The Loose Filter Project

If John Cage were alive today

he'd dig this house-sized, nature-powered music box created by NOLA's Quintron.

If you liked Singing House you should check out Quintron's Drum Buddy. Acquire one and you could improvise trios with Fred Armisen and Lauri Anderson.

Pulp Fiction in chronological order and the inevitable majority of remix culture

Something I've wanted to see for years, Pulp Fiction in chronological order:

 

Plus, a very interesting thought about the inevitably rising majority of remix culture:

"For most people, sharing and remixing with attribution and no commercial intent is instinctually a-okay..... What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth?"

I left my quarter tone marimba in San Francisco

A few months ago I was fortunate enough to be asked to write an article for NewMusicBox about the SF new music scene. For the next few weeks I dutifly pounded the pavement (and Bay Bridge), met a lot of very cool folks, and heard some fantastic new music. The article, published last week (link below), centered around the remarkable Magik*Magik Orchestra, then branched out from there in a 6 Degrees from Kevin Bacon kind of way to explore the musical endeavors of several young musicians. It's a snapshop of a very cool scene.

Shake It To the Ground: SF Musicians Re-envision Classic(al) Career Paths

Special thanks goes out to Annie Phillips, who put me in contact with many of the musicians interviewed, and to Magik*Magik, Nonsemble 6, and the guys at The Living Earth Show for allowing me to attend their rehearsals.

The Living Earth Show in their fuzzy-walled rehearsal cave.

 

OPERA REMIX is here! Tonight!

Tonight at the State Theater in Modesto, California: Opera Remix, from Townsend Opera.  You can read all about it on the Remix webpage, but this event is a major foray into the real world for the Loose Filter philosophy (disclosure: I'm Creative Consultant for this project with the opera company...so any similarities are not coincidental at all).

Here's a clip from the reading rehearsal last night with orchestra only, playing Jonathan Newman's setting of Here Comes the Sun:

 

Enjoy a couple more rehearsal clips here (of Summertime and Baba O'Riley) from a playlist that includes gems from Mozart, Puccini, Gershwin, Led Zeppelin, Chicago, Pink Floyd, and more.  Keep an eye on the Opera Remix website if this catches your interest, there will be much more video of the event itself posted there soon!

I'll also soon be posting here, in installments, a user-friendly version of the research paper that started things rolling on this extremely innovative project from a wonderful regional opera company.  Stay tuned.

What happens when you let the students program the concert?

Being an entirely student-run ensemble, the Trinity Orchestra in Ireland does just that.  Their repertoire from last spring?  Daft Punk:

 

Their most recent concert featured The Arcade Fire.  You can follow them on Facebook here.

On second thought

Jonah Lehrer writes about how emotional decision-making may be better than rational decision-making when faced with complex choices.

While there is an extensive literature on the potential wisdom of human emotion, it’s only in the last few years that researchers have demonstrated that the emotional system (aka Type 1 thinking) might excel at complex decisions, or those involving lots of variables. If true, this would suggest that the unconscious is better suited for difficult cognitive tasks than the conscious brain, that the very thought process we’ve long disregarded as irrational and impulsive might actually be “smarter” than reasoned deliberation. 

Lefties

Interesting email this morning from Gregory Ruffer, a conductor and doctoral student at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Dear Conductors Guild Member:

I am a doctoral student at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City, where I am completing my dissertation research under the advisment of Dr. Hal Abeles. The working title of my dissertation is, "The Sinister Conductor: Preceptions and Practices of University Conducting Instructors Toward Left-Handed Students." 

One portion of my research involves surveying conductors about their work with left-handed people. I would be most appreciative if you could take 15 minutes of your time to complete my survey. Your input will assure that the data in my dissertation is representative of the largest possible population. Please click on this link to complete the survey:http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/left-handed-conductor-training.

Can I get a recording of that?

Really thought-provoking post from Nico Muhly on the difficulty many composers have acquiring recordings of their own works, and how having access to those recordings can be an extremely valuable learning experience. The discussion continues in the comment thread, and it is worth a read.

I remember a composer actually having to email me and ask me to return promo CD because he didn't have permission from the orchestra that performed one of the pieces to distribute it.

 

Filter bubbles - pt. 2

In a previous post I talked about the filter bubble I've created for myself in terms of my classical music world view, and resolved to search out other voices that would add to a mostly one-sided discussion. It's been tough because there aren't many folks outside the classical music world writing about it, but here are a few interesting perspectives.

MetaFilter - classical music is not a big discussion topic on the blue, but a few posts have generated some great discussions and sobering perspectives. For example, from this thread:

Great orchestra sounds incredible, and is an experience not to be missed; no doubt. But am I sad that a member of the orchestra gets paid only $40k for their part time work doing something that they love, which is about what the average full time American makes? Not exactly. Is it right to think that Joe Cellist is a truly fundamental piece of any given local music scene? No. - felix

 

Intellectual property, continued

The Artful Manager had an interesting post in which he shared some points of view that questioned the assumption that stealing (or giving your stuff away for free) is bad for business (previously). He linked to a couple of studies that suggest that sales of knock-off designer handbags can lead to sales of the actual item. For some people, it turns out, possession of the fake or pirated item can actually lead to a desire for the real deal. For example, author Neil Gaiman discovered that access to pirated copies of his work seemed to boost sales, and convinced his publisher to conduct an experiment testing the idea.

An interesting way to read a poem

Via the American Academy of Poets, here is a wonderful Whitman poem presented using Poem Flow:

 

Kinda fun.  More poems here.

Another one lost...

Another U.S. orchestra has shut down, meaning we've lost FOUR this season: Honolulu, New Mexico, Syracuse, and now Bellevue (WA).  As well, Louisville and Philadelphia have filed for bankruptcy protection.  Lebrecht gives the story here.

As regular readers of this site know, our position is that the basic problem remains relatively uncomplicated to understand: the potential American listeners that orchestras need to reach simply are not interested in what they are offering.  It could be different specific things: programming, modes of presentation, ticket prices, competition, etc., but it seems that many American orchestras somehow think that if they can just preserve what audience they have through the recession or whatever, things will spring back to normal eventually.  This does not acknowledge that the larger culture has changed and is changing in fundamental ways to which artists must adapt if their work is to resonate with listeners.

Everyone's a patron with direct-to-fan

Matthew Guerrieri recaps the Rethink Music conference at the Berklee College of Music (via NewMusicBox). The conference aimed to bring together "all sides and viewpoints on the subjects of creativity, commerce, and policy to engage in critical dialogue examining the business and rights challenges facing the music industry." But, as Guerrieri writes, the viewpoints of emerging artists and established players on those subjects couldn't be more divergent.

[T]here was, for example, Del Bryant, the president and CEO of BMI, opining on Tuesday morning that "giving things away for free" was "not building the business," while the Canadian band Metric and their voluble manager, Matt Drouin, related on Tuesday afternoon how they built their business by giving things away for free. There was Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, insisting that lawsuits against file-sharing end users had "clearly [indicated] to the public at large what was legal and what was not," a day after the singer/songwriter Bleu had matter-of-factly said, "I don't think there's any way to go back to monetizing music."

Filter bubbles - pt. 1

Eli Pariser's great TED Talk about the dangers of internet "filter bubbles" got me thinking about what other types of filters shape my worldview. I realized that in addition to the algorithmic ones that Pariser is concerned about, there are also filters I've unintentionally created myself.

When I looked at the RSS feeds I subscribe to I realized that almost every blog or webpage belongs to someone squarely in the classical music world, someone who is either part of a large, traditional institution, or dependent on one. I thought about some of these folks and wondered what they filter out. For instance, if you only read Greg Sandow you'd think that nearly all orchestras are going out of business. If you only read Alex Ross, on the other hand, you'd think that classical music concerts are the coolest, hippest things in the world. If you only read Proper Discord you would probably think that all arts administrators are idiots.

Supreme Court to hear public domain case

In 1994 Congress, following the latest round of GATT talks, voted to remove thousands of works, including musical scores, from the public domain. The rationale was that U.S. copyright laws would now be comparable to those in Europe - at that time many musical scores that were in the public domain in the U.S. were still under copyright in their home country - and this new parity would help protect the rights of U.S. composers, authors, and publishers abroad. If you've ever stumbled across an old set of parts for a Shostakovich or Prokofiev symphony in your school's library and wondered why that piece is rental-only today, this is the reason why.

A case challenging Congress' right to remove works from the public domain is now on its way to the Supreme Court. The plaintiff, conductor Lawrence Golan. The Chronicle of Higher Ed tells the story of Golan's journey from a conductor stymied, as many of us are, by the high costs of copyrighted works, to a reluctant advocate for the protection of the public domain.

John Cage Quote of the Day 8

        At all costs inspiration

must be avoided which is to say

act in such a way that inspiration

doesn't come up as an alternative

but exists eternally.

 

from 45' For A Speaker

Do musicians have better brains?

A new study says yes:

New research shows that musicians' brains are highly developed in a way that makes the musicians alert, interested in learning, disposed to see the whole picture, calm, and playful. The same traits have previously been found among world-class athletes, top-level managers, and individuals who practice transcendental meditation.

Summary is here, abstract is here.  Their conclusions are quite interesting:

[Those with high mind-brain development, such as musicians] have well-coordinated frontal lobes. Our frontal lobes are what we use for higher brain functions, such as planning and logical thinking.... Yet another EEG measure shows that individuals with high mind brain development use their brain resources economically. They are alert and ready for action when it is functional to be so, but they are relaxed and adopt a wait-and-see attitude when that is functional.

Musicians also exhibit higher levels of moral reasoning and have more peak experiences.  Fascinating stuff.

Disruptive technologies and intellectual property

NPR had a succinct history of the MP3 a while back. It was an interesting read, and this is what fascinated me the most.

The story of how the [MP3] technology was hijacked and adapted for widespread consumers contains not only the roots of the war that the music industry would later wage over the tiny, compressed, user-friendly files, but also echoes of some of the very ideas that war was fought over: intellectual property, copyright, technology, theft, control and the free distribution of ideas and products that had taken years to realize.

What's notable and disturbing is that Brandenburg and his colleagues were ultimately unable to assert their intellectual property rights once someone copied and distributed their proprietary software used to encode MP3 files. This problem - "the free distribution of ideas and products that had taken years to realize" - made me think of composers and their music, and this post from John Mackey's blog in particular. While John's post deals with unlicensed performances, it still made me wonder what technologies have the potential to impact the classical music world the way the MP3 impacted the recording industry.

John Cage Quote of the Day 7

Rhythm is not arithmetic. 

from 45' For A Speaker

Check please

In case you missed it, here is Proper Discord's contribution to Drew McManus's Take a Friend to the Orchestra project. He shares his experiences attending orchestral concerts with non-musicians, and the results are pretty much what you would expect. If the show was good, his guests enjoyed it; if it wasn't, they didn't.

PD explodes (IMHO) the argument that suggests that audience members have to have technical musical knowledge to enjoy musical structures like sonata form. His guests either liked the show or they didn't, and didn't need a technical explanation to justify their reaction. It's like eating out, PD says:

When you’re sitting in a restaurant and your food shows up cold, you don’t care why it wasn’t cooked properly. You just wanted it warm.

(previously)

 

"It has indulged...a narcissistic avant-garde speaking in languages that repel the average committed listener..."

Bernard Holland pithily dissects the two basic sets of problems facing American orchestras, in a very perceptive article from 2003:

The free-enterprise system, which worked so admirably to bring the American city its new wealth, transferred poorly to the performing arts. [...] With good management, it is supposed, money and listeners will come rolling in -- again, a symptom masquerading as a cause. Orchestras are not sick because they have bad management. They have bad management because they are sick. Failing industries do not attract top employees.

[...] As for disappearing audiences, no amount of managing will solve that one. Classical music has only itself to blame. It has indulged the creation of a narcissistic avant-garde speaking in languages that repel the average committed listener in even our most sophisticated American cities.

[...] Fleeing audiences are one more symptom, the cause being a public art that has been abandoned by its avant-garde and uses up its given natural resources with profligacy. Audiences are not to blame. They are smarter than Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt want to think they are.

Definitely worth a read and some reflection....

Teachout in WSJ misses the point (while making a good one)

So Terry Teachout wrote a kind-of-controversial article that ran in the Wall Street Journal today, rounding up some of the recent terrible news in the American performing arts world and making a comment about those problems--and he almost, but not quite, says what those problems are really about.  After detailing some sobering recent news, including the Philadelphia Orchestra (!) filing for bankruptcy last week, Teachout observes:

What's the problem? In the immortal (if apocryphal) words of Sam Goldwyn, "If nobody wants to see your picture, there's nothing you can do to stop them." Corollary: If nobody can afford a ticket to your show, there's nothing you can do to make them buy one. When money is tight and ticket prices keep climbing, playgoers and opera buffs will respond by staying home. Moreover, the high-culture business models of the past don't work anymore.

In that quote he almost clearly sees the fundamental problem that American performing arts organizations face, but then sort of willfully ignores it and talks about business models.  He is right that ticket prices are generally way too high and that most of the business models of large performing arts organizations are no longer working and need to be fundamentally reconsidered, particularly with regard to negotiations between labor and management. 

But the real truth is in that Goldwyn quote: more and more, people are simply not interested in the products offered by large performing arts organizations.  They aren't buying tickets because they do not value what is on offer, and are choosing to spend their entertainment dollars elsewhere.  (If ticket prices are way too expensive, how do successful professional sports franchises continue to sell so many high dollar season tickets?  People will find a way to pay for experiences they value.)

This seems to be the real, potential core problem that no one wants to say out loud or discuss openly: the possibility that the kind of musical experience that symphony orchestras and opera companies currently offer appeals to too few Americans to sustain the institutions that present them.  The gap between what classical musicians do and what American listeners seek may have simply grown too wide to bridge in any sustainable way with current practices. 

Musicians use both sides of their brains more frequently than non-musicians

Recent research out of Vanderbilt University, published in the journal Brain and Cognition:

Supporting what many of us who are not musically talented have often felt, new research reveals that trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.

Some interesting conclusions, read about the research here.

Amazing: music listening and chat room for you and your friends, regardless of location

 

Listening Room is as simple as it sounds: create a room, have your friends join you, and anyone can play music from their computer for all to hear.  Plus, chat.  Completely awesome.

How perception of time relates to decision-making

A fascinating short talk from Prof. Philip Zimbardo on how fundamental our perception of time is to much of our lives:

 

 

What's wrong with classical music, part 8 billion and oh hell I lost count....

The perenniel topic of "what's WRONG with classical music??" surfaces again in a thoughtful blog post over at 3QuarksDaily.  I agree and disagree with much of what Colin Eatock mentions in that piece (and am frustrated by some of the common misperceptions perpetuated in it), but it's excellent discussion fodder and it generated a  fairly interesting conversation in this thread over on Metafilter.  Food for thought.

More from Big Think

I've linked to a great John Waters interview Big Think previously, and as I perused the site after that post I discovered that it is an absolute El Dorado of interesting people and ideas.  Here are some that I found especially engrossing.

• Penn Jilette - "I want to live in a world of a market place of ideas where everyone is busted on their bullshit all the time, because I think that is the way we get to truth."
• Pierre-Laurent Aimard - "Every experiment becomes a part of your life."
• Chuck Close - "There is no better time to make painting than when everyone thinks it's dead."
• Steven Pinker - "There are certain realms in which a measure of irrationality and lack of control can actually work to your advantage."

You can scroll through the list of contributors here.

"And that is like joining a biker gang; that is."

John Waters speaks brilliantly about contemporary art and morality.   NSFW language at the end.

"... most people have great contempt about contemporary art and I find that hilarious because I did a piece, it said "contemporary art hates you."  And it does hate them because you can’t see it.  You don’t know the magic trick; you haven’t learned the vocabulary, you haven’t learned the special way of seeing something that changes it.  And that is like joining a biker gang; that is."

My wife and I had a conversation about this statement, and she felt that is was a bit unfair.  She feels that while many people may feel that contemporary art is couched in a language they don't understand, most artists aren't looking to deliberately mock or confuse their audience.  Rather, it is often self-imposed barriers to the perception of contemporary art that gets in the way.

Inspiration v. Creativity

A brief, but interesting and thought-provoking take on Inspiration v. Creativity from designer Owen Shifflett (via DesignTaxi), about how the ease of the former - to take what others have done and use it as a basis for our own work - might be impairing out ability to create genuinely new things and ideas.

John Cage Quote of the Day

Those of you who know me know that, for the time being, I am not earning my living as a conductor, thanks in part to California's woeful state budget.   I have strong, contradictory opinions about my situation - but not the state budget, which is simply fracked - and perhaps I'll express those later.  In the mean time I've decided to delve into the wonderfully contrarian mind of John Cage (the Terry Gilliam of American composers).  Cage was the ultimate (inside) outsider, and as I am now on the outside as well, I figure it is high time I tackle the esoteric tomes that have been waiting patiently in my library since being purchased at Half Priced Books, oh so many years ago.

So here it is, your John Cage Quote of the Day.

So it was that I gave about 1949 my Lecture on Nothing at the Artists' Club on Eighth Street in New York City (the artists' club started by Robert Motherwell, which predated the popular one associated with Philip Pavia, Bill de Kooning, et. al.).  This Lecture on Nothing was written in the same rhythmic structure I employed at the time in my musical compositions (Sonatas and Interludes, Three Dances, etc.).  One of the structural divisions was the repetition, some fourteen times, of a single page in which occurred the refrain, "If anyone is sleepy let him go to sleep."  Jeanne Reynal, I remember, stood up part way through, screamed, and then said, while I continued speaking, "John, I dearly love you, but I can't bear another minute."  she then walked out.  Later, during the question period, I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question asked.  This was a reflection of my engagement in Zen.

From the Foreword to Silence; Lectures and Writings of John Cage

Why band music matters

From Steve Layton at the always excellent Sequenza 21, a great essay about the modern American wind band and its (earned but unrecognized) place in concert musical life, in the form of a review of several recordings.  A taste:

I had a teacher who once said that the sound of a symphony orchestra was one of the great achievements of Western civilization. Whether that’s true or not is open for debate, but there seems to be no question that the survival of orchestras in small to medium markets in the United States is in doubt. There are also artistic questions about the viability of the model that makes a symphony orchestra the center of a town’s musical life. Wind music, whose players are more plentiful than string players, and whose audiences tend to be more open to new music and new artistic situations, can assume a more central role than it has in most places now.

All of the pieces are in place, then, for bands to play an important role in the revitalization (or continued growth, depending on how you see the current situation) of concert music in the United States. What may be needed are artists, presenters, and patrons with the will and the imagination to re-invent musical life in their cities and towns.

New project is up: the 21st Century Symphony

For your listening and viewing enjoyment.

Remix composition contest WINNER

The winner of our remix composition contest is up for your listening pleasure, congratulations to Robert McCarthy!

Check it out here. 

Hard to love

An exchange from the last episode of Bill Moyers Journal.

BARRY LOPEZ: [Y]ou know, you can turn on the television and see people who claim expertise that they don't possess. And I say that, because the kind of expertise we need is not a facile grasp of policy, but a love of humanity. That's what we need. 

BILL MOYERS: But some people are hard to love. 

BARRY LOPEZ: Humanity. And, you know, what Charles Taylor or Idi Amin did, or Hitler or Stalin or any of these reprehensible human beings. What they did is-- we should condemn. Humanity is also Michelangelo. Or humanity is also Darwin. Humanity is Epictetus or anybody that you want to pull out of the fabric. I mean, if you have the Bach cello suites in your head at the same moment that you're looking at a gas chamber at Auschwitz. Then to me you've got some hope of being fully aware of what it is that we're enmeshed in. 

BILL MOYERS: Well, this, of course, is the puzzle, isn't it? I mean, in that quote, high civilization of Germany at the time. The generals walked in the garden, listening to Bach and Beethoven, while a mile away, the gas chambers were working overtime. 

BARRY LOPEZ: There was no capacity to imagine their own humanity was being destroyed there. The way in which they were ethically compromised by what they were doing. What I hope that I'm saying is that there is in the interior of those six cello suites that Bach wrote. An homage to a quality that is apparent to a Western imagination about beautiful proportion and rhythm; increment and spatial volume . . . There's something captured in them. And that is the fuel that you use to open yourself up to everything else, even those things that break your heart. You have to see into the whole. 

"It seems the wind ensemble’s image needs a makeover."

From Listen magazine, an excellent article on the creative surge happening in the wind band world: Beyond the Halftime Show: The American wind ensemble is quietly building a canon.

As the article quotes John Corigliano:

The repertoire of band music is largely contemporary. As a result, the audiences expect and look forward to new works. Listening in an environment largely ignored by the press, they learn to trust their own ears and respond directly to what they hear. Most important of all, concert bands devote large amounts of rehearsal time over a period of weeks — not days — to learning thoroughly the most challenging of scores.

So the appeal to composers is obvious.  If the medium continues to be more and more appealing to composers, well...where the composers go, so goes the musical culture.

(You can download Corigliano's absolutely fantastic symphony for band, Circus Maximus, here.  And it's only eight bucks.)

LA Phil announces new season, continues to be awesome

The Los Angeles Philharmonic just announced their 2010-2011 season, and it demonstrates again why we think the LA Phil is one of the most vibrant arts organizations around.  They deftly honor the old while championing the new, with a very wide embrace. 

Not convinced to go look?  What if I told you that their slate of commissions and premieres includes: Adès, Turnage, Lindberg, Marsalis, Salonen, Barry, Golijov, Mackey, Gubaidulina, Lieberson and Górecki?  Most major orchestras may have one or two commissions or premieres per season--the LA Phil has 19 premieres (including 12 commissions and 9 world premieres) planned for 2010-2011.

Just the ways that they present the season speaks volumes: a print brochure with PDF version on the website of course, but also informal videos of Gustavo Dudamel and Deborah Borda (President & CEO) talking about the upcoming season, as well separate videos of John Adams (Creative Chair), Herbie Hancock (Creative Chair for Jazz), and Thomas Adès (Aspects of Adès Festival Director) all talking about their contributions to the season.  Check it out here.

(I didn't think I'd find myself saying this, but I hope to be in LA more often in the future.  I want to hear some of these concerts!)

Perspective

The Scale of the Universe - you know, for fun.

More on interpretation

I've been thinking about interpretation on and off since this previous post on the subject, and Allan Kozinn's New York Times essay, in which he compares Schoenberg performances by Boulez and Barenboim, has provided more food for thought.

But what was particularly striking was that the two conductors took interpretive approaches to Schoenberg that were poles apart: Mr. Boulez’s readings prized delicacy and transparency; Mr. Barenboim’s, raw power and heft. Both were highly personalized approaches, though you could argue that Mr. Boulez, by clarifying Schoenberg’s scoring details and structure, was offering something close to a literalist view, and that Mr. Barenboim, by magnifying the vigor he found in the music, was bending the music more overtly to his will.

This reminded me of a quote from Serge Koussevitzky, who felt that even performances that attempted to follow the score to the letter were influenced by the personality of the interpreter, sort of like the same beam of light passing through prisms of different shapes and sizes.

A fair point:

Jon Sass is amazing. You've never heard anything like this.

Playing with a laptop, DJ, and using live looping, Jon Sass plays music like I've never heard before and makes the tuba cooler than it ever ought to be:

American Eclectic, or why I conduct mostly bands

Peter sent this link with a suggestion to post and, as usual, he's right--this is a great piece from the Savvy Musician called "The Most Viable Instrumentation."  Cutler's point is simple, that many concert music ensembles make the mistake of identifying and marketing themselves almost solely based on instrumentation:

Unless the demand for your traditional ensemble far outpaces supply (highly unlikely), or your wild configuration is fascinating and newsworthy in itself...don’t build a marketing plan around your instrument(s) alone. Much of the time, you may even want to de-emphasize this element.  Focus instead on the unique talents of players, unusual programming, and other creative aspects of the show.  Sell your story.  Sell your message. Sell your theme.  Sell your charm. 

What's shocking about this advice is how revolutionary it sounds in our current state of concert music ossification.  Regular readers of the LF Project know how heartily we endorse this perspective, and not just concerning marketing or presentation--for too long, musicians have allowed a priori sorts of ideas like standard instrumentation guide the artistic process in some very fundamental ways, causing many to make unexamined assumptions that place real, major constraints on their music-making.

For instance, we often start with assumptions and questions like:

 

Great art needs a great audience

Poet Patrick Gillespie makes an impassioned argument ("Let Poetry Die") against institutional benevolence sustaining poetry, and his comments and insights hold true to a great degree for concert music as well.  He perceptively notes that the audience for great art is actually part of great art:

Monroe’s stance excluded the general public from the evolution of art, but as Walt Whitman wrote, great poetry isn’t possible without a great audience, and if the audience is excluded from the development of a given art form, then it will no longer reflect the audience’s own innate greatness. And that is precisely what has happened. The general public no longer turns to contemporary poetry because it ceases to find itself, its greatness, reflected in that poetry. The general public has been excluded.

He comes to a fairly strong conclusion along the way:

The best thing that could happen to poetry is to drive it out of the universities with burning pitch forks. Starve the lavish grants. Strangle them all in a barrel of water. Cast them out. The current culture, in which poetry is written for and supported by poets has created a kind of state-sanctioned poetry that  resists innovation. When and if poetry is ever made to answer to the broader public, then we may begin to see some great poetry again – the greatness that is the collaboration between audience and artist.

While I think that great music has certainly been composed in the past 60 years, I also believe we have lost much because of a commitment to narrow, self-reinforced artistic perspectives that in many ways disrespect the audience.  And how long has it been since American concert music could credibly be described as a "collaboration between audience and artist"?  Ever?  Gillespie's whole essay is here.

Voice Band for iPhone: use just your voice to create that rock anthem you've wanted to write for so long

A new iPhone app that turns your voice into instruments in real time and allows multi-track layering.  Pretty cool music recreation app, and some interesting implications for music education spring to mind--especially at just $3 (available here).  A demonstration:

Net neutrality is important to you

In a recent NewMusicBox post composer Alex Shapiro reminds us why net neutrality is such a vital issue, and why it is of particular importance to musicians who share and sell self-created content - scores, recordings, video - online as a means of making a living and advancing careers.  Here's the crux of it.

 [O]ur ability to share our creations around the world lies in our access to the necessary portal.  This is why net neutrality - the term for an open internet that is not owned,controlled, or censored by any corporation - is crucial to artists.

Arts training improves attention and cognition: new empirical evidence

A very readable summary of some very interesting new research:

If there were a surefire way to improve your brain, would you try it? Judging by the abundance of products, programs and pills that claim to offer “cognitive enhancement,” many people are lining up for just such quick brain fixes. Recent research offers a possibility with much better, science-based support: that focused training in any of the arts—such as music, dance or theater—strengthens the brain’s attention system, which in turn can improve cognition more generally.

Michael Posner and Brenda Patoine, authors of the study, are finding clear causal links between arts training and increased cognitive ability!

Jonah Lehrer (my absolute favorite science journalist, and one of my favorite writers about anything, really) comments and elaborates on the importance of arts education:

That's why the research cited above is so important: it helps us appreciate the "soft" skills that we tend to neglect.

But I think that even this clinical evaluation of arts education misses an important benefit: self-expression. I shudder to think that second graders, at least in most schools, are never taught the value of putting their mind on the page. They are drilled in spelling, phonetics and arithmetic (the NCLB school day must be so tedious), and yet nobody ever shows them how to take their thoughts and feelings and translate them into a paragraph or a painting. We assume that creativity will take care of itself, that the imagination doesn't need to be nurtured. But that's false. Creativity, like every cognitive skill, takes practice; expressing oneself well is never easy.

A virtual choir?

Indeed, Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir.  Sending in separate tracks from all over the world, here is the first round of participants singing his piece Sleep:

Is that what I really sound like?

Why does my voice sound different when I hear it on a recording?

"The idea for the Music Animation Machine started with a hallucination ..."

The Music Animation Machine is a tool for visualizing music.

"Music moves, and can be understood just by listening. But a conventional musical score stands still, and can be understood only after years of training. The Music Animation Machine bridges this gap, with a score that moves -- and can be understood just by watching."

Virtual cool

The British music site Dilettante is hosting a Virtual Composer-In-Residence competition. 

The aim, they say, is to redefine the composer-in-residence for the digital age. He or she will win a modest prize of £1000, and a year-long residency on the website, allowing them to engage with web-site members through a Composer’s Corner blog, a podcast series, online forums, and masterclasses. It will culminate in 2010 a live event with a performance of a new work.

You can read the article from which the above quote is excerpted here, and hear music and interviews from the three finalists here.  While the Virtual-Composer-in-Residence is a cool idea, especially the interactive elements of the residency, as  Stuart and I continued to peruse Dilettante it became clear that the site, despite its revolutionary claims, still exists squarely within the framework of the "classical music world," as evinced by the preponderance of content generated by the marketing departments of large, traditional institutions like orchestras, artist management firms, and record labels (Lorin Maazel's "blog" for example).

Critical Thinking & Technology in the Arts

Greetings everyone!  It's great to be here and I look forward to regular contributions to the greatness that is the Loose Filter Project.  Much thanks to Stu and Dustin for the invitation. Feel free to reach me via twitter (millerasbill) or via email.

In starting a new position at Texas Tech University, I've been seeking ways to engage my students in a more significant and meaningful way.  Rehearsals go by too quickly and there often isn't time or means to delve deeply into the music itself: compositional techniques employed, critical thinking about the piece itself or the wide ranging musicological connections of a composer or specific piece, etc.  These aspects of the music aren't merely academic--understanding these aspects is fundamental for the future performers and educators I'm helping to train.