Is everything really worse?

A number of people have pointed me to this article, outlining David Lowery’s talk at the SF MusicTech Summit where he attacked iTunes and Amazon (the ‘new model’ of the music industry) for taking a roughly 30% cut of revenues without – Lowery claims – taking on any risk or capital expense.  So, where record labels used to at least come in and help the artist with the expense/risk of making a product, now all of that risk and responsibility falls to the artist:

In the new model you have these parasitic entities (iTunes, etc.) that take 30% of gross and provide no added value. As screwed up as the old business was there wasn’t this giant parasitic entity sucking out 30% of gross for nothing. This should suggest to any intelligent person that there is something seriously wrong with the NEW MODEL.

A number of the comments on that post have pointed out that there are a few deep and basic flaws in this logic.  Most pressingly: iTunes and Amazon are retailers, not ‘labels’, and it really isn’t true to say that they haven’t expended resources or taken on risk in building their online platforms (have a look at how many players there are trying to make money in that game).

I agree with these rebuttals, but the real problem with Lowery’s reasoning is that if these entities were really ‘parasites’ that offered ‘no added value’ absolutely nobody would use them.  Any artist can build their own website, upload their digital tracks, and stick a paypal or google checkout button on it.  Nobody is forced into a partnership with an online distributer. Artists are asked to make a calculation: will I make more money selling my album on my own website, or through a retailer like iTunes/Amazon?

We can argue about the respective value/costs of that relationship, and it is obvious that more artists need to think more deeply about that question, but the fundamental point is that it has never been easier or cheaper to create high-quality music with the potential for mass distribution.  That this has not made us artists rich is not a function of retailer’s fees, but to lower barriers of entry and the resultant growth in the sheer number of players in the field.  It’s now a much larger and louder arena where it takes a long time to get noticed and established.  I understand the frustrations of this, but looking out at the quality, diversity, and innovation that have started to take place in many forms of music (including – I hope – my own) as a result of this very phenomenon, I have trouble seeing it as an entirely bad thing.

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February 15, 2012 by in Blog
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Solo: Premiere by Paul Silverthorne

February 10, 2012
12:30 pmto1:30 pm

The first allegretto from Britten's "Lachrymae"

At his free LSO Discovery Friday lunchtime concert - 12:30 at LSO St. Luke’s this Friday - LSO and London Sinfonietta principal violist Paul Silverthorne will be premiering a new collaborative work for Viola entitled Solo.  This work is a sort of collaborative effort between Mark Simpson (Mov. I), Darren Bloom (Mov. II) and myself (Mov. III).  Each of us contributed a separate movement, and we each started from material taken from a piece Paul had already scheduled for the programme, Benjamin Britten’s Lachrymae.

This work is one of the first products that’s come out of the LSO’s Soundhub project and it’s hopefully an exciting taste of what’s to come!

 

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February 8, 2012 by in Blog, Events
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The (digital) future of classical music?

Over at the incredibly useful Baekdal.com, Thomas Baekdal has some thoughts on the future of Television.  His general argument can be outlined like this:

  1. People currently pay about $130 a month for a cable TV over which they have little control, limited access and in which they receive a huge amount of content they don’t use.
  2. People pay a comparatively paltry $7.99 for digital services such as Hulu Plus/Netflix, where they have total control, unlimited access and in which they use every piece of content they purchase.
  3. In the short term, restrictions on digital content (particularly delays) devalues the digital product and teaches consumers that these online digital forms of media are less valuable.
  4. Over the long term, users will move away from TV to totally digital subscriptions.  Because they have been trained to do so, they are willing to pay only paltry sums for this far superior content.  This creates a revenue crash within the industry.

Baekdal also points out that “this is not just happening to the TV industry…People are now dominantly consuming news online, but they also refuse to pay for it as the industry taught them not to.”

Baekdal briefly compares this to the music industry, pointing out that the payouts for artists from services like Spotify is miniscule (and how could it not be when most people, like me, don’t pay anything for it?), but I’m interested in playing this argument out in the world of the digital classical (and contemporary-classical) music.

In particular, there are two services that seem particularly related to this discussion: The Met Player (of the Metropolitan Opera) and The Berlin Philharmoniker’s Digital Concert Hall. (This has gotten so big it is now the top hit on google  for ‘Berlin Philharmoniker’). Those unfamiliar with these services can click through on the images, but in general they offer wide, thorough, and sometimes even live digital content.

Both of these services have a similar price for a yearly subscription.  The Met Player costs roughly £100 per year, the Berlin Digital Concert Hall costs £125 per year. This means that, for roughly the price of a single average ticket to the Met you receive access to nearly 400 opera performances – many in HD with extremely high quality sound.  Or, for the cost of a two ‘live’ tickets, one can access thirty live Berlin Phil concerts, and hundreds of concerts ‘after the fact’ each year.

Assuming that you watch one opera per week (this may seem like a lot or a little to you depending on your disposition) you will have saved roughly $7,650 in comparison to attending live Met performances over the course of a year.  (Moreover, you will have done so without fighting New York traffic, paying for taxis/dinners out, or even having to plan your schedule around a curtain time).  With the digital concert hall you can do even more – watching individual pieces or chamber recitals alongside the orchestral concerts.

On the surface, it seems like we are headed down Baekdal’s road of cheap digital content replacing expensive live content and resulting in a crash of revenues in the industry.  But in the classical music world, there are a couple of other questions.

First: Going to the Metropolitan Opera or Berlin Philharmoniker is a special experience that can’t be totally replicated online.  How big a difference is this?  If and when these services become even more convenient (“Oh going to the orchestra? There’s an app for that…”), will the social aspect of attending concerts continue to draw people out of their homes and into the hall?  What if someone purchases a subscription and then invites friends over for dinner and a ‘night at the orchestra’ on their 46″ flat screen TV?

These are important questions.  There is also, however, one other huge difference: whereas digital television services are offering a different version of the same product to the same people, these classical-music services offer their product to a vastly larger and more diverse group of people.

So, Baekdal points out, to maintain the same revenue in the industry, Netflix would have to take on roughly 16 customers for each customer that ‘leaves’ cable TV.  This is obviously not happening – nor is it even really possible for it to happen: there aren’t 16 unique customers for Netflix to sign up for every customer that leaves cable.

Even if the Met, Berlin Phil, and other organisations do loose some concert goers to digital content, there are currently huge numbers of people who never interact with classical music at all.  Many of the reasons these people aren’t involved with classical music can be minimized by the transition into the digital realm.  On top of the lesser cost, people are no longer likely to get flayed for having their mobile phone, or having a small child to take care of. (Full disclosure: in both these instances, were I in the audience, I would have likely been pretty aggravated myself.)

Digitally though, people can consume the concerts as and when they please.  This is far more representative of the way the younger generations relate to music and music listening.  In other words, the digital world does have the capability of growing the audience for classical music at a rate that could not just sustain a drop in revenue per customer, but reawaken classical music’s influence.

The mass market available for digital content also suggests that it might just be possible for an organization who uses this correctly to actually make a reasonable amount of money.

That leaves us with just the second, perhaps more pressing question: is it profitable?  Are the Met and/or Berlin Philharmoika making money on these projects?  If anyone has any data on that, please do let me know!

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February 6, 2012 by in Blog
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PRSF App Hints from Vanessa Reed

On 29th January, in the Fountain Room of the Barbican Centre, Sound and Music hosted “Counting In” a morning of discussions and presentations, aimed at early-career composers and performers.  The event ran from 11am – 2pm, with the first half being a sort of ‘round-table’ discussion between panel members and the second half being presentations by Vanessa Reed (PRS), Stephen Newbould (BCMG), and Gabriel Prokofiev (Nonclassical).

In particular, composers might be interested in the notes/advice given by Vanessa Reed about the upcoming PRSF Funding Applications (there are four deadlines throughout the year, and each composer/organisation can apply once per calendar year.)  The first deadline for 2012 is 6th February.  The individual applications are new this year, and will place a special emphasis on the quality of music and the clips submitted.  As background, the average grant last year was £3,200 and the PRSF are expecting to support approximately 50 of 800 (estimated) applications.

Vanessa began by pointing out that it’s important to remember the mission of the PRS for Music when applying for their funding.  In summary, the PRSF exists “to stimulate and support the creation and performance of new music throughout the UK and to ensure that this music is enjoyed by a wide audience.”  That means they don’t fund things like purchasing equipment, funding recordings or providing travel costs to performances.  (They do, however, offer support up to £500 through the Bliss Trust Composer Bursaries – upcoming deadlines March 26th and August 28th).

One really important kernel of information that Vanessa shared was that, in general, the PRS are becoming more reticent to fund commissions that will result in only a single performance.  Notice, again, that bit about ‘ensuring that new music finds a wide audience.’  You are more likely to be funded if you team up with another organisation in a ‘co-commission’, or if you can show that the piece you’re applying to fund will have a performance life beyond the premiere.

Finally, Vanessa shared “Five Tips for Enlightened Fundraising’.  I won’t flesh them out here, but I’ll list the headings and leave them to you for your thoughts:

1. Funding can mean more than money
2. Know what happens behind the scenes
3. Break out of your niche
4. Get informed
5. Be resilient & know when to say ‘no’ or ‘why’

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January 29, 2012 by in Blog
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Review: Jonathan Harvey Total Immersion Concert

On January 28th, the Guildhall School of Music presented a concert at the Barbican as part of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Total Immersion Series.  This series spends time focusing on the work of a single contemporary composer.  Normally held on a single day, this instalment took a weekend to focus on the music of Jonathan Harvey. This concert picked up chamber/solo pieces that were concerned with memory, spirituality and death. Harvey is famous for his blending of live performance with electronics – both prerecorded and processed live, and we were treated to both here.

 

Before the Guildhall Chamber Orchestra took the stage, James Kreiling performed Harvey’s solo piano works Vers and Tombeau de Messiaen.  The second of these involves a prerecorded “tape” part, and included many moments where the recording preceded the pianist with either a sensuous sonority anticipating a coming chord, or activity that set the pianist off in short bursts of motion. Because the flow of information between tape and player can only ever go in one direction, pieces with prerecorded parts always feel something like a puppet a show.  This was true of Tombeau, but James also managed to dwell on the delicate and fragile moments, communicating them with fragile intimacy.

The Guildhall Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Richard Baker and led by Marcus Barcham Stevens, then treated the audience to performances of Tranquil Abiding, Songs of Li Po (with soprano Marta Fontanals-Simmons), and Calling Across Time.  The performances were first-rate, as Baker drew out disciplined, nuanced and engaged performances from the students.

I was particularly impressed with the dynamic range the players achieved, and the true pianissimos in Tranquil Abiding gave the work a constant sense of motion and intense honesty.  Soprano Marta Fontanals-Simon was excellent throughout the Songs of Li Po, but the entire thing might just have done with a bit of sound reinforcement, as the busy string parts are often creating dense and active textures, making it difficult to hear the words (though I’m sure many would say I should have simply coughed up the £3.50 for a programme!)

Finally, we heard Calling Across Time.  The piece has an elaborate set-up, with two wind quintets sat on either side of the stage, a percussionist and trumpet player behind the audience, and a live synthesiser.  As I’m writing up my Doctorate at the moment, I’ve been particularly engaged in Denis Smalley’s concept of source-bonding which, more-or-less, had to do with our tendency to assign a source to the things we hear.  Source-bonding largely makes these connections based on the timbre of that sound.  So, if I hear a sound coming out of a speaker that sounds like a trumpet (whether it is actually a trumpet, a recording of a trumpet, or some other sound that just sounds like a trumpet to me), then that sound is source-bonded to a trumpet (and, for all intents and purposes, is a trumpet).

This performance threw up some interesting questions about this idea in electro-acoustic music, where live musicians are present.  As the sounds started to come out of the speakers, the entire audience started shifting about in their seats, trying to locate the musician creating the music (rather ironically, the synth player on the stage in front of them!).  I’m sure Elias Canetti would have some other explanations for why a crowd of people don’t like unidentified sounds coming from behind them, but in this instance it seemed to me that audiences have a genuine desire to know exactly what they are experiencing.

So, in a concert where virtually every sound had been created live (and in a concert venue where an even greater percentage of the music heard is always created live) the audience had a genuine interest in knowing who or what was making that sound.  There was also every good reason – with other live players behind us – to imagine that there were some currently unseen players creating these sounds.

I do wonder if all of this actually ends up overtaking the piece, as the process (and processing) is so obvious and forward in the texture that it quickly becomes the only thing you’re paying attention to.  One becomes acutely aware that the sound coming out of the speaker to their left, is actually quite different to the sound coming out of the trumpet behind them to the right.  Perhaps though, as the piece is states as being about resurrecting humans in history when we read their thoughts, this is exactly what Harvey was after.

I would highly recommend the two remaining Total Immersion events at the Barbican (Focused on Brett Dean and Arvo Pärt.)  A day pass (as little as £28) will actually get you into every event, and is good value for money if you can commit for the day.  This pass, and individual tickets can be booked online, by calling the Barbican Box Office (020 7638 8891) or in person.

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January 29, 2012 by in Blog
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Is Composition Research?

Lauren Redhead recently posted a thoughtful blog post surrounding the question of whether or not composition is “research”.  As I’m in the writing up stage of my Doctorate at Guildhall, I’m obviously somewhat vested in the matter, and have also had a good deal of time to think over these issues over the past 3.5 years.

The first comment left on this blog summarises the most basic objection to the idea that composition is research:

 Good of you to keep up the thinking and posting on this matter! For me: composition (incl. a score and its performance, also an improvisation) is not research. It can be an application of research, however, like drawing and building a bridge can be a result of research. A score and a performance don’t transmit enough knowledge about how the music is made (has been composed), and – again: for me – dissemination of new knowledge is essential to research. There doesn’t have to be dissemination for something to be research, but the new knowledge must be disseminable, and a performance/score does not make research insights disseminable per se.   (Orpheus Instituut)

There are a couple small, but important errors in the thinking of Orpheus, and the many others who dismiss the possibilities of composition as research in this way.  Most glaringly: The idea that the research insights contained within a score are not ‘disseminable’ is mistaken.

Firstly, as an aside, a score can (and many do) contain performance/explanatory notes that give extensive insight into the way the work was created.  I take the point that these explanatory notes are not “composed music”, but would refer the debate back to Laura’s excellent point that the actual writing of a research document or paper is not technically research either (it is simply “composed language”).  In both instances, the researcher is aiming to compile and/or apply their research and make it available to a wider community.

The more important point, then, is that compositional scores do make research available to the wider community of musicians.  It is not that the idea is available only in the written-language form, while the score itself is an impenetrable scribble.  Nor, for many musicians, is the performance an aural mystery!  Music is a language, both in written and aural forms, and both composers and performers who have spent their lives studying it can decode it. A simple example: How did I ‘make’ or ‘compose’ this chord?

I call this chord: "Knowledge"

The shape of this chord is so familiar that many will identify it as a symmetrical chord without even having to check.  Even those musicians who have never seen or heard a chord like this could figure this out.  When a musician sees this chord for the first time, it becomes an issue of thinking of the chord as collections of intervals (in this case they fan out symmetrically from the ‘C’) instead of as a functional harmonic construction within a scale or key.  The words make it clear, but the idea and the knowledge necessary to come to the conclusion are also contained in the chord itself.
This is why it is a similar fallacy to contend that a building or bridge does not contain within itself the information about how it was constructed.  That particular information might be inaccessible to me, but there are many people who can look at a building or bridge – especially if they are allowed to look closely and over time – and draw out nearly every detail of its construction.

It is true that music is a denser and/or more complex language than most, but when one thinks of the knowledge and ideas that were passed from musician to musician purely in performance (this is particularly true in the field of jazz) the existence of a score becomes positively luxurious in the amount of information and knowledge that it carries.

Finally, with all of that being said, I will now say that I myself do not consider either composition or performance themselves to be research.  This is hardly endemic: As we have already said, the writing of academic papers is not research any more than either of these two.  The problem with calling any of these “research” is not what can be transmitted through them, but that these tasks are all creative processes that seek to make something new.  None are the ‘search for new knowledge’ but the attempt to either codify or deploy the knowledge currently held by their creator.

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January 20, 2012 by in Blog, Uncategorized
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LSO Soundhub

I’m really happy to announce that I’ve been selected as one of nine pilot participants for the LSO Soundhub Project.  The pilot program will run from January to June, beginning with a meeting with all the participants this Saturday.  My project proposal was to use the Soundhub for the recording of new CDs of contemporary music by young, unpublished composers.

There are still some details to work out with the LSO, but I’ll give details and further information as I have them.

 

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January 12, 2012 by in Blog
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Sonata, World Premiere

February 27, 2012
8:00 pmto9:00 pm

Aaron’s work Sonata, for 3 bass clarinets, Eb clarinet, percussionist and timpani resonance will be premiered on 27th February at 8:00pm in the Music Hall of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.  The piece will be played once, there will be a chance to speak to the performers & Aaron about the work, and the piece will then be played a second time.

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January 3, 2012 by in Events

The Poorer Silence Now, Performances

March 30, 2012
7:00 pmto8:30 pm
May 19, 2012
12:30 amto10:30 pm

The Poorer Silence Now, for solo oboe has been programmed in two upcoming concerts:

30th March “Society of New Music”
7:00pm, LRR, Guildhall School of Music & Drama

19th May “Emulsion” (Ensemble Amorpha)
A one night mini-show at the old vic tunnels.

 

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January 2, 2012 by in Events

Issuu: A self-publishing tool

I was recently pointed to the fantastic new music blog, 5 against 4, which has completed a series of posts on James Dillon’s ‘Nine Rivers’.  While reading the final post I came upon, to my amazement, a searchable and scalable online PDF of the full score.

Following the link, I was taken to the website Issuu.  An online, self-publishing tool that is currently mostly used for the publication of digital magazines.  As I looked around the website, I found that I was able to sign in (via Facebook, or as an independent user) and upload PDF documents, to ‘My Library’ completely for free.

After uploading a document, there’s the normal process of logging information about it, and at the bottom are some fantastic tools for the composer.  In ‘Media Options’ you can link your publication to an mp3 file (which must be located online), which will automatically play when the score is opened.

You can further choose to either publish the score publicly or privately, and there are also options surrounding the sharing of the file.  These include allowing comments, ratings, and downloads (composers should be careful of this – it’s a balance between making your music available and making sure your copyright isn’t infringed).

What you end up with at the end of all of this are two things.  Firstly, an online digital library of your scores.  This is, if nothing else, a fantastic back-up tool for composers.  More than this, though, it is a place where musicians, ensembles and other composers can come to browse through your output.

Secondly, and most importantly, you end up with the digital publication of your scores, including (where available) the recording.  You can link this to file, or embed it directly into posts or other websites.  So, for example, here is my piece Skin and Bones.  If you ‘expand’ the box, you will be able to scan the score, and will concurrently hear the premiere performance by Ensemble Amorpha.

 

I’m currently using Issuu to log all of my previous compositions, and it’s a website that I can see becoming useful in terms of applying to competitions, festivals and even jobs or university places in the near future.

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December 12, 2011 by in Blog
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