Six weeks to the concert and I’m told we now have $850 towards our goal of $1000. Amazing! (And of course if we go over, our musician friends will get a little extra than the pittance we’re planning on giving them).
I was going to try and say something funny and encourage you guys to send us a few bucks, but instead, I’ll be reflective. Mainly because I’m a little hung over. And my ears hurt from working on an organ piece. And what with the rehearsals, the people I hear are coming and the success so far with the fund-raising I can get away with it. So, please excuse me while I shine something philosophical…
One of the things about online communities is that we’re all creating something new together. We’re creating a vibe, a place, a way of communicating and also we’re making friends. Fine, we all know that. And the strangest thing about online communities has always been that until very recently – they all were basically a dream. They didn’t resonate into the real. One glitch and whoops, the community would vaporize. Lose that email address and it was almost like Joe from Kalamazoo didn’t even exist anymore. But something has changed recently. Call it critical mass, or just the mirror breaking from the sheer scale.
In David Gerlertner’s book, Mirror Worlds, he talked about how the next step for the computer revolution was the mirroring of the world into the network. Think Google Maps. The real world transformed into a virtual place that would let us reflect on its characteristics from afar. Sequenza21 was that, until very recently, a set of virtual characters, symbolizing people, that simulated conversations with posted texts. Frankly, I’d rather sit in a Paris cafe with another composer or two and do that with a glass of absinthe, but those days are sadly gone.
It was then further hypothesized that this network would eventually reflect outward causing a new world to be created. A world which combined the benefits and wonders and freedoms of this real->virtual mapping with the real. The way we share our thoughts here, away from the physical, the freedom which let us say things we might not say to a colleague, all of these possibilities and transformations we’d created here in the virtual, would somehow establish itself non-virtually as something new.
Sequenza21 is now attempting to do just this. Create a brief real musical world, a new music reality derived from a virtual community. We are now reflecting outward and creating projects. People are rehearsing, making travel arrangements; the virtual community of Sequenza21 is going to shine back out into the real. And with your support we’ll be able to do this in a professional and thankful way to our performer friends who we all depend on to realize our crazy musical visions.
Click on the PayPal button below the picture of our own Ian Moss to add your $.02. Any amount is appreciated and frankly, we’d just as soon get 20 gifts of $10 as a $200 gift from one person. And since we’re all so nice here, and this thing is absolutely rocking, we’ve decided that instead of a $100 donation for an incentive, if you give over $50, we’ll throw something cool in. Help make this community something not just cool and virtual and liberating but something really really real.
What we know to be not possible,