'The architecture of the copyright law that is now being forced upon the Internet was crafted for a different age and different technology. A strategy for rewarding artists that regulates ‘copies’ makes as much sense in the digital age as a strategy for controlling greenhouse gases that regulates breathing. The modern law of copyright is a failure, not because copyright is a failure, but because in the current technological environment, the machine that we are using to protect the values of copyright is a failure.'
I agree with just about everything Lawrence Lessig says, especially on this topic.
Mozart performed his twenty-sixth piano concerto twice in 1789-90 and as was his custom [especially in piano works conceived for himself] he improvised extensively, particularly in the left hand. Now composer and pianist Timo Andres inherits Mozart’s mantle, but with a twenty-first century twist. As Timo explains his re-imagining of K537 fills in the many incomplete sections of Mozart’s manuscript with entirely contemporary material:
I approached the piece not from a scholarly or editorial perspective, but more as a sprawling playground for pianistic invention and virtuosity, taking cues from the composer-pianist tradition Mozart helped to crystallize. The left hand gets an extended catalogue of gestures [no more tasteful, 18th-century Alberti bass]. It uses imitation, counter-melodies, and canonic interplay to participate in the musical drama of the right hand [sometimes even leaping above it in register]. Harmonically, new chords both thicken and undermine the existing progressions, adding allusions to music after Mozart’s time [Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Prokofiev, Ives, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and Bartók all make appearances].
At the end of last year Andres and his colleagues from the impressive Metropolis Ensemble performed K537 at Angel Orensanz Center in NYC as an encore to their 2010 premiere of the work; the first movement from that reading is above. Timo arrives in Iowa today to begin rehearsals of the piece with the WCFSO ahead of our collaboration on Saturday night.
[Other movements from the Metropolis performance are here]
Tsuneaki Hiramatsu’s stunning long exposures of fireflies at dusk. I’m longing for midwest summer.
[via The Fox Is Black]
![The dramatic interior of Buenos Aires’ El Ateneo bookstore, housed in the former Teatro Gran Splendid. The image is by one of my favorite urban documentarians, Tumblr’s own Patrick Joust.
[More interesting stage views here]](http://www.tumblr.com/photo/1280/jasonweinberger/16829596804/1/tumblr_lrsw6jZU2n1qbvpg9)
The dramatic interior of Buenos Aires’ El Ateneo bookstore, housed in the former Teatro Gran Splendid. The image is by one of my favorite urban documentarians, Tumblr’s own Patrick Joust.
[More interesting stage views here]
'Downloaders are making a moral calculation and coming to the conclusion that the content industry immorally perpetuates an artificial scarcity to maximize their profits at the expense of users and artists. They understand that content is a non-rival good, that unlike an apple, they can consume it without diminishing anyone else’s ability to consume the same thing. They know that the content owner paid nothing to reproduce or distribute the content on the Internet. They also know that the artists who created the original content get a tiny fraction of the revenue. So they are making a moral judgement that the content owners are pricing their product to extract unjustifiable profits and they feel morally justified taking the content they find out there on the web.'
Brad Burnham’s astute take on digital media was originally intended as an entry into the SOPA debate but is now even more relevant in the wake of the Megaupload shutdown.
I’ve never been shy about extolling the widespread benefits [for everyone but a narrow group of rights holders] associated with the internet-era erosion of monetary value for recorded media. Not only does this process naturally encourage greater focus on live performance – something all musicians should actively seek – but it is also a boon for artists and audiences in general, who benefit from freer contact and conversation with art of our time.
The saddest part of this situation is how willfully the major media companies continue to resist the prevalent new financial and aesthetic calculus surrounding the value of recorded media, all out of a desperate – and doomed – attempt to perpetuate a previous century’s exploitative business model.
BALLET 360, featuring dancers from Canada’s National Ballet School, is one installment in a fascinating series by Ryan Enn Hughes:
‘The 360 Project’ is an exploration into the crossroads of photography and motion pictures. It is a study of peak dance movements, captured simultaneously by 48 cameras aligned in a circle.
Prepare to be spellbound.
[via culturite]
