TeledyN

Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips told a Rolling Stone reporter of the group's plan to record and share a song a month instead of producing another traditional album. The always whimsical college rock elder mused on new possibilities, such as packaging the songs inside small toys. Most important, though, was a straightforward declaration of purpose. "We want to try to live through our music as we create it," he said, "instead of it being a collection of the last couple years of our lives.

Ok, enough of my gloating, and thank you all for catching up with my thinking, whatever your reasons doesn't really matter, the point is simply that if you are running a studio my friend, I advise you to drop your prices by 95% before next Tuesday, because all that extra mile production stuff you layer in to give the salon that exquisite sense of exclusivity is about to be jettisoned as just so much ungreenery. Your once lucrative boutique business is now box-store, like software, become a common thing that can be tossed together quite acceptably by a dilligent teen with two weeks practice and just as no one really cared about the fonts and kerning in a myspace page (or even if the text overwrote the image!) no one will care much anymore that the seinheissers were impeccable and the placements of baffles pure brilliance. It will all be postcard polaroids now, baby.

Only last night on Twitter, Batt revealed that the whole thing was a joke to stir debate about copyright issues.

The Planets album had spent three months at number one in the classical charts when Batt received a claim for royalties from the MCPS on behalf of Cage’s publisher. However, well aware of how copyright works, Batt had cannily registered the writing pseudonym Clint Cage with the PRS, so was able to assert that the Batt/Cage credit just meant he had written this particular sixty seconds of silence himself.

Batt claims they then agreed to disagree publicly, in order to educate people about copyright. The subsequent debate involved a musical duel between The Planets and a clarinettist from Cage’s publishers, with simultaneous performances of the Batt and Cage silences. “Mine is a much better silent piece,” asserted Batt.  “I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and 33 seconds.”

The story was brought to a close when Batt made a £1,000 donation to the John Cage Trust, which supports young artists. Batt proposed that it should be an undisclosed amount paid in a sealed envelope on the steps of the high court, giving the impression it was a settlement. Batt claims journalists were shouting out sums, and when they reached six figures, Riddle nodded, either out of mischief or nervousness. Thus a music industry myth was born.

Brilliant, brilliant, brill score Mr Womble (I've always loved Wombles) and might I add it worked beautifully to the intent and purpose, and now we can get on with today's 5pm EST performance of the Global Silent Orchestra.

Some say the real miracle of Christmas is not that we fail to observe Goodwill Towards Man on all the other days, but in how, as wild animals ourselves, it is miraculous that we can even just somewhat tone down preying upon each other for a few hours each year -- I am sitting here now, downloading Christmas carols in free public domain arrangments, thoughtfully typeset and even transposed for band instruments, and they are good 4-part arrangements. Just imagine ...

No other web site offers all of these features:

• All of it is free! No hidden costs, no teasers, no bait-and-switch.
• Sheet music for every carol, in standard PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format. No need to purchase or download special software!
• Sheet music in 4 parts (SATB) for most carols. Just the thing for caroling!
• Lead sheets (melody, chords & lyrics) for most carols.
• Additional guitar lead sheets in easy keys, when the piano lead sheet is in a horrible key for novice guitarists.

• Instrumental parts for C, F, Bb, and Eb instruments. Play in 4 parts with any combination of instruments!
• MIDI files for every carol (so you can hear what they sound like), with both 4-part (SATB) and melody-only versions.
• New! A list of CD's where you can hear each carol, with easy links to buy them from Amazon.com, and (in most cases) a sound clip of a sample of the carol from the CD.
• Background music only when you ask for it, instead of playing automatically whether you want it or not!
• Lyric sheets for every carol. (Okay, so this is no big deal, but this site wouldn't be complete without them.)
• Credits (author, composer, translator, arranger) for every carol.
• No obnoxious animations or pop-up ads.
• And did we mention that all of it is free?

absolutely mindbogglingly amazing - can you imagine? I could call you up, I could post to my site an open call to say, "Grab your instruments and download the following and meet me at the town square and we'll fill the air with music!" and we'd all just meet there and pick our parts and we're ready to go, no lawyers, no rights organizations to notify, just music to be made for everyone.

Truly this is Christmas.

We hear now all over the Classical Music blogdom and trade journals of a 'modern' crisis in Classical music; I've been reading Murray Ginsberg's history of Canadian music in the twentieth century, and you'll never guess what I've found --- it may well be that the popularity of Classical music is the anomaly!

Ok, the brutal bad news: in the early industrially enlightened age of American Prosperity the entertainment and education of the New World did not include the great classics; the ticket-buying norm was vaudeville, music halls, even to some extent, and even in Canada, it was that Jass music. So much so that the first incarnation of the Toronto Symphony in 1908 went bankrupt within five years!

No one added dazzle and sizzle or marketing departments. No one staged extravaganzas or decked themselves out in shock-value. There wasn't even any great disrespect paid to their ordinary day-job music. What changed was only the musicians. It was our musicians, and not the public, who so wanted to play and hear the beloved grand master achievements of the Classical tradition, that they did it themselves, regardless whether or not they were going to be paid; they did it for the music, for the sheer joy of doing it.They did it because in their soul, they needed it. Such a different world it was back then.

[Luigi] von Kunits was confident that, especially with his students in tow, Toronto had enough skilled players for the New Symphony Orchestra. But all its musicians actually earned their living playing afternoon and evening performances in the theatre pits,. The only time the orchestra could present concerts was between theatre performances, from 5:15 to 6:15pm (after which the musicians would return to their respective theatres).

The musicians were assembled in late 1922 and rehearsals began. For the players it was a joyous time: at last they were able to play their beloved Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms.

Playing accompaniment to vaudeville acts or music to the flickering images on the silent screen seemed less onerous, as long as they could spend some happy hours with von Kunits and the New Symphony Orchestra.

Von Kunits rehearsed them well, On April 23, 1923, the sixty-musicians aggregation, with the maestro on the podium, made its debut in Massey Hall (erected in 1892 as a gift to the people of Toronto from its famous family of agricultural machinery manufacturers). Playing to a half-filled auditorium, the orchestra offered a program consisting of Weber, Dvorak, Brahms and Tchaikovsky. According to Arnold Edinborough, the critics were impressed ... though responsive, the early audiences were not large, but by its fifth season the orchestra had finally found its patrons. During the 1926-27 season, the name Toronto Symphony Orchestra became the official title of the growing organization.

Which now begs the question: at what point did the need for this music become the right to budgets, managers, halls and the associated funding? Looking at the timeline, we have 400 some years where the musicians play because they want to play, then a tiny blip of a few decades where suddenly there is a great ballywhoo and strikes and demands for rights to be paid for doing what, history shows, they themselves needed to do for their own sanity. Where did the flip happen? With the Unions? No, sorry, there again, if we examine the history, the union in Toronto was started in 1887 with the Toronto Orchestral Association simply to standardize on the rates payed for the requisite day-job mundane musical provisions, for the music that the buyer needed, but to which the musicans were largely indifferent.

Hence the expression, "You'd have to pay me to do that" -- the organization was called 'Orchestral' but only because the trained musicians of the day were called upon to play the pop music of the day, which in 1887 was largely church and classical repertoire. The name was changed before the turn of the century to reflect the changing popular interests, but remember: the actual Orchestra would not exist for another two decades.

But getting back to that timeslot, that 5:15 to 6:15 pm, the only timeslot available to the musicians to assemble to rehearse and perform the works they felt would do the most benefit to themselves and to their audiences, a conviction so strong they would persist for five seasons slowly educating and expanding their audiences until they reached a break-even sustainability, at which point, one would think, everyone would be happy.

So what went so horribly wrong? I no longer see classical players in any of the cafes, there are no Debussys and Saties exploring the limits of parlour composition, there are no Jose Broca exploring the reach of the guitar, building upon the tone science that had gone before, cognizant of every twist of the story to date, studiously applied and explored. Outside of perhaps a very few of the jazz-parlours where there still lurk those who dare chance an explorative cadenza (tho most often mechanically just payin' dues), I see instead grunge guitars and off-minor rumblings, I see pop-song duets with strummed chords first-position, imagined solo and fill lines and dr-um ma-chi-nes, we were better off with barrelhouse and vaudeville! So what happened? Hundreds, possibly thousands of years of traditional contact between the people and their musicians, where did it go?

And more to the point, how do we get it back? I think that is a rhetorical question really, given the example of our forebearers: We need a reprise, a new New Symphony Orchestra, a new commitment to the medicinal shamanism of the profession that looks beyond petty costs. Sell insurance if you must make a buck, but how about let's keep our humanity.

The musicians of the Detroit Symphony were hired originally to play only orchestral repertoire and at very high levels of quality. Yet they now face the possibility of having to professionally wear many hats. Future symphony duties beyond orchestra playing would include teaching, mentoring, chamber music concerts, public speaking, among others.

Most change is both good and bad. One criticism of the proposed changes is that the level of quality of their performances will go down. That fear is justified, and probably true. Yet, the proposed versatility of the musicians’ jobs may, after a period of adjustment, improve their quality of life through that variety. Instead of the “assembly line” churning out of high-level orchestra concerts, the musicians will have the opportunity to perform more chamber music, which on the whole is more satisfying than orchestral playing. And their value to the community will be greatly enhanced. It is that non-monetary value which is the true spirit of music and music’s expression. (Needless to say, musicians must earn a respectable income to continue to perform at high levels.)

I see musicians returning to the role of “healers”, rather than distant performers on stage. Musicians are community “glue”, not only through playing beautiful music, but also through encouraging others in their expression of it.

to which David adds the apocryphal postscript: "Connections with people are more difficult to make through traditional concert settings." and that is when I lept to my feet.

"Anybody out there looking for music lessons? Or know of anybody who's looking for music lessons?"

Well ... here's the thing: People don't KNOW you offer an enriched learning experience; after now 60 years of being told that music is "just sound" sadly most people in our culture have no direct experience of music at all, and will proudly say,when asked what they play, that they 'play' the radio. They've been sold a lie and even more sadly, we musicians re-inforce that lie every time we hold out a CD as if it was even important. So you can advertise until the cows come home, no one is going to call.

Time was, parents had direct experience of music. These would be the children of the 'tween-war era, those who lived through WWII, every last one of them had heard a real choir, a real organist in their church, they had heard brass bands up close, and their dancehall was a purely acoustic experience of the sonic laser of the Big Band. Most, at least most in the urban areas, had also experienced a full-scale symphony orchestra although in the era since the collapse of Edwardian aristocracy, that experience was, by 1945, rarer and rarer, progressively replaced by the National Radio systems, and by those Infernal Machines, the phonograph. So these parents knew about music, and even the protestants saw value in giving every child possible the opportunity to get in on the musicianship game. It didn't matter if you were poor as churchmice, even the Gershwins and the Blounts could justify the expense; it was a matter of survival.

Today we haven't many parents alive who can remember a world pre-phonograph, precious few remember pre-MTV. Their experience of music is of a commodity that is shrink-wrapped and dazzling, created by mythic heros in the halls of great Olympus, the domain of the gods themselves. Mere mortals do not aspire to challenge the gods of the music industry, they can only pay their tithes and feel priviledged to be allowed to listen in for a fee.

where have all the students gone?

That means no P.A.'s. That means no CDs. That means no electric pianos, no stacks of marshall amps, no 'sound' systems, only the direct brain to body to space to body to brain transmission of musical experience.

And dig: they think it is worthless, so they aren't going to pay a dime for it -- your concerts only preach to the dwindling choir -- if we truly believe music is worth anything, the burden of the proof is ours, it is then left to us to SHOW them what it is worth.

This is why I joined a community band, and this is why I always vote 'YES' when there is even a hint of a potential to play in front of people out where they are, in parks, in parades, on the street, in the shopping malls ...

One concert in the park is worth 10 in the hall. We have to get out there and demonstrate, play not for bucks or sales or awards or acclaim, but play because, very literally, civilization itself depends on our performance. We must rage against the dying of the light, show 'em what we got. If the kids see what you do as the thing they need for their own evolution, you can bet they will line up to learn how its done. But they have to experience it for themselves, they have to feel what it is, they have to SEE the goods,and for that to happen, we have to SHOW the goods.

Or we can sit on our backsides and complain as civilization slides farther and farther into commercialized primitivisms.

Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it! (Vladimir Mayakovsky)

If everyone paid a penny every time they played a song on their computers without buying a single song, the record industry would be in far better shape than it is now. More listening doesn’t need to mean less money, even if it means less purchasing. But for some reason, that model is seen as “eating our young,” when compared to the pay-per download model, which is essentially the electronic version of buying an unbundled CD, cassette, or 8-track tape — all formats that have become considerably less attractive to most people as they increasingly listen on connected devices, if they listen at all.

Ha! Now ... where have you heard that particular price-point before? Seems I'm now only about 8 years ahead of Wired, I'd better watch myself. But back at that pretty penny, here is the truth the plastic disk vendors will not accept: the vast majority of people will listen to the vast majority of music only once at best they might keep it in regular play for a week or two until they grasp the lack of timelessness in it, and they, swoosh off it goes to the Cornfield, stuffed out in the la-la land of never to return until a nostalgic mood takes them. Piles of it, huge great mounds of it.

This is especially true today with all the totally well-meaning mp3 vending machines for the 'indie' artists, but dig, nearly no one wants to buy your mp3 for a buck and even ten for a dollar is pushing it. But ... if it was like radio-on-demand, pick a swath of catalog and pay so little you couldn't possibly exhaust your account, well then it makes sense to do a little sight-seeing.

This is the reason for the great success of the free MP3 as a loss-leading advert for your sound, as a calling card (business cards cost money to design and print too), clear illustrations of what you'd be like if they hired you for the service you provide. The trouble is, only those who can afford to front that kind of money will be in the position to sustain giving things away, and that makes it difficult for the newcomers. However, you up that to an almost invisible penny or two a play and who cares if they snatch the download for their ipod because you know they'll be bored soon enough and back tomorrow for a dozen more, maybe even from the same band if they dig it!