Music's Gradual Change from Being a Service to Being a Good

We are all currently witnessing something that traditionally was thought of as a service transform, through the magic of technology, into a good. And it seems that the trend might render music as a person's livelihood into something truly rare, and something reserved for the relative few.

We didn't think it would happen with 78 records, LP records, or tapes, but the transistor radio and the Walkman made it extremely enjoyable to listen to recordings while being out in the world (i.e. not at home), and listening to music became something private and personal. The quality of the CD and the quality of the technology that has gone into recording music on one end, and "spitting it out" on the other end has come to the point where rendered "readings" are even preferable for reasons of balance and of accuracy to natural ones.

The change has sure put a lot of musicians out of work over the past hundred years or so, because in places where musicians once provided the desired ambience, recordings do it for a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the price.

You can buy a CD for $15.00, and play it a thousand times without paying a cent more to anybody (and you can download the files for even less). The guests at your party, the people eating in your restaurant, or the people shopping your store will be bathed in its ambience, and the people who made the recordings, if they are still alive, will never even know. If you sell enough of these to enough people, the world will be flooded with electronically-generated sound with nary a musician attached to it. Oh yes. It already is pretty much that way with the "classical" kind of music.

I have been wracking my brain, and haven't found anything in current life or in the life of times past to compare this transformation of service to good with.

Can you?

UPDATE: I finally found one on-line discussion about this matter, and then another discussion about the question of whether music is a product or a service. If Jeff McDougall (the person who wrote one of the articles that started the discussion) happens to be reading this, I would love to have his take on this question.

Nice Music for this New Obama Ad

I wish there were a way to find out who is writing some of the music used in the new Obama Ads.

I particularly enjoyed listening to the music in this one from just a few hours ago.

The Musical "Marketplace" Is Changing Too Quickly

During the 1990s it seemed like there were hundreds and hundreds of brides and grooms in our area who wanted to have string quartets play at their weddings, and my quartet had pretty much as much work as we could handle during the summer months. Before the internet, there was the telephone, and when it rang it was almost never a sales call from some entity somewhere I have never heard of. Often it was a call about a wedding to play, or a party.

The internet and e-mail have certainly made it easier for people who are getting married to contact our quartet, but it has also jettisoned the practice of pairing up brides and string quartets into the territory of bidding and bargaining, which is not a healthy "place" for musicians to spend time.

I blame organizations like Gig Master. Gig Master seems to make its money from charging a fee for musicians to join and be part of their mega listing. They flood the search engines with links to pages for their musicians, and make it easy for "clients" to find possible "vendors." The "vendors" can "bid" for jobs, and the "client" will usually pick the "vendor" with the lowest price. This practice pits musician against musician, which does no good for building and maintaining a respectful society of working musicians.

Our quartet tried Gig Master, but we let our membership lapse after a year because we did not get a SINGLE wedding from being part of their network. We got inquiries, but, since there are four people in a quartet, and since we are all professionals and provide a consistently high-quality "product," we probably have a higher fee than those clients were willing to pay.

In the "market" for everything besides live music, the higher price "good" is usually considered the better "good." People imagine that a $150.00 pair of shoes will be better than a $20.00 pair of shoes. We are often encouraged to buy good things that won't wear out. High-quality cookware should last a lifetime. So should high-quality furniture. A high-quality musical performance lasts for as long as it takes for a musician or a group of musicians to play it.

It's hard to quantify music. If you go to a concert where the tickets cost $50.00, will that concert be as "good" as a concert where the tickets cost $20.00? Consumers want to know if what they are spending their money on is worth the price, and sometimes, when they lack the skills to tell the good from the great, they will convince themselves to enjoy less-than-enjoyable performances because of the price they paid for their tickets. Most of the concerts I play are not so expensive, so, when the concert is good, the people in the audience feel that they got a bargain: a lot of good music for relatively little money. Unfortunately the practice of newspapers paying critics to write honest and timely reviews of concerts is fading before our very eyes, so there is little in the way of post-concert "discussion" beyond talking with the people you happen to know in the audience.

More and more things in current culture seem to be quantified mainly by money. People pick expensive private colleges over state schools because they think the education they get at the more expensive college will be superior (forgetting, of course, that the real price for getting an education has to do with how much time and effort students put into their coursework). Some people make restaurant decisions based on price, and somehow believe that a $500.00 dinner for two would be "better" than one that costs half the price. People who can afford it make the same kinds of decisions about wine (Michael and I like the "house" brand of wine at a grocery store we frequent because of the variety. The wine varies from bottle to bottle, and it is always well worth the rock bottom price.)

I believe that music is not a thing you buy. Music (and that would be Music with a capital M) is played by people, and it happens in real time. Music is something that is different every time it is played. Music is written by people for people to play for their own enjoyment or for other people, and the price of admission that you pay at a concert should cover your part of the fee that the people playing are being paid and part of what it takes to manage a hall and all the workings behind putting on a concert. You are paying for the privilege of taking part in the Music that is happening.

The slope becomes slipperier and slipperier when people talk about buying music the same way they talk about buying a "thing." (I'm not talking about sheet music now, because I would classify that as more of a tool than a thing, though it is, actually, a thing.) When you buy a CD you are paying for the printing, design, engineering, and all the business-oriented stuff that is connected with making anything for publication. The sound stuff that is printed on the CD to make it something you can listen to should remain viable for a certain amount of time, but it is not something that can store recorded music permanently.

"Buying music" in current terms often means downloading an electronic "picture" of a performance or a rendering of several recorded musical fragments onto a device.

Let's hope that the musical "marketplace" will cycle back again, and Music will be thought of as something to experience rather than something to own. And maybe our quartet will get a few more weddings to play.

How Playing the Viola (or any stringed instrument) is Like Playing with a Yo-Yo

I really enjoy listening to the How Stuff Works podcast. I always learn something I never knew before (or even really thought about), like how a yo-yo works. In the podcast I listened to yesterday, the banter concerned the way the spinning motion of a yo-yo gives it gyroscopic stability:

1. The yo-yo is held up in the air, giving it the potential to fall to the ground.

2. The yo-yo has string wound around it, giving it the potential to spin as it unwinds.

When the yo-yo is released, both forms of potential energy change to kinetic energy. The yo-yo spool falls straight to the ground, which builds a certain amount of linear momentum (momentum in a straight line). At the same time, the string unwinds, and the spool spins, which builds angular momentum (momentum of rotation).

When the yo-yo reaches the end of the string, it can't fall any farther. But, because it has a good deal of angular momentum, it will keep spinning.

The spinning motion gives the yo-yo gyroscopic stability. A spinning object resists changes to its axis of rotation because an applied force moves along with the object itself. If you push on a point at the top of a spinning wheel, for example, that point moves around to the front of the wheel while it is still feeling the force you applied. As the point of force keeps moving, it ends up applying force on opposite ends of the wheel -- the force balances itself out. This phenomenon keeps a yo-yo's axis perpendicular to the string, as long as the yo-yo is spinning fast enough.

I do not have the vocabulary or knowledge of physics to explain why sometimes it feels like pulling and pushing the bow perpendicularly across a string feels like using a yo-yo, but the above explanation does a good deal to illuminate the feelings of opposing forces that seem to be at work while I'm doing it. It is a helpful image to use in order to try to keep the string vibrating (or to minimize the gap in vibration) between bow changes.

The Colbert Violin Bump

What a thrill it was to tune into the Colbert Report and hear yet another few minutes of terrific music. This time it was Itzhak Perlman playing Kreisler, and for no other reason but to play Kreisler on the TV for millions of people to enjoy. I was shocked to see that this morning, when I went to hear the extra web "song" (as Colbert jokingly called it), only 30 people had been there before me.

It was a very enjoyable Liebesfreud.

Here's the whole episode. Perlman plays Kreisler's arrangement of a piece from Falla's La Vida Breve near the end of the program.

These are pieces that every violinist knows and loves, and pieces that Perlman (and Fritz Kreisler) knew would tickle the inner violinist in anyone listening. One of the most exciting violin moments I have had happened at Juilliard during the first orchestral rehearsal for a performance of La Vida Breve. When the entire violin section (made of the violin stars of our present day who are now in their 50s) got a chance to play this tune, one that they all knew so well from this Kreisler arrangement, it felt like the walls had broken and music was flooding the room. There was such an outpouring of surprise and delight that I still feel it today. Perlman reminded me of that feeling last night.

Thank you Stephen Colbert for inviting Perlman to play on your show.

Colbert Report Cellist's Identity Revealed!

The kind people at the Colbert Report just told me that the cellist who played such elegant Bach last night was Maria Kitsopoulos. Here's her fresh-from-Naxos biography:

Maria Kitsopoulos, cellist, has been a member of the New York Philharmonic since 1996. She has traveled throughout Europe with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, performed with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the New York Chamber Symphony, and her own four-cello ensemble “Cello”. Solo orchestral engagements include the Phoenix Symphony, the Westfield Symphony (New Jersey), the Graz Orchestra and Athens State Orchestra. Her recordings include portrait discs of Nikos Skalkottas on BIS. She has made prominent appearances with Continuum and is soloist on Continuum’s Naxos Portrait of Leon Kirchner.

Nice Bach in a Totally Unexpected Place

Scroll over to 10:04 of last night's Colbert Report, and you'll hear a very nice performance of Prelude from the Bach G-major Cello Suite. The cellist isn't named, but I would love to know who she is so that I can tell her how much I liked her playing. Now what was the guy in the hat saying, anyway?

[By the way, we covered some Bach instrumental music in my classes yesterday, and I played my students a recording of the Courante from the Sixth Suite. My secret hope is that someone might have been watching this program with his or her friends, and that person could say "I bet that piece is part of a Bach cello suite."]

One Difference Between Fine Art and Mass Market Culture

"But I believe we do a disservice to the music and its audience by oversimplifying, demystifying and dis-empowering the magic of complexity in order to lure in possibly unreceptive or unwilling listeners. We rob them of the opportunity of discovering, when they are ready and without bias, the difference between the wondrous ineffability of fine art and the everyday barrage of mass market culture."

You can read Martin Perry's whole post here.

One Reason, Perhaps, That So Many Jews Love Music

In 2008 I blew the shofar for Rosh Hashanah morning services for the first time. I got to do it again today. My experience then was quite profound, and my experience today was profound in a different way. A lot has "gone down" in my life since 2008, particularly if you look at some recent blog posts, and the doubts I have been having concerning the importance of what I do (and by extension, who I am) in relation to my community.

Today I realized the idea of having a religious service where a sound is approached with the same reverence as reading a sacred text is rather unusual. The sound itself is set up with a series of prayers, and is then communally consumed. Because it comes from the most ancient and most unstable of instruments (particularly the one I was playing, and particularly with my non-brass-player's embouchure), the sound feels like the result of some kind of miracle. By the teki'ah gedotah, the final note that is held as long as it is possible for the player of the shofar to hold it, I was able to put all of my heart and soul into that little piece of ram's horn, and I did so until all my air was gone. My feeling of uselessness seemed to go away with that expulsion of air.

(I should add that the service was in one of the most wonderful acoustic spaces I know.)

After playing, I had the thought that each time any of us makes a sound on any instrument we happen to be playing, it is kind of like the playing the shofar for Rosh Hashanah. The day comes but once a year, but the act of making music (and hearing music) fills in the time between Shofar blasts.

The notes and instruments change, but the music functions much the same way.

Echolocation and Music in its Natural State

I just learned that echolocation can be developed in humans (i.e. people) to such a great extent that blind people can learn to "see" objects from the way that they reflect sound.

Here's an article that describes the matter in scientific detail, and here's an interview with Brian Bushway that describes how it works for him.

After listening to the Bushway interview on my walk today (through an electronic device, of course), I went out into the natural world of my back yard to pull some weeds (my latest way of being useful). I noticed that once you remove the headphones, hearing sound in the real world is truly multidimensional. It is possible to hear how far one bird is from another (generally speaking), and to hear how directionally we really are able to hear. (You can't hear weeds though: separating them from the grass takes a sharp eye and a ruthless spirit.)

I began to understand why the fact that most people experience music only through electronically-generated media bothers me so much. Very expensive recording equipment that is operated by very experienced engineers can come close to simulating the experience of a multidimensional world of surround sound, but the difference between close and real is huge when it involves listening with your whole being. Also, the difference between close and real can involve some serious manipulations on the part of the engineer that render the sonic "image" in ways that "improve" the sound of the original raw material. It's kind of like what you can do in the darkroom of you are adept at photography, or kind of what you can do with photoshop if you are adept at using computers.

Too many performance venues (new concert halls and churches in particular) are constructed with the idea of projecting amplified sound, which is, after all, simulated sound. I have played in some of these halls. The sound that bounces off the walls (if there is anything reflecting the sound at all) tends to be brittle and unfriendly. I have played in churches are "wired" so that all the amplified sound goes through a board that is manipulated and balanced by a board operator. I much prefer the experience of walls (particular old ones made of plaster), and balances that are manipulated by the people playing the music.

Of course I listen to recordings, and I have learned to love a lot of the music I hear on them. I also really appreciate being able to hear things I otherwise wouldn't be able to hear (because the people playing are no longer living, among other obvious reasons). But I do not believe that a musician develops the ability to hear him or herself play (and therefore improve) without developing the ability to listen in 360 natural surround sound. You can hear what is wrong when you use a recording device to play something back, but figuring out how to make the music have real meaning in the larger world of sound bouncing off stuff has to be developed by bouncing your sound off stuff (and stuff, of course, includes the sounds of other musicians playing in the same physical and acoustic space).

My concluding thought? Musicians need to play with one another in order to get better at what they do. They also need to play for people (as in audiences) in order to understand that what they do has meaning that goes beyond their own enjoyment. Eliminating or reducing either of these is a recipe for serious musical decline.

Being Useful

I have always thought of what I do (and have done) in music as being something useful. But I notice, as the world around me changes, many of the ways I thought I was being useful are, frankly, not of much use to as many people as they used to be. People used to ask me to write music for them all the time. It still happens, but now it happens only rarely.

I find it very difficult to write something when I know that it will never actually be played. That's why I stopped writing operas. I certainly have operatic ideas, but it is too daunting a task to put the time and effort required to write an opera if there is no chance that it will ever get produced. From experience (and from a lot of time, effort, photocopying, and postage trying to get performances), I know that I am right. I would love to be pleasantly surprised (who wouldn't), but I'm tired of trying to keep my hopes up. What I have done in that medium may just as well not have been done. It's of no use to anyone.

Nothing kills inspiration like apathy.

I try to be useful in my community. I try to give my students as much as I can give them (though the numbers are seriously down these days), and I try my best to contribute something to the ever-dwindling musical life in this town with an ever-dwindling number of people who care about what I do. It used to be much easier.

So, since I have to work, I have been busying myself with what I consider the musical equivalent of knitting. I usually spend the spring making new arrangements (of music written by other people) for our Summer Strings orchestra, but this year, for want of other projects, I started last month. I have been going great guns making arrangements that I hope will amuse the people who will be playing them next summer (most of them are not my students). My hope is that they will help those people find a sense of usefulness and purpose as growing musicians.

I know that on the other side of this window (that I am typing in right now) there is a larger world where there are people who use my arrangements to amuse and inspire their students (a few people send me videos, which I enjoy a great deal). I hope that some of those people can find some use for the original music I have written over the years. Occasionally bits of it pop up when I put my iPod on shuffle, and I realize that there is some music of quality in the body of work I have written. It is very easy for me to forget what I have done and what I am capable of doing, when the kind of support that I need (and that all creative people need) is lacking.

My Thematic Catalog blog is kind of stuffed with arrangements right now. People regularly go to it looking for what I think is a pretty good arrangement for string orchestra of the Pachelbel Canon, but I do have a little bit of hope that somebody might look for some of the original music I have written. Perhaps there might be something there that somebody can use.

Related Post for people who work with string players and need music.

Charles Mills

Last night Michael and I watched Lionel Rogosin's 1956 film On the Bowery. Here's the trailer.



The music for the trailer is but a snippet from Charles Mills' score. The oboist Harold Gomberg is listed as the conductor, but since there are never more than three people playing (oboe, clarinet, and cello, a few measures of flute, and a bit of prepared piano), he must be listed that way for reasons that have to do with the conventions of film making. The vibrato-laden flute sound that comes in somewhere towards the end of the movie must come from John Wummer, the cellist and the clarinetist are both excellent. Perhaps someone reading this might recognize one or the other by his (or her--though not so likely in 1956) sound.

Anyway, this is the first I have heard of Charles Mills (1914-1982). The music for this film is not listed in his list of works on his American Composer's Alliance page, and the bit used in the trailer is only a little taste.

I like this photo, partly because of the alto and tenor recorders he has on his desk, and because it looks like he might be transcribing Renaissance music from part books.

It's not easy to find out much about this particular Charles Mills. He's not one of the people in the Charles Mills entry in Wikipedia. The composer there, Charles Henry Mills, directed the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, and had a music library named for him. This is a different (and younger) Charles Mills. A search in Google Books points to a book written by Elinor Rogosin, who was married to the film maker. She mentions Mills (in only one paragraph) as an occasional dinner companion and the composer of the score for On the Bowery. My guess is that Mills must have been a friend of Harold Gomberg. There's a Mills Concertino for Oboe and Strings from 1957 (one year after On the Bowery came out) that Mills might have written for Gomberg. Who knows?

Does anybody know?

Here's what I have found out: Mills studied with Copland and Sessions, and taught at the Manhattan School of Music. Most of his chamber music (a lot of it from the 1950s) seems to have been published by the American Composers Alliance. Some is available from various libraries by way of the World Cat.

Here's a 12-minute film about Greenwich Village in the 1960s where you can hear more Mills music, and you can hear him play recorder (OK, it's not the most in-tune recorder playing, but the film is a great peek into the past).

Thought for the Day

Playing (and writing) music is a lousy way to try to make a living, but a terrific way to make a life.

Oh, Oh, Oh, Okra!

Michael and I joined a farm cooperative this summer, and one of the constant products we found in our weekly box was a bag of okra (even during the dog weeks when the temperature was constantly in the 100s). I have always avoided okra because I found it slimy (and it is). I ate it "ingrediently" in gumbo, of course, where I only thought of it as a thickener. It didn't, as far as I was concerned, have any merits on its own. I dutifully (and carefully, because of the slime) cut up our weekly stash, and threw it in the freezer for winter gumbo.

The other day I decided to bite the bullet (or the pod), and try it on its own. I sauteed it in olive oil with some garlic and a bit of salt, and found it delicious. The picture above is some okra I roasted with garlic and tofu, and ate with some kamut (wheat berries). Again, it was delicious.

I sure hope that the box of vegetables we get today includes some okra.

It is also some kind of super super food. Here's some of the stuff it can (ostensibly) do for you (you can find the whole list here).

It protects against trans fats, stabilizes blood sugar, gets rid of cholesterol, prevents constipation, feeds good bacteria, helps fight depression, heals ulcers, lubricates joints, treats lung inflammation, sore throat, and irritable bowel syndrome, helps with asthma, helps support the structure of capillaries, lowers the risk of cataracts, helps prevent diabetes, and is good for your skin.

The Worst Exploitation of Innocent Musicians I Have Seen To Date

Make sure to read the comments on this post, so you can truly understand the kind of outrage this woman in generating among musicians. I sincerely hope that either no musicians show up at her concerts (where she is offering them a opportunity to play back-up for her for free), nobody shows up to witness the concerts, and the people who donated the million dollars to Kickstarter sue to get their money back.