One cornerstone of the business model for the One-Track Universe is an assertion that fundamentally, in the very real human terms, recorded music isn't very important. Sure you probably have music playing now and a stack of recordings in your cache, but recordings are only the media, a poor substitute, playing in your environment now as an escape from the rest of the work and study environs because it reminds you of happier places ... and that place is where the music is live.

Think for a moment: What are your fondest music memories?

Just about any Torontonian my age can answer the question, "Where were you the night the Stones played the El Mo?" ... I know where I was: Walking by outside, saw the poster for April Wine and thought, "naw..." and asked the roadie on the street who said, calmly, "The Stones" and I thought, "Yeah right" and walked on by on my way to take some more slides off the 16" MacLennan telescope.

Now ask those same late boomers, "Where were you when the Stones released 'Some Girls'?" and you'll get blankness, even from people like me who were in the hype of the record business at the time. I dimly remember being told (by the rep) how Dire Straights were "The biggest thing since the Beatles" but I couldn't tell you the date.

Music defines a place. A time and place where we experience being. Recordings are mere shadows, holiday snapshots and fashion magazines to make us wish we were there, in that place, back there instead of here, where we are ...
At best, we remember some other life event concurrent with hearing our song or some-such, but for our memories about music, recordings can only take us there -- our passions and dreams are tangled up in a wish for the presence of being there. I still remember the choral music at the mass Canterbury Cathedral, "Stairway to Heaven" don't mean nuthin' anymore.

The Voice of Fire

In 1992 or so, I attended a robotics conference in Ottawa, disappointing because there was only one actual robot in attendance, but there I was with some of the grad students from our lab, most of them from far away lands. As part of our tourist wanderings, we took in the national art gallery so I could show off our national treasures.

One of those treasures was the newly re-deployed work by colour-field artist Barnett Newman, originally created for Canada's 1967 centennial and at that time the hot how dare they call that art news story, the infamous Voice of Fire.

My fellow travellers were incensed, especially at the price tag. What sort of nation would plunk that sort of money down on a red stripe? To tease them, when it came time to buy our souvenir postcards in the swag shop, I bought the VoF card, and was kidded over it all the way home.

But there's something peculiar about this postcard ...

Back home, scattering my cards on the kitchen table and mulling them all over a few johnny walkers, I noticed something remarkable: Every other gallery postcard features a canvas, in isolation, very occasionally with the frame, but usually just the canvas, all except this one.

This one print, in the postcard, on the web and in all the books, always shows the floor, the wall, the canvas and a person ... it always shows the place ...

This is the Place

Tell anyone, anywhere in the world, "Meet me at the Voice of Fire" and you can only mean one spot, one specific room in one specific building, totally unique, unambiguously one and only one place in all of time-space. The Voice of Fire.

Such was the genius of Newman's art, his stroke of genius: In the modern world, anyone can go to the nearest Athena Posters shop and buy a Kandinsky facsimile, or a Picasso, or a Rembrandt or Monet, they can frame it, hang it, and while it's not the original experience, these mass-produced knock-offs still capture a bit of the experience of the original. You can print them in a fine-quality art book and use slides to teach about their technique and composition and innovation; these prior works are eminently copyable, digitally bootleggable, and it's a hard slog for those who still try to sell such one-of wares.

But not the Voice of Fire.

Newman's canvas escapes the problem completely. To bootleg his canvas, you can only allude to the place, and to capture any sense of the experience, you have to go there and see it for yourself --- in one fell stroke of a stripe of red midst the deep blues, Barnett Newman defeated the entire reprint industry. They can copy his stripe all they wish, duplicate every non-variance of his pigment tone and brushwork, even blow their copies up just as high and mighty, but they cannot usurp his work's position as the Voice of Fire.

The National Art Gallery had purchased a place, a locus of attention as unique in it's experience of presence as the pyramids of Giza or Michaelangelo's David. Worth every penny, I say. Sheer brilliance.

Music is Now

Musicians need to learn from Barnett Newman's example. We often say that poets go first, followed by the painters, and then by musicians far in advance of the rest of our culture catching up to the new realities of perception. John Cage knew this as his own works embraced the aleatorics of the present tense and matured over the years into happenings and circuses, real time, real places, you should-a bin there.

We do see some of that, even in the digital age. Bono's world-stage media event concerts, distributed concert music over the CA*Net II, places on the timeline, milestones we can all use to mark the thread of our days. Woodstock, SARStock, Lilith Faire, sure, but also the uncapturable space-time events like R. Murry Schaffer's Soundscapes, Udo Kasemets' Duchampera

To ignore this in the digital age means a path of anonymous and viral mass-production. Only this ephemerial state of being the uncapturable, the marker of a place in time and space, the now of being here, this is the only option in a digital rebroadcast future, an inevitable convergence path for all art in a digital age.

And that future is here.