Sequenza21/

I just finished reading Molly Sheridan’s interview with David Morneau, who spent the past year writing a 60-second piece every day, over at New Music Box. With Morneau’s project, 60×60 (which Morneau sites as his inspiration), and the Microscore Project, music of extremely short duration seems to be all the rage these days. Are we seeing the rise of the miniature as a new net-fueled genre? Any veterans of composing mini-music or attending the relevant concerts care to contribute lessons learned?

A recent essay by Rasmus Fleischer in Cato Unbound does a great job of explaining the evolution — or better, the progressive convolution — of copyright, what’s become fundamentally different in our own time, and why any model based on our old conceptions of it are utterly doomed in anything less than a world police-state. It’s only fair to point out that Fleischer is part of the Swedish anti-copyright group Piratbyran, founders of the notorious file-sharing site Pirate Bay, so some could read this essay as simply justification for their own “questionable” activity. But Fleischer clearly lays out some real issues here, and there are many good examples of how the meaning of copying and sharing have transcended — and will only move farther from — the old models and enforcement. One of the most mind-boggling is this:

One early darknet [the term for the idea that people who have information and want to exchange it with each other will do just that, forming spontaneous networks which may be large or small, online or offline] has been termed the “sneakernet”: walking by foot to your friend carrying video cassettes or floppy discs. Nor is the sneakernet purely a technology of the past. The capacity of portable storage devices is increasing exponentially, much faster than Internet bandwidth, according to a principle known as “Kryder’s Law.”  The information in our pockets yesterday was measured in megabytes, today in gigabytes, tomorrow in terabytes and in a few years probably in petabytes (an incredible amount of data). Within 10-15 years a cheap pocket-size media player will probably be able to store all recorded music that has ever been released — ready for direct copying to another person’s device.

In other words: The sneakernet will come back if needed. “I believe this is a ‘wild card’ that most people in the music industry are not seeing at all,” writes Swedish filesharing researcher Daniel Johansson. “When music fans can say, ‘I have all the music from 1950-2010, do you want a copy?’ — what kind of business models will be viable in such a reality?”

I’d urge everyone to read the full essay, since this stuff will directly affect all our work, our entire career.

I’m beginning the process of looking for college work, and something strikes me as odd:  the most important classes in music departments are not taught by the most valued or experienced faculty members.

Any music department will have theory and ear training courses required of all majors.  Since these courses are required, departments surely consider them more important than those courses that are not required.

But the ear training and lower-level theory classes are most often farmed out to grad students, adjuncts, or very junior faculty members.  The tenured folks teach optional seminars related to their area of expertise.

I suppose this irony extends across the entire American education system: elementary school teachers are “more important” than college professors–since everyone by law must attend elementary school but not college.  And yet the prestige is in teaching college–not kindergarten.

But, returning to academia, are ear training and basic theory considered so boring by tenured faculty that teaching them strikes these faculty as odious?  I know I’m young and naive; but teaching these “grunt” courses the past three years has been a total thrill for me.  Doing it for the rest of my life would be a pleasure.   I would assume that others interested in music as I am would feel the same way.

But they don’t. 

A little-known wiki on the current state (up to the minute) of the academic job market came to my attention last year and has since blossomed
from a listing of gigs in various stages of completion to a though-provoking anonymous discussion on issues pertaining to those in the front lines of the college/university job market in theory & composition. An example from the discussion (author, of course, unknown):

Having worked for several departments on a non-tenure-track basis over a number of years, and having spoken with a number of colleagues working as both TT and NTT faculty at several different institutions, my impression is that the search process is too uneven to generalize. To be fair, the hiring process in any industry is ultimately a crapshoot, both for those doing the hiring as well as for the hiree: one never knows how good the hiree will be until that person has been on the job for a while; conversely, the hiree won’t truly know the nature of the professional environment until he/she has been there for a while. With that said, here are a few impressions:

1. Most faculties tend to be, on the whole, pretty good, staffed by competent professionals committed to their work. A few faculties are excellent across the board. A few are mediocre. Many span the range, with pockets of both excellence and mediocrity. (This is perhaps more likely at larger departments.) The same can largely be said of search committees: most are good, a few excellent, and a few mediocre; this range can sometimes be found within different search committees on the same faculty.
   
2. Some search committees go into a search already having identified the person they want to hire. This may be an internal or external candidate. The deck may be stacked in favor of that candidate, making the interviewing of external candidates an expensive formality. (This strategy can backfire.)
   
3. Some search committees go into a search already having identified their ideal hire, but create a fair and level playing field. This sometimes leads to the hire of the ideal candidate, sometimes not.
4. Some search committees are beset with political infighting and/or conflicting agendas. This can lead to poor hiring decisions, or to failed searches. It can also lead to excellent hiring decisions.
5. Some search committees lack the “relevant expertise” but still make excellent hiring decisions. Some have an abundance of expertise, and still make poor decisions.
6. Some search committees conduct themselves with the utmost of professionalism. Some can be highly unprofessional.
7. Search committee recommendations can be shot down in a faculty meeting (plenary or otherwise). This can be due to concerns of the faculty, political intrigue, etc.
8. For some departments, the hiring decision is ultimately made by the department chair. This individual can veto a search committee’s recommendations.
9. A search committee’s recommendation can be struck down at higher levels of the univeristy administration. This could include the dean and go as high as the provost, or even the board of trustees, if there are larger (i.e. budgetary) issues.

So, as I said, it’s impossible to generalize. I once worked for a department that didn’t care what their students thought about potential hires, and hired a fine scholar that the student feedback would have prevented. (One student said to me, personally, about the candidate, “I don’t like that guy, he’s a smart ass.”) The end result was, for the students, fairly disastrous. I also know of departments that do care about student feedback, but don’t consistently follow through, even when their interviewing protocol requires it. I have also seen one search go south due to an incompetent dean that decided to check unlisted references without asking the candidate first. None of this should be surprising: if one looks at tertiary education as an industry, one should expect to find similar ranges (e.g. size of institution, levels of excellence/incompetence, etc.) as one would in other large industries. That these variables should affect some of us in getting hired (or not) should not be unexpected. I think, however, many of us view the university as something “special”, when it is in reality just an institution with a specific agenda, and often a large and cumbersome bureaucratic structure. That structure is inhabited by normal human beings who are just as fallible as the next person.

Not only is the discussion of interest, but the results from the job searches as well - most are named along with their alma maters so you can get a very sharp picture of who’s getting hired and where did they graduate from. What’s your reaction?

The science journal Nature has been working its way through a nine-part series of essays on Science and Music. Not all are online or free yet, but you can currently read Phillip Ball’s and David Huron’s contributions on the site.

Huron provides provides an important — though to many of us not very surprising — reminder that the worldwide musical landscape is nearing the completion of “The Great Flattening”; soon, there won’t be anyone making anything that doesn’t have the Western musical tradition either at its heart, or as its wrapper:

Last year I joined an expedition of biologists to the remote Javari region of the Amazon. The biologists were censusing the wildlife. I was interested in the people. We encountered subsistence hunter–farmers with transistor radios. Even in the western Amazon, people listen to Funk Carioca and Christina Aguilera.

Linguists know how fast languages disappear. Musical cultures may be an order of magnitude more fragile. It will be many centuries before the whole world speaks Mandarin. Meanwhile Western music has swept the globe faster than aspirin. Robust musical cultures remain in China, India, Indonesia and the Arab world, but even in these regions, most people are thoroughly acquainted with Western music through film and television. Less robust musical cultures are disappearing rapidly or are showing deep infiltration by Western musical foundations. Many have already disappeared. There remain only a few isolated pockets, such as the highlands of Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya.

Regrettably, most cognitive scientists are ill-equipped to do remote field work, and few ethnomusicologists know how to do an experiment. This situation must change rapidly if we are to have much hope of glimpsing the range of possible musical minds. We have perhaps just a decade or so before everyone on the planet has been brought up with Western music or its derivatives.

Of course the plea for keeping all this diversity alive and thriving is right, good, noble… but it’s just not going to happen. There’s always something in the call to “preserve your culture” (whoever the “you” may be), that has its own tinge of a kind of reverse-imperialism. On the one hand, the old-school thought was “here, ditch all that silly crap you’ve been doing for generations, and we’ll teach you the only true civilization”; while the other asks people to not join up, stay fat and happy (or skinny and miserable, as the case may be) and and just keep doing what you’ve always been doing over there in your own little world. And through all of this noble theoretical bickering, the people just do what they think they want to do… I’m not making any plea myself, just saying “get ready”. Sure, there’ll always be different styles of music, but only one foundation: that of the West. Everything else will just be interior decoration.

“Eh? Speak up, I can’t hear you…” The problem? Hearing loss from too-loud music. The culprit? Composers! All our fortissimos are endangering the very people we rely on to make our music. From a recent St. Louis Dispatch story:

Seated in front of the percussion section, and subjected to “ferocious” sound, [bass clarinetist James] Meyer worried about the effects on his hearing. He did research at the library and talked with people at 17 different orchestras around the country about their setups. He drew diagrams. He took readings of decibel levels. “The threshold of pain is (about) 118 decibels. I took a lot of readings (on stage) over that.” [….] Many contemporary works rely heavily on percussion and high volume, notes [percussionist Rich] O’Donnell. The orchestra played a lot of them during the Leonard Slatkin years, in particular. “I think there are a lot of composers who have trouble writing a soft piece,” O’Donnell said. Conductors can be prickly, too. O’Donnell recalls bringing up noise issues at a meeting with Slatkin and getting a glare: “He said, ‘Are you trying to limit my artistic expression?’”

While we may side with Slatkin and pooh-pooh this as over-worried hype, better think again if you’re hoping to have that European performance; As the NYT reported recently, workplace noise-protection regulations there now apply to symphony orchestras just as much as to factories:

They had rehearsed the piece only once, but already the musicians at the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra were suffering. Their ears were ringing. Heads throbbed. Tests showed that the average noise level in the orchestra during the piece, “State of Siege,” by the composer Dror Feiler, was 97.4 decibels, just below the level of a pneumatic drill and a violation of new European noise-at-work limits. Playing more softly or wearing noise-muffling headphones were rejected as unworkable. So instead of having its world premiere on April 4, the piece was dropped. “I had no choice,” said Trygve Nordwall, the orchestra’s manager. “The decision was not made artistically; it was made for the protection of the players.”

Geoff Edgers over at Boston.com’s Exhibitionist blog, posted a few thoughts today on composers’ attitudes to their early works. Some keep ‘em, some never want them to see the light of day, and some wish that, even if they might have become popular, they’d just go away.

I know I’m a pack-rat. I still have every cassette tape recording I ever made in my bedroom, starting at about age 15; and in a box in my garage is the musty, yellowed remnants of my first-ever score (titled Mountains, it opens with long string runs up and down a C diatonic scale… pretty darn original, huh?). I’m fifty-freaking-two now, and so much of this early stuff is embarassing, hilarious, even painful — so why do I still keep it all around? I suppose simply because it’s a record of me; most everything I became musically is hiding out in this or that phrase or moment.

How about you? Are you a hoarder, historian, or spin-meister? Do you want your musical story with warts and all, or all neat and tidy?

You know, he’s not my favoritest composer or anything, and, yeah, everyone should get more performances.  But I have this slight–but nagging–bafflement as to why Jacob Druckman’s music doesn’t get more performances.  My puzzlement was provoked just the other day as Brangle 3 shuffled onto my iPod.  What a smashing piece!  And same with Counterpoise.  These are big, rock’em sock’em orchestra pieces that, though aggressive, stand a chance with the sort of audiences who are game for the Rite or some Berg.  Maybe Druckman’s getting some play elsewhere and my head is just in the sand.  But how about some good ole’ fashioned drum beating for those whose music’s not getting due play.  Huh?

“During the process leading to political independence for Finland in 1917, culture and the arts were regarded as basic prerequisites for an autonomous nation.”

 – Finnish Music Quarterly. 3 (2006), p. 6

Well?

Recently I had one of those experiences that have become cliche for the contemporary composer. I wrote a piece that was really, really hard; there wasn’t enough rehearsal time; and the performance (despite heroic efforts) was pretty rough.

I’m still stubbornly proud of my work. But, sometime during the whole process, it dawned on me: whereas some of the difficult music I’ve composed I honestly do wish had been easier, I have never wished any of the easy pieces I’ve written had been harder.

Have you?