Tom Moody offers "Some thoughts on the amorphous middle ground between between the hissing, honking, and chittering of academic electronic music and the clicks, stabs, and skronks of its club-based variants." [link]. Tom mentions Paul Lansky's The Importance of Being Digital lecture as something of a starting point for observing the convergence between "club" or "techno" music and the equally-needing-qualifying-quotes world of "academic electronic music".

I decided it would be worth the effort to try to dig up my interview with Paul, (now eleven years old!), and get that back on there through the tubes of the internet. Thanks to the Wayback Machine for saving files that my old computers, hard-drive and laziness about backing up stuff couldn't solve. Here's the article, and it includes the transcript from our hour long chat, too.

I spent more than my fair share of time at the old electronic music studios that were once the Columbia-Princeton studios, in it's final years. And it was truly an amazing experience, not only for the historical significance of cutting tape on the same blocks and tweaking the same oscillators that made those early "masterworks" of electronic music, but for the influence that it had on all my instrumental compositions as well (a fondness for timbral manipulation, an attention to envelope generation as a facet of phrasing, perhaps?).

But down the hall the revolution had already been well underway towards a purely digital creation -- even past the doors of the bastard step-child that was FM synthesis and MIDI. Even now, I fear, I'm still enough of a academic pitch snob (or, as Davy would say, I still retain the buttstix) to find too little to enjoy of the auto-composed music from either "serious" composers or whatever you'd want to call the "techno" kids (I wouldn't know what to call them, but by simply trying to distinguish "techno" as something "other than serious" I do everyone a great injustice).

But composition, like everything else, is shaken by the digital revolution, by the power of the personal computer, and now -- hopefully -- by the real gains brought about by the internet and the Long Tail. The machines of music are always changing, thankfully, and the ears that consume the ouput are as well -- and at the end of the day, the gains of digital productivity hit not only the office, but the parlor room that housed the player piano, too.

Who but the biggest curmudgeons (and lord knows, there are many academic composers who fit the bill) can resist the joy of Electroplankton?

From Reuters:

Myung made that career switch in October. With two graduate degrees from Boston's New England Conservatory, the 25-year-old gifted violinist turned down a rare opening with the New World Symphony and an audition for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

...

With the cost of tuition rising every year and conservatory students spending as much as six years in school, many like Myung are swamped in debt as they enter a field in which jobs are scarce and salaries often low.

"Even if you do music really well, there's no guarantee that you'll get a job," said Myung.

Click here for the rest. It's a much longer post, without a snarky headline, that would need to discuss the passing of live music, and live musicians, as a part of everyday human existence. And as someone who would of course much prefer live music, or playing music, or writing music, to sitting around with a stereo, while it truly saddens me, I'm still also excited about where interactive digital music can go. But just don't leave it in the hands of these guys, huh? Thanks, BoingBoing, as usual, for getting word out to the world.

Also from The New Scientist, a report of studies finding fractal patterns, or at least self-similar patterns, underlying abstract art:

A TECHNIQUE designed to detect art forgeries using the maths of fractals may also help pinpoint why we instinctively like some abstract paintings more than others - even if we can't put our finger on why.

The abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock famously dripped paint onto large canvasses on the floor, manipulating it into abstract swirls using sticks or trowels. In 1999, an Australian group found that these swirls contained well-defined fractals - patterns that show self-similarity, that is, they are repeated at different magnifications (New Scientist, 5 June 1999, p 11).

The essence of pattern recognition, or self-simularity, as a primary characteristic of appealing art -- whether painting or music -- is not really a revelation.

Even while the charges that modern 20th century music was nothing but random chaos were relatively disproved by an "experiment" by the BBC (I believe), where "real" pieces of modern music were judged by an audience against a truly intentionally random, improvised piece of percussion music -- even with a made up backstory and an imaginary composer, etc. The audience did not like the random piece -- and instead prefered the other works, which, if I recall correctly, were of your garden-variety Darmstadt-type composers. Of course, underlying the seemingly abstract and chaotic work of the modernist school was a highly principaled and disciplined system of non-tonal relationships.

Fractals found the math for many naturally occuring relationships. Leaves, the coastline. Even Webern.

Anyone who's read Larry Lessig's books, including the most recent and my favorite, Free Culture, has probably already read the New York article by John Heilemann, called The Choirboy, about Lessig's personal history of abuse, and his quiet (until now, I guess) fight for justice for others at the Boychoir School. And again, in typical Lessig fashion, not just for a single individual, but to fight against an idiotic law that could protect institutions from crimes as heinous as years of institutional sexual abuse.

I decided to visit his blog, to follow up on the aftermath of the article. Another posting there, however, caught my eye "support hyperion":

Hyperion was sued by Dr. Lionel Sawkins, who had created a performance edition of four works by Lalande. The British court has now concluded that a performance edition, even one that does not claim to be an "arrangement," is copyrighted. Apparently, the "sweat of the brow" in producing the performance edition was enough to create an "original" work.

It's amazing to me that here I sit, in 2005, writing an entry praising "my favorite lawyer" (or technically, law professor), while I also write about how much, as a "still-embedded-in-my-marrow" composer, I can find real tangible proof that musicologist-swine are indeed lower on the totem pole of mankind, below idiots, criminals, loud tenor sax players who play solos twice as long as they should, and people who text message on their cell phone while driving.

My heros don't have capes, but giant brains. Or, like Lessig, many of my musical heroes have giant foreheads, or a rumor of having twelve toes.

In a unique attempt to appeal to new audiences, the Royal Opera House will perform a new opera in an undisclosed location via flashmob.

It's a great idea to get some publicity and get more people exposed to the genre. Hard to imagine how that would go over, for example, here in New York. I think most people would be pissed there was crap in their way. Still, bringing an opera via a new and hip method of meeting (the flashmob), seems like a promising idea, especially with a new piece that focuses on a contemporary story line.

I've been thinking a lot of the role of "high art" (for lack of a better term) and the role modern art plays in a commercial society. Peter Bagge's incredibly funny, and incredibly spot-on indictment of modern art and it's institutions has had me pondering a lot about the relationship of life - my life, I guess -- and some of the more esoteric and abstract aspects of contemporary art that I love. Having been outside that world for almost a decade now gives me a good bit of perspective. In the end, I feel, it's not the language of modern art that has failed (except, as Bagge points out, the end-in-and-of-itself of pure performance-arty shockvalue). On the contrary, the language of the modern (or, perhaps early/mid 20th century abstractionism, both in music and art) has a solid place in daily contemporary life -- but the medium itself has withered away at it's core: concert music, galleries, museums, record companies, and especially the supporting infrastructure of academia, blue-hair arrogance, non-funded non-profits, and the deification of old(er) commercial art and music (i.e. Gentrification-via-Marsalisification).

What the hell am I saying? I'm not sure exactly. But read Bagge's comic, it's funny and smart. And note that in all the publicity that this flashmob opera is getting, not a single one of the articles mentions who wrote this new opera -- neither music nor libretto.

Despite my composerly grousing to follow, it sure seems that Chicago has got it going on with some striking investments in public space for the arts. While New York has been figuring out ways to cannonize Marsalis as the saviour of Jazz, or annoint Jazz as the savior of our cultural selves (or at least toss American Modernism down the memory hole), Chicago has moved the dirt and welded the metal.

What a beautiful site -- the garden entrance to the opera house in Chicago, by Kathyrn Gustafson, covered in today's NY Times. Gotta love the wild Gehry design of the open air pavilion. Granted, Chicago has done it's part to build an American concert music -- and yet what fills the halls of their Opera house? The same old repeat-toire. And the music festival goes it one better -- celebrate a touch of Copland, then Corigliano.

I've linked to him a lot in this post -- Greg Sandow has a lot of interesting things to say, especially this article about new music. While I don't agree with everything he says, he surely makes many good points, and thank goodness there's a voice even talking about it without the dated hysteria of other journalists.

The two remaining Bee Gees (Robin and Barry) picked up "Commanders of the Order of the British Empire" at Buckingham Palace. Unfortunately, the sudden death last year of Maurice (too often overlooked as the 3rd brother behind the keyboard -- lacking the early ear-cupping 60s star power of Robin, or the huge 70s career of lion-beared Barry), left the honor ringing tinged with melancholy. In fact, Barry reveals his fear of flying after 9/11 may have cost Maurice the chance to receive the award in person, before his sudden heart attack last year.

This doesn't really have much to do with the category here of as a 20th Century composer, at least the serious brand that filled my 20s. But the BeeGees were a childhood favorite (I always cupped my ear in elementary school for sing-a-long like Robin), and a guilty pleasure ever since. I don't know that I'm actually *sad* that they won't perform as a group anymore, since except for the 1989 album ONE, which was great, they haven't done a lot more than receive awards and accolades. Well-deserved, in my opinion. Nobody gets too much heaven.

From boingboing, a student project that uses hamsters to trigger a happy little midi-ditty, with pictures, soundfiles, and a detailed review.


Very cool. Not just fun with rodents, but a commentary on the automatic nature of composing music in our super-tech era of music.