check out http://blog.case.edu/jeffrey.quick/2007/03/04/composers_datebook_on_ip_and_other_comp_biz for a bit on an 1886 Wagner bootleg, and how unimaginable that would be today

I think at a certain point, we’ve become so accustomed to being disliked, so accustomed to accepting the fact that it’s the audience’s fault that our music isn’t adored that we’ve stopped questioning why more people don’t love our music. Why is our audience so small? Why do we have to advertise to people that ‘yo my music is accessible’. It’s just weird.

We ignore or react with hostility reactions to our music that are not obviously reflective of the academy’s rationalizations of the historical progressivist model of our musical canon. And as long as we have this ‘protected space’ of ‘we write what we have to and it’s accepted that we won’t be liked because our audience doesn’t know better’ I think our musical culture dies.

We are not engaged with a living musical culture that responds with passion. We live in a cold, heartless careerist driven world that itself can barely get excited about new music. When was the last time we saw, here at S21 anybody say, ‘This record is the most unbelievably great record I’ve heard in ages.’ Where is the passion? The fanaticism? The undying adoration that music from living cultures engenders? It just ain’t there. This is highly unusual for an art community. The heat is generated more by formal discussions here than music itself!

When I used to participate in electronic music BBS’s and forums and a new record by a big name came out, say Squarepusher, the ongoing debates would be endless. ‘What’s happened to him?’ Is this the greatest SP record evah? Why did he do that track with an acoustic bass?’

It was endless and fascinating and indicative of passion. It would be ferocious. We see these same types of fanatical devotion in classical music forums, bluegrass forums, but in new music we have zilch. That is also weird.

In large part, I believe, this refusal to engage the listening public because only WE know what is right is contributing to the incredible stylistic stagnation we’re witnessing right now. Dudes writing the same shit over and over that their teacher did and now that their teacher’s teacher did. We have witnessed practically zero stylistic innovations since minimalism in large part, I believe because of our musical separatism.

Tom

Alex Shapiro (& Belinda Reynolds from over at NewMusicBox):

http://www.emusic.com/album/10859/10859945.html

Beth Anderson:

http://www.emusic.com/album/10812/10812771.html

Mary Jane Leach:

http://www.emusic.com/album/10812/10812761.html

Lawrence Dillon:

http://www.emusic.com/album/10957/10957596.html

Tom Myron:

http://www.emusic.com/album/10961/10961905.html

And of course me, myself and I, on a CD that also includes a great piece by Jeff Harrington as well:

http://www.emusic.com/album/10889/10889697.html

Re Alex Shapiro’s frustration about terminology: As an outsider this is frustrating to me as well. Even non-negative terms like “contemporary classical”, “new music”, and so on, are pretty much useless to me in terms of telling me anything about whether I’d be interested in hearing a particular work by a particular composer. Contrast this with (say) popular electronic music, where there’s endless inventiveness in coming up with new terms to identify new styles (see for example “Ishkur’s guide to electronic music” ), and where most such terms (e.g., “techno”, “trance”, “glitch”, etc.) are at least generally evocative of what the music sounds like.

Re the “accessible” question: “Accessible” is a relative term, not an absolute one, depending as it does on the background a listener is bringing to a work. I don’t want composers to try to appeal to some imagined lowest common denominator audience (whether Starbucks customers or whatever); they should write the music they want to write. However at the same time very little music is truly sui generis, and there’s no question that I and others can better appreciate music that has points of resemblance to things we’ve already learned to like. I’d therefore appreciate composers and critics pointing out affinities between new works and existing works, especially existing works that are “popular” (if only in the restricted sense of not being perceived to be part of “high culture”.) If you think that your instrumental works would appeal to fans of (say) Sigur Ros or Explosions in the Sky or that your art songs might be of interest to Bjork fans, don’t be afraid to say so.

A final comment in terms of “marketing”: As I was commenting on Kyle Gann’s blog a little while back, it’s nice that composers now have their own web pages and make MP3s available (and I appreciate “Steve’s click picks” and other attempts to highlight them), but at the same time people with limited time (like me) prefer to get music through a correspondingly limited set of channels (in my case, eMusic). So I think it’s important that composers still work to put out formal releases of their works in formats suitable for distribution through services like eMusic, the iTunes Store, etc. (eMusic in particular has a critical mass of subscribers with relatively esoteric tastes.)
Maybe someday applications like Songbird will make it dead easy to treat the “music web” as a unified virtual music store, but for now I at least find commercial digital music services much more convenient, and anything not available from such services is pretty much off my radar.

Now that would make a nice disc: a compilation of other people’s music that personally inspire(d)s Reich, or Adams, Glass, etc. etc… Hell, even one from John Williams might be interesting to me (& definitely more so than one of his own stuff!).

Of course, if you’re still insulted, or if you’d rather patronize the independent record shops and cafes that get cut out of an “exclusive” deal like this, I should point out that Starbucks is a really easy place to shoplift.

Alex, that remark makes my day—thanks!