I’m happy to announce that I’ve been awarded a bursary to attend the Dartington Summer School “Recording Production and Live Electronics in Contemporary Music” course.  The course runs from 11 – 18 August  and will be directed by Moritz Bergfeld.

Currently, through the LSO Soundhub, I am working on a piece for Lorenzo Iosco (principal bass clarinet of the LSO) and Dave Worswick (LSO first violins) that responds to Josef Albers’ book, The Interaction of Color.  The work is aiming to translate Albers’ discussion of visual phenomenon into music, and I will be blogging about the composition of the work – along with my other projects through Soundhub – on the Soundhub blog.

There is a workshop for this piece scheduled for the morning of 31st May, and the final performance will take place at 7:30pm, at LSO St. Luke’s on the 22nd of June.  Tickets for this concert can be booked through the LSO website.

Announcing the re-launch of The Riot Ensemble.  8pm on 17th June, on an LSO Discovery Concert in the Jerwood Hall at LSO St. Luke’s.  The programme will feature Jonathan Harvey’s Song Offerings alongside Elizabeth Maconchy’s Sun, Moon and Stars and the world premiere of Aaron Holloway-Nahum’s Plainer Sailing.  The ensemble features numerous established and emerging professional musicians, and will be sung by soprano Celeste Cronje.

Tickets cost only £10/£5 for students (add to your basket and you can select ‘student tickets’ on the next screen), and include a wine reception after the concert!  Book now!

The piece was premiered on an LSO Discovery Concert at LSO St. Luke’s on 10 Feb. 2012.

Here is a score:

I’m happy to announce that I’ve been accepted onto the highSCORE Festival, in Pavia, Italy.  I will be writing a new work for violin and electronics that will be performed at the festival.  The festival runs from 23 July – 4 August.

I’m happy to announce I’ve been accepted to the ECCA Etchings Festival, in Auvillar, France.  I will be attending the festival from 7 – 14 July this summer.

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.

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!

This collaborative piece, written with pianist Adam Swayne, receives a re-premiere after heavy revision at the University of Chichester “NEW MUSIC CHI” concert: a celebration of New Music from around the campus and around the world, featuring the University’s Contemporary Music Group and new pieces inspired by exhibits in the University’s Otter Gallery.

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!