Composers Forum

The Stop Online Piracy Act – SOPA – has been taken up by Congress and this puts the future of recorded music back into the news. The SOPA bill – backed by big money entertainment firms – ostensibly provides for the protection of intellectual property by allowing internet domain names to be blocked if a website allows unauthorized downloading of copyrighted materials. Sites like YouTube or Facebook will be at risk if someone improperly posts a movie clip or MP3 file that is under copyright.

The recording industry has been in a state of flux ever since it became possible to exchange music between individuals easily via electronic files. Napster and other file sharing services made it possible to download almost any recording in existence – for free. Fierce legal action by the recording industry essentially made criminals out of their customers and further alienated consumers already reeling from the high price of CDs in record stores.

Apple provided a sane solution to the Napster problem by launching iTunes a few years ago and has now sold over 16 billion files . The success of iTunes is due to the balance it has struck between a low selling price per track, protection for the copyright holder, and convenience for the consumer. In the process iTunes has essentially set the going price for a single downloaded track at $1. Other, similar services have since been established: Amazon is a big player and sites like BandCamp and CD Baby allow the copyright holder to offer tracks or entire CD albums to the consumer directly.

Just as the iTunes model was taking hold and offering some hope for market stability, the technology behind music streaming took off and made the actual downloading of the music file is superfluous – because now you have continuous access to the server holding the music you want to hear. So the search for the correct price point for streamed music is now underway. If iTunes has established that it costs $1 to own the file – what should it cost just to listen to it? Not much, apparently – the Spotify model pays fractions of a penny per listen. This may eventually change, but so far you have to be a mega-pop star to see any significant revenue from the streaming model.

And now comes SOPA – strengthening the hand of copyright holders – with the ultimate goal of allowing an increase in the price point possible for all forms of electronic distribution.

So what does any of this have to do with new music? We certainly benefit by the world-wide distribution possible via the Internet at essentially zero cost.  But our music is a niche and much bigger players are now trying to reshape the digital music landscape.

So where does that leave the composer of new music?   Is the current $1 going rate for a downloaded track sufficient? Is there any point in releasing your music to a streaming service for fractions of a penny per listen? Should we even care about copyright protection if revenue is going to be negligible? Is infinite distribution and promotion via YouTube and Facebook – even with zero revenue – preferable to some more restrictive model that might evolve under the constraints of SOPA ?

What are you doing now to copyright your music? How is the current Internet distribution system working for you and what would you like to see changed?

How many performers and ensembles out there are willing to play new music? Probably hundreds. How many composers and compositions are out there waiting to be played? Probably tens of thousands. A call for scores can literally bury a performing group in hopeful submissions. The dismal arithmetic of composition means that that the number of composers and compositions far outnumber those groups willing and able to play new music. And even then the playing field is tilted toward a relatively small pool of composers associated with institutions, so the odds of getting one’s work performed are slim indeed.

Slim, but not impossible. Networking, persistence and determination can win out. The recent efforts of our friend Dennis Bathory-Kitsz to get his opera performed were heroic by any measure: he applied for state grants, did fund-raising, promotions and solicited donations at every opportunity. He organized the cast, the musicians and supervised set construction. All this despite the fact that his basement flooded, it snowed on the day of the first performance and even his house cat died during the run-up to the performance. And yet, after three well-attended performances, Dennis will likely have more fund-raising to do just to break even. How many of us would endure what Dennis has gone through to get his work performed?

Given the imbalance between new compositions and the number of groups who can play new music – what is the composer to do?

One obvious solution is to start your own performing ensemble and be your own composer-in-residence. This was essentially what Philip Glass and Steve Reich did in the early days of minimalism. Steve Moshier – to name just one west coast example – is doing this with his Liquid Skin Ensemble. In New York  Bang on a Can is perhaps the most well-known group.  And there are many other examples of smaller groups playing original music in unexpected venues:  James Ross, Richard Lainhart, Michael Waller and Dave Seidel in the east, Paul Bailey in Los Angeles.

Similarly, by networking you could get close to a performing organization and write pieces that work to their strength. I do this by writing choral music for our church choir – it’s not the Met but still a very rewarding avocation.

Still another, more radical solution, is to bypass the need for performance altogether – and write electro-acoustic music. The Internet makes this option particularly attractive by delivering your music world-wide directly to the ear buds of listeners at essentially zero cost.

So what is your method? What works best or least?

I recently attended a concert featuring music by Antonin Dvorak. Dvorak is one of those much beloved composers whose music I find incredibly inconsistent due, in no small part, to his incredible facility in composition. To paraphrase a conductor friend, he just doesn’t seem to struggle enough for his notes (this friend was referring not to Dvorak but to Camille Saint-Saens, however, a composer whose work, in my opinion, embodies this dichotomy even more problematically than Dvorak). Being an extremely opinionated consumer of social media, I immediately posted something to this effect on my Facebook page, something with elicited a minor controversy and one of the most stimulating discussions I’ve ever had on my wall. A couple of things came up in this discussion that have stayed with me: 1. what is this struggle and why is it so important? And 2. Is it okay to criticize the GREATS of the past?
So, what do I mean by struggle? A romantic (or Romantic) aspect of this comes to us from, like many things, Beethoven. Beethoven famously and mightily worked out his ideas in copious sketchbooks before setting them down in a score. His struggle, mind you, is rather mythologized, but it added to his mystique as a composer, even in life, and remains a part not just of his legacy but, being perhaps the gold standard of GREAT composer, of all our compositional legacies (well, at least our baggage).
Mozart is the most famous and sublime antithesis to this notion. Young Wolfgang Amadeus, perhaps the first freelance composer in Western music history, had famous, prolific facility for composition, sometimes producing sets of parts before producing an autograph manuscript of a score. Much like Beethoven’s struggle, however, this facility is largely the product of mythmaking, particularly stemming from Mozart’s years as a stupefying child prodigy and propagated primarily by his father, Leopold. Mozart, unlike Beethoven, didn’t see the need to work out his ideas on paper, but you’d better believe that ideas as gloriously worked out as his, particularly in the works of his last decade, were arrived at after careful consideration.
As to the question of criticism of the GREATS: a composer friend of mine took issue with this notion, suggesting, somewhat ironically, I think, that I must be supremely confident in my own compositional abilities to feel comfortable criticizing GREAT composers like Dvorak or Saint-Saens for “not being great enough.” Hubris (I am confident in my abilities or I wouldn’t be a professional composer, but I try, at least, to keep grounded about where I fit in. We stand, after all, on the shoulders of giants), however, is not what drives my criticism.
Just as writers must be prolific readers, so should composers be prolific listeners. In the act of listening (or reading) one absorbs certain lessons about how to write one’s own work. How else are we to arrive at something resembling a confident voice as artists if we are not free to criticize, good or ill, the work of others, good or GREAT? The key, of course, is to apply that same criticism–turned up to eleven, perhaps– to our own work.
I bring this up because Dvorak teaches me about my own strengths and weaknesses as a composer. Like Dvorak (or Saint-Saens, or Hindemith…), I have an amazing facility at generating notes, something which has proven to be a double edged sword, to say the least. On the one hand, I am able to finish a piece relatively quickly, which comes in handy when facing a looming deadline. On the other hand, I have become increasingly suspicious of my initial ideas, and will agonize for long periods over my ideas (in my head and on the computer), often putting pieces down for weeks or months at a time (when the schedule allows it) before reaching a final decision on a passage. This is more problematic the older I get, it seems, although recently I have found that ideas are flowing very easily…which fills me with dread that the piece I’m working on is no good!
Perhaps this dread is also part of the struggle. Or perhaps Dvorak’s and Saint-Saens’ advocates on my Facebook wall are right: not every piece should be a masterpiece. Maybe I should just relax and let pieces do what they will do. I should be so lucky as to find the kind of audience that Dvorak and Saint-Saens (and yes, even Hindemith) enjoy!

Well, I am writing this on my employer’s computer during work hours. And I don’t even feel guilty about it – the same increases in productivity via computers and the Internet that now allow me to do the work of three people for my employer (at the same pay, of course) also lets me do some extra-curricular activities – all with time to spare.

I find I can get a lot of networking done on Facebook, G+ and the various new music blogs during work hours. Reading articles, posting comments and maybe creating some album artwork – all easy to do between phone calls, quoting prices, responding to emails or rewriting technical specs for our products where I work. I can also print out scores, break out the parts and get them ready for copying. So one way to leave more time for composing at home is to get all the other stuff done at work. Of course I have my cubicle set up so I can quickly put my emergency spreadsheet on the screen as soon as anyone approaches, but that is actually pretty rare.

At home I try to reserve the same time slot each week for composing and for me this is Saturday morning. I’ve been able to sleep in so I am refreshed, the house is quiet and I know I can concentrate on getting all the notes in the right places. I work strictly by PC – so I don’t need to bang around on a piano or fool with staff paper – it all goes straight into the notation program. When I’m finished I can print out a .pdf score and upload to my website in just a few minutes.

I do a bit of processing to the resulting midi file – sequencing, normalizing, maybe stretching or adding some reverb, echoes or equalization. But the final mp3 or .wav file can be uploaded directly, again in a matter of minutes. Everything is on my laptop so I can do this pretty much anywhere – although I prefer the familiar surroundings of home. But the whole process is a beneficiary of the efficiency that the PC (and Mac) has brought to music creation over the last several years.

All of this has encouraged me to believe that a full-time day job need not prevent the composer from a reasonably productive musical output. Many of us must make a living outside of music – and even if you are teaching the academic life is pretty crowded with job-related responsibilities. It might even be argued that a full-time composer will spend much of his time on non-composing tasks anyway – networking, rehearsals, traveling, overseeing the distribution of scores, etc.

So what makes you productive? Do you have a full-time day job? How would your composing habits change if you could work at it full time? If you now work exclusively at writing music, what is the best thing about full-time composing?

[Note: Philip Fried is a composer mentioned before on S21; I've known him forever as a long-time commenter over at NewMusicBox, and as composer-in-residence for Minnesota's Opera Bob. Phil had a bit of a brain-worm spinning around in his head, and asked if he could share this thought over here at our forum.]

Bear with me. Stockhausen created an opera, part of which requires an instrumental performance in moving helicopters.  I saw this on video. John Cage creates a work where the player doesn’t ‘play’ in the traditional musical sense, but turns a page in time. (It would be easy to say that this is simply a theater piece for a musician to perform, Mr. Cage was a theater composer after all.)  Recent European music plays a lot with timbral similarity and disparity.  In the vocal realm an opera can have editorial that can’t be perceived from hearing the work. Sound artists create works that are site specific.

These works have a similarity; in effect they are creating new instruments. That is, the instruments are not playing music so much as the “music” creates a singular and unique instrument. Sometimes it’s a disposable, one-performance-only work. Other times it’s features are reusable. The laptop is not the instrument itself, rather it is part of a larger exploration of time, space, and event. A part of many.

A performance in a moving helicopter implies that the moving space itself is part of a site specific instrument. Is the video a useful recreation or not?

Naturally all musical ensembles and performing abilities — chamber music, grand opera, solo piano, recital — have their particular time and place to perform. Then where and in what context might beginners, advanced, students and professionals in these different styles perform?  Strictly speaking these rules are no longer the case. The space can become part of the work.

An orchestra has long been considered an instrument with many performers; so too are bands and many other instrumental configurations. The creation of “super instruments” — that is, joining several similar or different acoustic/electric instruments into a single formation or unit that act as one instrument (that is mostly rhythmic or gestural unison) — is quite popular especially in Europe, combining an instrument with a voice or voices, or electronics as a single formation. Or the melody, the obbligato, and the accompaniment act as one multifarious singularity. All kinds of composers and sound artists are creating sounds and music that explore and develop these new solo and multi-player instruments.

It seems to me that post-modernism is focused on music that creates new instruments, rather than in modernism which used instruments to create new music. If that makes any sense… Thoughts?

[Ed. Note -- Jeff Harrington has been doing the composer-promotion thing on the web just about as early as anyone could. Now working out of France, Jeff has written a bit about his own long experience, and wanted to share that with you all.]

Here’s a short article I wrote upon request from somebody teaching a course in Digital Musicianship.  I offer it as a way to encourage discussion about the costs and benefits of the free culture model.  Please pardon the informal nature of it…

My strategy… is basically to get my music into as many people’s hands as possible without expectations of renumeration. What happened to my wife and I in the early 80′s informed the process where I invented the free culture system.

We’d both had to drop out of college, me from Juilliard and Elsie from Pratt because of money problems. We were quite angry about this and started a street art project. This was 1982. At the same time we started showing Elsie’s paintings on the street in the West Village, right on Spring Street to be exact in the heart of Soho. We showed these huge paintings with a sign saying, “Not for Sale.”

This was pretty shocking to people and we started getting more and more interested in seeing where that could take us. We created series of non-destructive art works in chalk and with rubber stamps and displayed them all over NYC. Eventually, we became so famous (or infamous) that we started a whole mini-art movement in NYC and started receiving death threats… we ended up having to flee NYC, broke and regroup in New Orleans.

In New Orleans we continued giving our art away through the mail art networks. These were exchanges where you’d send a piece of art to somebody and then they’d send you something back. These turned into zines eventually, and from there into multiples and even gallery shows. When the computer networks started up in the early 80′s with BBS’s it was a natural progression to take our art give-away there.

I was probably the first serious artist to use the BBS system to distribute art, although I’m sure there were a few more; nobody at the time seemed to have come from the street art/mail art networks. I uploaded the score (as a set of GIF images) to my Variations for String Quartet onto a BBS in 1987 which is probably the earliest music give away. I started distributing MIDI files of my pieces around this time. It was very interesting to upload a MIDI file or a graphic and then watch it get uploaded by a fan to another site. At about the same time I started embedding my music into synthesizer patch downloads. I first distributed my Acid Bach series as a component of a synthesizer patch library I created for the purpose of having a compelling download. That is, I designed the patch library so that people would want it and coincidentally listen to my music. This way they’d have a high quality musical experience akin to the MP3 playback today through the use of the same synthesizer. Read the rest of this entry »

Literally… For a while now, and with far too little recognition, a group of composer-students at Michigan State University have been running their own weekly videocast/podcast. Called SoundNotion, it’s a place where composers share geek-talk with — and more importantly, for — other composers. Whatever’s going on, from the recent Pulitzers to new hot works, current web memes to just your general composerly “what’s up with that?!?”, SoundNotion is a reasonably smart, witty, casual place to catch up with concerns of up-and-coming composers figuring out this musical  world today. The regular cast includes  Patrick Gullo, David MacDonald, Sam Merciers and Nate Bilton, enhanced with the occassional guest composer, guest interviews, etc. etc. Here’s the latest episode, with topics including:

“For me the only new music would be music that a composer of genius successfully created on the periphery of all the movements of our time and in the face of all current slogans and manifestos. Generally speaking, whatever the intellectual movements in force, not enough attention is paid to matters of temperament and originality…” –Henri Dutilleux

On 22 April, the newly established Ensemble: périphérie will begin its inaugural tour. The ensemble’s mission is to promote contemporary music by presenting stimulating and inspiring concerts of new chamber works, by commissioning new works from both emerging and established composers, and by inviting audiences to join us in recognizing great art of our time. One of the primary goals of E:p is to bring greater exposure to composers and works that are underperformed and neglected—that is, music that lies on the periphery.

From our “Call for Scores,” we received over 130 high-quality submissions and selected the following composers for performance: David Smooke, Philippe Bodin, Mike Barnett, and Mark Zuckerman.  We also commissioned a new work by German composer Klaus Hübler, and will perform works by Russian composer Irina Dubkova, and German composer Robert H. P. Platz, one of our advisory board members.

If you are in the area, please come to one of our upcoming performances:

22 April at 7:00 pm – Daehler-Kitchin Auditorium, Coe College, Cedar Rapids, IA

24 April at 7:30 pm – Riverside Recital Hall, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, hosted by the Center for New Music

25 April at 7:30 pm – University of Minnesota, Morris

Please also check our website for more information, and for audio excerpts of the works performed (coming soon).

The Washington Post’s music writer Anne Midgette put out an interesting blog post about the importance of linking to other critics when publishing a review on a piece or concert or CD. I found it pleasing to read a prominent music critic’s acknowledgment that her opinion is not the be-all, end-all.

In contrast, Montreal Gazette guest blogger Arthur Kaptainis published a preview of the Montreal New Music Festival a couple weeks ago where, at the end of the post, he suddenly rails against Michael Daugherty’s Grammy win. Kaptainis’ opinions aside, he is factually incorrect inasmuch as he cites Daugherty’s win for the “Metropolis Symphony”, when the New Classical Composition Grammy went to Daugherty’s piano concerto, “Deus ex Machina”. As I read Kaptainis’ piece, it became clear he was using Daugherty to attack the Grammy’s in general.

Just wanted to share these with our community of critics to see what others think!

To provide full disclosure, Michael Daugherty personally drew my attention to the Montreal Gazette article. I am a student at the University of Michigan, where he teaches, but he is not my private instructor.

I just saw this blog post on Alex Ross’ twitter feed and read through it. It makes a great argument (by great, I mean it uses real statistics) to prove funding the arts produces MORE jobs than funding other, more popular areas of the economy, namely alternative energy.

Here is Ross’ tweet, to whet your appetite:

“Alternative energy…generates 1.67 jobs per $100,000 spent, while the arts generates 2.94 jobs per $100,000 spent”