Reblog → Wider culture
This one lit up the music writers’ blogs last week, for obvious reasons.
The New Statesman, in association with the Royal Academy of Music, is delighted to announce the launch of its Young Music Critic competition. We are looking for classical music writers under 30. If you have a passion for, and knowledge of, the canon, but are also interested in pop, jazz, politics or the wider culture, and if your love of music is equal to your love of the written word, submit your work to our distinguished panel of judges.
What I notice is the stark contrast between this endeavor’s encouragement of broad-minded and culturally relevant work in music writing and the almost complete lack thereof in standard conservatory curricula and competition guidelines for performers. [Found here on Tumblr via Yay, it’s Rob]
Reblog → Stop selling scarcity
Orchestra professionals, pay close attention to these words from Jeff Jarvis:
The real story in nonphysical goods is one of deflation. Value in once-scarce — well, once-controlled — commodities like news, information, and advertising decline as the internet explodes creation and competition. The internet also destroys the ability of many to control distribution and thus value. But at the same time, the internet drastically increases efficiency thanks to platforms and open distribution and the ability — no, the need — to specialize and collaborate.
This is why the old controllers of scarcity have such trouble rethinking and remaking themselves for the economy of abundance. Their reflex is to control more, when that only decreases value.
So stop selling scarcity. Scarcity has no value.
As Jarvis points out the theory holds true for performers, many of whom are finally beginning to understand that ‘putting our content and information out there is how it gets distributed, how we find new people, how we build new relationships, how we realize new value.’ [via Frank Chimero has a blog.]
Hope springs atonal
And speaking of emerging musicians doing things differently, violist Nadia Sirota fits the bill better than most. Nadia is a superb player, committed genre-buster, and, I am honored to say, former orchestra student of mine at the Baltimore School for the Arts. Get to know her on Q2 internet radio; I especially like the concept behind her new segment on post-tonal music, Hope Springs Atonal.
128 Soloists
And via said blog: Most orchestras can’t manage one cool picture, and these guys just rolled out more than a hundred.
True. More recent coolness from the Berliners here and here.
Reblog → How about enriched listening?
LA TImes Go Mobile quotes BACH Technology Chief Executive Stefan Kohlmeyer explaining the company’s MusicDNA project:
What we are bringing back to the end user is the entire emotional experience of music… We think it got lost in the transition to the digital era. We think a beautiful piece of audio has been reduced to a number code. We want to enrich it again.
And how? Replacing the easy-to-share mp3 file format with a more proprietary one that can contain lyrics, images and even updatable news. The goal – whose transparency I find disturbing – is to curb piracy .
So do bells and whistles like this ‘enrich’ music? I think we need more people in the music business encouraging the creation of music that enriches listening. I’m afraid that MusicDNA’s approach encourages the opposite.
Reblog → Mass-communication
From designer Frank Chimero comes this bit of wisdom:
‘The digital revolution allows us to do mass-communication without mass-production.’
Reblogged here for its relevance to orchestras, who so often struggle with communicating the uniqueness of their product.
Reblog → The [de]merits of easily shared
Someone tell me why so many institutions in this business - including many in my corner of it - still insist on acting this way. [Please don’t say ‘money.’]
Four years after we posted our first homemade videos to YouTube and they spread across the globe faster than swine flu, making our bassist’s glasses recognizable to 70-year-olds in Wichita and 5-year-olds in Seoul and eventually turning a tidy little profit for EMI, we’re – unbelievably – stuck in the position of arguing with our own label about the merits of having our videos be easily shared.
OK Go speaks about EMI’s insistence on prohibiting embedded playback of the band’s new self-produced video. Reblogged from Marco.org, quoting an excellent post at kung fu grippe.
Update: Mashable interviews OK Go’s frontman Damien Kulash about this issue. The line that caught my attention: ‘What we’ve always enjoyed about the Internet is that it’s not this marketer’s dream, it’s a creative person’s dream.’
