phenomenal promise in these lands, and although the future will never be bright until a lasting peace is assured, it is realistic to hope that when it does finally happen, a new generation will be ready to realize its potential.

As well as some fairly large scale concerts in Ramallah and Jerusalem, working with the renowned singer Waltraud Meier and the brilliant Jerusalem Symphony oboist Demetrios Karamintzas, we also toured extensively in communities such as Jericho and Bethlehem, where audience development is less about attracting people with an existing interest in music than effecting a wholesale transformation in the attitude of the community, and inspiring focus and concentration in listeners to increase their cultural awareness and quality of life.

This being Palestine, everything is tinged with a wildness that is absurd to a foreign visitor. More than once we were left in complete darkness mid-piece owing to power failure (candles and mobile phones to the rescue!), and the post-concert headcounts of the childrens’ choir were legendary ‘anyone not here? OK, let’s go!’

Palestinian contempt towards the formalities of military checkpoints might seem superficially like the harbouring of a death wish, but closer examination reveals a healthy black humour that is as inspiringly dogged as it is cathartic.

It was heartening too to talk to our Palestinian colleagues (or by now I should probably say friends), and to really reach a deep understanding of their political views. I find that beneath the panoply of conflicting opinions on the political situation - on which every one of us often disagrees - there is a deep rooted focus on freedom and peace that transcends any political arguement. More than once I heard Palestinians give sensible, logical advocations of a one state solution, but when pressed by me as to how they would feel if peace did eventually erupt in the shape of two states (for I believe, as do many, that Israel agreeing to a one-state agreement is about as likely as the celestial teapot being proven to exist!), gave incredibly eloquent answers that rose beyond personal belief. Their attitude: that ultimately peace and freedom are the important goals, and that those people not actively involved in shaping the political process should focus not on the political theories of tomorrow, but on the practical aspirations of today; seeding the creative thought, dialogue and tolerance that will educate the next generation to cope constructively and peacefully in an unknown future.

It’s worth repeating again the fundamental idea that it is often impossible to break down oppressive structures (literally or metaphorically!), and that the only way to overcome them is to build something positive from the grassroots that grows so influential that the old order is made obsolete. There comes a moment - a tipping point, Malcolm Gladwell would say - when mass awareness that something needs to give comes into being. And when that tipping point happens, change comes very quickly. History proves this: from the fall of the Berlin wall to the death of the record industry (and subsequent re-emergance of the music industry) and even the phenomenon of Barack Obama’s rise to power, it’s a reliable pattern for making insurmountable problems dissolve themselves.

I was in the office in Ramallah, articulating these ideas to one of the guest artists, when Ramzi walked in, and caught the end of my explanation. ‘Exactly’, he said, with his characteristically devious smile, and a glint in his eye.. ‘It is exactly what I try to do.’ Ramzi ‘gets it’, and so do so many others in the Palestinian education, culture, business and NGO sectors. I hope with all my heart that the same shift of awareness is happening in Israel too.

It can be argued that the imprisonment and psychological repression of the Palestinian people shares many methodological similarities with the injustices of the iron curtain, apartheid, and racial discrimination of the 20th century. It would not surprise me if it ends in a similar, peaceful way - but it will still take decades to happen. That’s the positive scenario. If the current ‘two steps forward one step back’ approach continues, peace in the Middle East will take another hundred years or more to arrive. But it can happen, and it will happen, however long it takes.

*Yes yes yes, I know it’s officially the ‘Occupied Territories’. I call it Palestine to make the point, don’t write in.

Photos by Kerry Olson. Baroque Festival image copyright Al Kamandjati.

The answer is to work out exactly how much the item is worth to you, bid that, and then forget about it. Either way you’ve won. Think about it.

I find that day to day life in an Arabic environment is often like an ongoing auction. When I travel in the Middle East, I nearly always pay the most pure price for a product or a service. By which I mean, at the point of transacion, the actual price paid reflects the exact value that it is worth to both parties at that very moment. Prices aren’t often published, and they’re constantly in flux, so it’s a very pure/fluid commercial marketplace.

That means that the unknowing tourist WILL get ripped off, because they don’t know how much value something holds in the greater context of things. But in the limited context of what they ARE aware of, they figure that the price is OK, hence the transaction goes ahead.

The obvious fault with this particular Arabic system, and where I dislike it, is the point a which someone realizes that a previous transaction feels imbalanced, and thus seems like a betrayal.

But how different is that feeling of betrayal to the feeling you get when the used car salesman tries to rip you off to your face, or the starbucks muffin costs almost as much as the hourly wage of the person selling it to you?

I’m not saying the western way of ripping people off is any better; I think they’re both ethically dubious methodologies and that the more responsible members of each community set prices in a way that’s more similar to the way you win an auction (just in reverse): work out the cost of production, add in a proportionate profit, and set a price based on that.

I think it also shows that a totally pure transaction does not necessarily reflect any kind of human value; it has no sentience, and it has no morality.

Some form if regulation is nearly always desirable, therefore. Not too much… not too little. It again comes down to … you guessed it… balance and moderation!

This was one of the lines with ‘Ghost Stations ‘, the mothballed underground stations in Eastern territory where West-Berlin trains didn’t stop, but just passed through on their way.

But those stations were never blocked up, or even altered. DDR guards just sat there in turn, rigidly guarding the empty platforms, glowering in the gloaming, as West Berliners glided past in their brightly lit U-Bahn trains. When the stations finally opened up again in 1989, they were like little time capsules; even the 1960s adverts on the Walls hadn’t changed.

I finally found time to visit Haus am Checkpoint Charlie , the famous museum that itself played a part in the 28-year drama of this most famous of crossings. I found the pictures of the late 1980s crossing-buildings especially interesting; they resemble more an English Channel ferry terminal check-in than a scarily disputed international border, and that approachability is disconcerting.

Disconcerting, because the everydayness of the architecture attempts to normalize something that is simply unnormalizable by others’ standards.

The DDR was speaking to the west, in the language of the west, in order to say something entirely not of the west.

In music, that’s called pastiche, and it has its place. But that place is not at the centre of a movement, or a the cusp of change. It’s not a forward movement, it’s a functional movement. What is function without forward direction? Stasis? I always think it ironic that Stasi Is one letter short of stasis .

What baffles me about the DDR is the state quest to instigate emotional stability…through repression! (and perhaps for some, oppression …). By imposing these ‘functional’ systems and strategies through social and civic planning, they endeavoured to create a framework of limitation that prevented self-expression and kept the peaceful majority submissive and benign.

But how can you possibly ‘impose’ emotional stability onto something and think that it will last? All you do by attempting to bottle something up, is increase the pressure on the inside. At some point, the lid will be blown off. So it proved in the American Deep South, and in South Africa, and in Berlin.

And that’s why divisive walls always come down… Even if it takes a hundred years.

Talking of which, I’m going back to Palestine later this month…

For the last couple of months I’ve been working in only two different places, but with interactions that are spread across a gamut of time zones. It completely does your head in.

Yesterday, for example, I was - as I am most of the time now - in Berlin, doing research work for my scholarship, working on a chamber music project (Brahms Clarinet Quintet! Nice.), and preparing some repertoire for next year.

But during the same day, I had to interact with MusBook-related people in Australia, a friend who’s working in Tokyo, the coordinators in the Middle East for the forthcoming Palestine concerts, several people in the UK about projects for next year, various admin people in New York, a tech support line in the Midwest, and a couple of technology people on the West Coast. Suddenly, time takes on an entirely different meaning.

When is tomorrow? How do you deal with the fact that the person you’ve just got off the phone to is well into tomorrow, whereas the person you’re about to call isn’t even halfway through today? If west coast people are working exceptionally late into the night, and people in Australia are up early in the morning, then it’s almost possible, but for a few hours, to end up talking to someone in Tomorrow on one line, someone from Yesterday on the other, and you’re sitting there alone: a sole representative of Today.

If you think too hard about it, you end up with a kind of macro version of the sensation of timelessness you get when you are ‘in the zone’, utterly focused, aware only of your immediate present. Suddenly, time seems to stand still. It is that moment when there has been a shocking incident, and for a few seconds there is nothing but silent chaos whilst your overloaded senses are numbed, frozen still, trying to comprehend what is real and what is not, in order to fathom a meaningful response.

But they are informing my everyday work here in Berlin, and - like some kind of mutant academic - I am stress-testing these new ideas not with essays and theories, but with practical application.

In collaboration with Peter Tregear - himself an academic, having been lecturer at Cambridge University and until recently Dean of Melbourne University in Australia - I am test-launching MusBook.com later in the week, with the hope that we can properly launch to lots and lots of people before Christmas.

I won’t waste time here explaining it in depth, other than to say it is a Global Social Network for Classical Music. The Global Social Network for Classical Music , we hope.

Two initial aims. 1) Create a global microeconomy for Classical music, and 2) Deinstitutionalize music education. Crazy? Possibly. Risky? Well… kind of. (we’ve already proved it works, so we’re actually really confident). Addictive? I hope so!

Please check it out, send your comments, play around, tell us how to make it better.

http://www.musbook.com/

It’s interesting for me to compare the Palestinian territories, where people are trying to fill a total vacuum with creative educational endeavours, to the USA, where it is almost the opposite situation: a skewed system needs to be completely regenerated, with creativity at its core. (The same could be said for much of the British education system.)

Which is more difficult - building creative/arts education systems from scratch, or persuading existing education systems to reassess their priorities? They both present phenomenal challenges. But don’t bet on the vacuum being the hardest to change: it’s amazing how hard it can be to alter other peoples’ views, and sometimes it takes a generation or more to really change the culture of an existing system.

Either way, it’s a question of creating tipping points of mass opinion, and changing entrenched attitudes. But with a vacuum, you have the space to create a grassroots-powered structure from the ground up. Whereas, when you’re trying to change a system, and you really can’t create something to take its place, you have to prove it works on a small scale, and then persuade people community by community to adopt it, until you create an unstoppable momentum of change that grows exponentially. That’s hard to do.

What motivates you as a musician?

I was lucky to be introduced to music at an early age, and for it to become a vocation whilst I was still young. So I have always been inspired by music. But increasingly, I feel that contemporary classical musicians – the ones who fuse traditional values and contemporary ideas – are the people who are most obviously equipped to inspire the expansion of awareness that will expedite the global changes that we’re beginning to see happening in our post-digital culture.

I believe that the creative arts should be at the forefront of all education systems, as they are the best way of nurturing the skills needed to survive and thrive in a digitally networked world that we cannot yet predict.

I believe that unrelenting development of a society’s culture is the best way to seed the kind of generational change that will positively alter that society’s direction over the long term.

I believe that the creative arts should lead the world in innovation and creativity. Arts that leave this to businesses, technologists and governments risk becoming just fun entertainments, or interesting museum-pieces.

I believe that global digitalization has entirely changed the context and therefore the role of art and cultural endeavour. Artists need to recognize this if they wish to remain relevant to their audience.

Because people often relate to music at a deep emotional level, I believe we as musicians have an opportunity – perhaps an obligation? – to be cultural leaders, not just entertainers, because the profound reactions we can provoke in our audiences give us an awesome responsibility. We have the possibility of infusing our world with musical revelation that leads to real raising of consciousness.

This is what motivates me as a musician. The belief that beautiful performances aren’t just transcendent experiences, but also experiences that can inspire people to strive beyond what is known to be possible.

An 11am concert featuring just such a programme with the excellent violinist Daniel Hope looks fairly predictable on paper, but there were two critical things that this concert-concept had that so many similar programmes in England lack.

Perhaps you can guess which of my favourite buzzwords I’m going to use… Relationships and Experience !

There’s something about the purity of an all-Mozart programme that’s made for congregational consumption. Perhaps it’s that notion of breaking the bread: a feeling of ritual that’s both comforting and familiar, a cleansing, rejuvenative process that brings together the community and simultaneously soothes the individual spirit. Is Mozart the new Church?

The cementing of the experience through coffee and croissants is simply the glue that binds together the varied elements of the process… as is the Mozart. What do Mozart, Coffee, Croissants and indeed the Church have in common? They are all social objects ; all tailored to their respective audiences of course, but all reasons for an experience to happen; conduits for ideas and emotions and interactions. How often have you arranged to meet someone for coffee, with no intention of drinking coffee?

An experience is most powerful when it is authentic, because everyone involved in the experience is intuitively committed to it (there’s no messy fringe area where people sit on the side, awkwardly, like a high school disco). You’re either in, or you’re out.

That’s easy to achieve at a cinema, where there’s a screen, and the room is dark. It’s easy to find in a theatre or a nightclub, where you’re enveloped by your environment. There’ s no mental escape. You either snap out it and leave the room, or you submit to the experience, and it gradually envelopes you, floating you out of your brain, until you become part of the performance’s world.

It’s more easy to be distracted in a classical concert. There are sometimes penguin-tails there to take your attention away; listen too to the cough sweet rustlers, the programme-book hustlers, socialite flakes, connaisseur fakes, distractions of all sizes and flavours. Whose responsibility is it to overcome the plague of broken concentration?

A performance that entrances and enthralls needs no gimmicks to succeed, but to succeed, it needs the best environment in which to enthrall and entrance. And even the most committed audience member needs help to make that happen.

And to my surprise, the all-Mozart concert did just that. The lighting was perfectly honed to pinpoint the mini-orchestras spaced around the hall for a 4-group sinfonia. The personable conductor introduced everything over a radio microphone. There was no interval. Our attention was guided, expertly, precisely, through sharply engineered logistics. Tiny things, but they make all the difference in setting the atmosphere. And the platform that these details create, is the platform upon which the whole experience is built. When the framework of a performance is honed with the same care and attention that the performance itself receives, the experience feels organic. It feels truthful. You want to commit to it.

Was this experience perfect? Not quite. The quality of the croissants was very mediocre.

Eh?!?! The croissants? "You Bourgeois snob!" I hear you say…! How can I complain about croissant-quality without first commenting about the music, about the subtlety of the orchestra’s interpretation, about their shimmering variety of textures, about the charming interplay between soloist and orchestra?!

Ah… but aren’t the croissants just as integral to the experience as the Mozart is? Aren’t they just as relevant as the quality of the orchestral performance? I couldn’t care less about the quality of the croissants per se , but integrated into the two hours for which the experience lasts, they don’t feel of the same world as the crispy, fresh Mozart-interpretations. They are damaging the integrity of my experience!

If you pay 20 Euro for an hour’s music, that in itself is part of the experience… 20 Euro may be a significant ticket-payment for some people, but the excitement and value in return is far more. Handing that shiny 20 Euro note to the ticket seller is a metaphor, not a price tag; it is the wafting aroma of freshly ground coffee beans, the bite of the croissant exploding into your consciousness, the innocent, sparkly vigour of the orchestral exposition in K216.

It is your committment to experiencing the music. And his committment, and her committment, and their committment, too.

cultural trendbase

(k?l‘ ch?r-?l tr?nd b?s )

n.

a constantly-developing array of loosely associated creative ideas that affect issues relating predominantly to the arts or to social culture, some of which may gain critical influence and spread memetically as a result of many simultaneous instances of individual manifestation.

(I may revise this a few times… not at my most lucid right now…)

in other words: like, the stuff wot gradually comes to be the new stuff wot is the way the arts is thought about, like.

I did some work recently for a seriously brilliant producer who works regularly with a major band, and we had a couple of conversations that I found very interesting. One of them was about the use, and the future, of using live musicians for commercial studio recordings.

I brought it up with him (tentatively - I wouldn’t want to become superfluous before we’re even established!) because I’m increasingly aware of how easy it is to use technology to create, or should I say ‘fabricate’, an emotionally engaging performance.

I know for a fact that there are forces, for example in Hollywood, who have London Symphony- quality samples at their fingertips, as well as programmers and technicians worthy of the finest Googler-algorithm-crunchers, and who are not afraid to use them. There is no doubt in my mind that at a certain point in the near future, it will be quite possible to fabricate an entire film score with pre-programmed instrumental samples, and be able to fool even the most experienced ear (it is, after all, ultimately a question of sound waves).

[UPDATE: I’m told it has actually already happened, within the last few weeks…]

So where is the value of ‘live’ if ‘live’ can be perfectly recreated in every way? This has been worrying me.

I’m not talking about live performance. Anyone who’s ever been to a concert (of whatever genre) knows the unique place that a live concert holds in the human experience. That won’t die. I’m talking about the fabrication of recorded music as a faux-live performance that creates a genuine emotional response.

The process of artificially manufacturing something genuinely moving and lifelike is all very well, but it is a strangely inhuman process (I would liken it to the genetically modified production of food: you might not notice the difference in the end product, but for a lot of people there’s something disturbing about the underlying process).

But if the end result sounds just as convincing as a genuinely live recording, why should we actually bother with live musicians at all?

The producer’s answer surprised me. "In a strange way," he said, "it’s more about the process than the end result".

What is the value of the creative process for the artists involved? I don’t yet have a brilliant answer, but the ability to learn, to discover things, and mature one’s ideas through interactions with other people must be a big part of it.

That’s not something you get by sitting programming an algorithm to get the same result. Because although you might get the same result that time, the next time you sit down and start to ‘program’ the next ‘live’ recording, your work is devoid of all the development and experience that you would have gained through a truly ‘live’ set of working relationships and recordings.

So let us welcome sample technology with all the possibilities it brings for enhancing mock-ups, amateur work, low-budget work, and emergencies, yet acknowledge that the process inherent in live recording has a lasting set of values that will stand the test of time.

The thesis in a sentence:

The arts are no longer static offerings passed down from an assumed position of authority. Instead, they are now the starting point for engagement.

The thesis in a paragraph:

In the 20th Century, mastery of music, theatre, dance and visual arts was presented as the untouchable pinnacle of high cultural expression.

In the early 21st Century, new technologies are creating a new context in which the arts can be seen and understood. The relevance of artistic culture is now defined by a new paradigm of networked creative interactions between millions of people. They are no longer passive consumers of the arts, but they also engage with the creative process themselves.

This new dynamic demands that contemporary artists reconsider their position in a global, digitally connected society, and understand how their work sets trends, pushes the boundaries of possibility, and inspires communities of people around the world.

**********

Please join in as we begin to discuss these problems and challenges! Email address is on the left hand side of the page.

I’m pleased to announce a new side project that isn’t actually in itself a music performance project. It is in fact a manifesto-like set of ideas that I’m putting together in collaboration with Russell Bender, a theatre director (and old friend of mine) from the UK.

We’ve decided to move our work over here to my blog, and over the next 2-3 months I’ll be talking through all the material on here, and Russell will guest-blog from time to time.

We’ve got to the point where we’re keen to encourage interactions and opinions of other people, and my hope is that by re-blogging everything, we’ll be able to crystallize and distill the ideas into some kind of coherent structure.

We need a new name for the project that actually reflects what it’s about (see next post!), but for now all the posts will be labelled with our old working title, ‘Arts 2.0’.

More soon.

William Harvey (who blogs here ) is a leading exponent of the emerging ‘cultural diplomacy’ sector, and his organization creates annual programs that bring people together through music, by forging connections across cultural and national barriers. They create dialogues where there were previously none. What startled me about Harvey’s outlook is the belief that music can be overtly used as a political tool.

Up until now, I have always thought of the arts as something that is best served up in an apolitical environment; you might go to a concert that inspires you in a way that ultimately affects your long term outlook, but you don’t necessarily go to a particular event and expect your worldview to be changed instantly.

This longer-term process, which I continue to believe is immensely valuable and important, is what John Harte of the Choir of London described as ‘engagement’: the tacet acknowledgement that anything can be interpreted as political simply by the fact that it is happening, and that is enough to begin to seed change without bludgeoning people over the head with political opinion as well. But is that just part of the picture? Do we also need a more proactive attitude to the social resonance of cultural program delivery?

At the other end of the scale, Daniel Barenboim is forever asserting that he comes ‘not as a politician, but as a musician’ - an absurd suggestion, for it’s quite obvious that a lot of what he does in the public eye outside of performances contains an element of political maneuvering. (This was very clear to me after our cancelled Gaza concert last year, when he immediately jumped on all the news networks to decry the situation. The facts as broadcast were very twisted and out of proportion to what actually happened, and done in the manner of the best politicians. With the best of intentions, of course. But it was interesting to note the compromises needed to reach a justifiable means for a noble end).

I suppose therefore, that through ‘cultural diplomacy’, William Harvey and his colleagues are only making clear what has really always been the case: that the presence of the arts on the international stage often has a political resonance. Examples: think of the cultural games played in the cold war when pianist Van Cliburn won the Tchakovsky competition in Moscow - these matters would be totally irrelevant now (international music competitions have become astonishingly irrelevant in the last 10 years, though that’s for a different blog), but then it was world news, as artists were shifted around as political pawns on a space-race-esque chessboard.

Equal exchanage - not cultural colonialism - is the key to making this work. Harvey and his teams of musicians approach each project as a mutual learning exercise, and I hope that we do the same in Palestine. Al Kamandjati , by recruiting international teachers now, is aiming to bring in the expertise that will help the younger generation of Palestinian musicians to have the skills to self-define their cultural identities, not to define that identity for them (this is a topic way too complex for this blog, and one I’d like to come back to, but suffice it to say this is frequently something that ‘interfering’ western influences often get accused of, often with good reason).

It should be noted that it is arguably a good thing to introduce the understanding of western culture to a place, in order that the people who live there gain a greater understanding of the global context in which they exist. And vice versa: the awareness of a foreign people picked up by cultural ambassadors should be taken back to the home country to increase understanding there. It’s very important to note that these cultural diplomacy projects are not all about outreach, although that does form a significant part of such work.

Where these projects work the best, are the times when they are delivered with a quality that speaks for itself, and that means the highest possible levels of performance. Any great performer can engage effectively with an audience in a way that a less experienced person cannot, and where is there greater need for effective performance than in intercultural situations, where a single performance can make or break a meme that will spread through a community for generations? In the words of one audience member at one of Cultures in Harmony’s events: "You’ve changed the image that I had about Americans because you’re completely different. You’re nice, kind, friendly, generous, awesome, beautiful.”

"We remain committed to music’s ability to dispel the clouds of ignorance that mar the relationships between cultures", says Harvey.

"The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." - George Orwell

Discuss!

1948 - throw rocks
1967 - fire guns
1987 - shoot missiles
2000 - detonate suicide bombs
2003 - start a viola ensemble

I like to think of Sulski – and people like him in other places – as custodian-advocates of musical life for the communities in which they operate. But what’s interesting about his model is that it works in a way that’s massively beneficial for the community, yet is entirely sustainable. Sustainable, because it creates enough paid performance opportunities for seriously good musicians to commit to regular performances and education work in a single community. Which means that rather than rely soley on the fly-in-fly-out visitations of artists from further afield (which is no doubt important, but shouldn’t be the whole picture), a loose collective of artists create a growing bond with and between members of the local community, at a much higher level (in every respect) than traditionally has been the case.

[The UK has always had a large number of outstanding musicians in all areas of the country, and perhaps it’s a much more competitive environment as a result, even in regional areas. But in the USA, the standard of artistic work outside of major metropolitan areas has not always been so consistent. This can have a detrimental effect on musical life in an area, because when musicians become uninspired, so do audiences…]

This also provides considerable new possibilities for the employment of musicians in a sustainable way that maximises their creativity and performance skills (not even a job in a top orchestra can do that). Deployed widely, this kind of setup could really do wonders for the development of cultural and educational possibilities at a community level.

Additionally to this, and from the performer’s perspective, I believe that if this happened more consistently throughout the world of classical music promotion, the possibilities for touring of concerts would be far easier, more artist-led, and decisions would be informed more by the art itself, rather than commercial allegiances and obligations.

I’ll blog more on how this model actually works sometime soon, but in the meantime I’d be very pleased to hear from anyone who has created similar structures in their own communities.

A key part of what I’m going to be doing imminently with this tech startup I’m involved in is identifying what’s lacking at community levels in terms of the infrastructure and resources that are needed. Then, the challenge will be to try and find a way to build an international infrastructure to help create the solutions that will solve those problems. Hopefully I can try and find a performer’s perspective on that, anyway.

Most people don’t seem to know how to use New York properly. Almost everyone I meet here seems to fall into one of two categories: either they’re engaged in that cliched daily material-struggle, desperately trying to live up to what they think the city demands them to be. Or, they’re way over-engaged, hoovering up experiences without allowing the space and time for them to be savoured properly (I know I’m often guilty of the latter).

When we have infinite choice, infinite opportunity, infinite information (digital world), it takes great strength to start to choose between things and narrow down the focus of your experience, but there comes a point at which the need for quality of experience over quantity of experience demands that choice.

That’s the beauty of a big city; there is so much choice that when you do finally decide what you want, it’s there, ready and waiting.

But the beauty of a big city is also its downfall; infinite possibility can become a trap, not an opportunity.

Same is true with music.

Did you ever read any of my old blog posts? See the first few paragraphs of this one: http://www.simonhewittjones.com/blog/2007/11/15/creative-tension-in-free-markets-long-post/

OK some of it is perhaps pretentious waffle. But have you seen the stock market indices of the last few weeks… are they not the most perfectly thrilling structures, full of uncontrolled adrenaline, like a 1^st year undergraduate virtuoso rushing through their end-of-year recital exam with brilliant, earth-shattering technique, yet not a shred of musical humility or stylistic integrity?

I bet you any seriously good musician who had enough time on their hands could have predicted last weeks’ market crashes, if only they had been able to sit down with the last few years’-worth of data from all the various companies, housing markets etc etc. Even with a layman’s knowledge [ha! Lehmann. No pun intended!], and without being able to explain it properly, they could have sensed it, and also sensed roughly when it would have occurred.

Let us hope a little proportionality is now introduced back into this world…

I’m in New York briefly, to lay down the groundwork for some future projects, and then I’m relocating straight away to Berlin. I’ve been very fortunate to gain the support of the Leverhulme Trust, and so I’ll be attaching myself to the Universität der Künste (University of the Arts), to research things there whilst continuing to develop concerts and recording projects in the UK.

There are also some bigger projects that I’m working on - contributions to infrastructures far bigger than my own little violin-orientated sphere - that will hopefully have a big impact on the future of Classical Music. I’ll tell you more about those things in a few months once they’re fully up and running.

***

I spent the summer travelling; working with young Palestinian musicians in London, going to the Dartington Festival, playing to fascinating violinists and musicians both at home and abroad, and doing preparatory work on new projects for the forthcoming year.

These kinds of opportunity always open your perspectives further, and I’m really pleased to see that the overarching trends of change in music, certainly in the Classical tradition, are becoming ever clearer. We are finally beginning to see, as a result of the uptake of new technologies, a new set of social dynamics that are transforming the way that social cultures are created and consumed. And it’s all good, so far as I can see.

Over the next few posts, I’ll begin to explore further what that might mean in practical terms for Classical Music. I’ll also be thoroughly attempting to understand the trends and relationships - as personified by the arts and especially music - between the UK, the USA and Europe (using London, New York and Berlin as the benchmarks). In particular, the relationship of Berlin to Germany and indeed to the rest of Europe is going to be a fascinating one.

The thesis of the scholarship itself is that there are emerging contrasts and similarities between international and local trends in classical music, including how it’s performed, presented and consumed, that are constantly changing, in no small part due to technological innovation. The idea is to understand how the cultural life of Berlin has been, is being, and will be affected by the social and economic upheaval that’s been going on since the wall came down.

That unique situation (particularly when the economy there is taken into account: a long stagnation that may possibly begin to see some growth in the next year or three) is going to present a load of interesting possibilities for music’s role in society.

These possibilities will be especially interesting in terms of how they relate to the German tradition (which, though one of the richest cultures, does have a tendency to embrace bureaucracy and small-c conservatism). Or rather, how they are able to integrate and balance contemporary international influences with the best of the existing traditions, and how painful a process that will be for those involved!

Anyway, more on that soon.

Anyway, sorry if you didn’t get the webcast. But we did tape it, so highlights may/will follow.

No guarantees - this is purely a test, so there may be transmission problems - and there’s only one camera too. But assuming everything vaguely works, do tune in at 7.30pm UK time (2.30pm EST) for piano trios by Kenneth Leighton, York Bowen and Frank Bridge.

And of course if you’re in or near Edinburgh this evening, do come along! St Mary’s Cathedral, Palmeston Place, 7.30pm - www.cathedral.net

In the meantime, I’m delighted to announce that the Imogen Holst CDs will be released very soon, but early copies are now AVAILABLE (yes! really!) so if you’d like to be one of the first to buy one before we release them to the world in general, just click on here: http://www.imogenholst.com/