A Passive Audience
Hi. My name is Marcus, and I have a problem: I’m a terrible concert attendee.
No, I don’t fall asleep and snore loudly. I don’t send text messages, do homework, or use my laptop when I’m in the audience, though I often scratch out a to-do list during performances. But as I sat in a saxophone quartet recital the other day, I found myself entirely disengaged from the music.
Let’s be frank: The only reason most students attend recitals is so that they fulfill their recital attendance quota. I’ll certainly admit that I would never be able to attend fifteen recitals in a semester if it wasn’t required of me.
I’m certain that MUS 021 (Recitals) only exists to ensure that performers aren’t met with an empty auditorium. Without MUS 021, recital attendance would be abysmal.
I’m part of the problem.
You could call it RADD (Recital Attention Deficit Disorder), perhaps. But it isn’t really a question of attention span; I simply don’t enjoy sitting in a recital hall listening to an hour of saxophone quartet music. Or vocalists.
Classical music, done well, shouldn’t be boring. But like chocolate chip cookies, you can have too much of a good thing — or someone can mess up the recipe, leaving you with a burned, bitter taste. Post-tonal saxophone music, then, is the boca burger of modern music. They took whatever ugly note combinations they could find, and crammed it into an emotionless three-movement saxophone work. The piano accompaniment is their napkin, wiped with whatever notes couldn’t fit into the saxophone part.
All things considered, I suppose it isn’t accurate to say that musicians have simply recycled centuries-old works for performance. They also include terrible twentieth-century music just to keep things balanced.
Today’s generation hasn’t learned the history of music; they don’t understand the evolution that brought us from Bach to Copland and beyond. Yet even for those of us who battled through a formal Music History course, recitals can be a drag if performers don’t set themselves apart with a phenomenal performance.
It’s a shame, then, that I found myself sitting in the auditorium the other night anxiously awaiting the concert’s end. Music should be enjoyable, and audiences should be engaged. Yet that clearly isn’t happening, and I see nothing to indicate that recital attendance will naturally increase. Today, we find university recitals filled with students who would rather be off playing Halo than watching a music performance.
Halo is more fun than a saxophone quartet, that’s for sure. Maybe music just can’t compete.
A more alarming thought: Our generation doesn’t appreciate classical music. When older generations die away, who will be left to advocate classical music?
Perhaps the future will be like Planet of the Apes, and hundreds of years from now a curious explorer may stumble upon recordings of Beethoven, wondering where that archaic music came from.
But then he’ll notice a Britney Spears recording, and realize that society was already dead at the turn of the millennium.
Blended: Hundreds of Songs, 45 Years
Andy Baio writes about Gurl Talk’s “Feed the Animals”:
Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals is one of my favorite albums this year, a hyperactive mish-mash sampling hundreds of songs from the last 45 years of popular music.
He compiled data on which songs were sampled in the album, sorted by time, and posted the results for all to see. (Perhaps more interestingly, he used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to find cheap humans willing to help him gather data. An article for another time.)
I downloaded the music for free and listened to a few songs, but I didn’t recognize much. Granted, this is all highly illegal, being a mishmash of copyrighted work, but it is very original nonetheless.
Musically speaking, these songs could certainly be considered a new, unique work, even though they are essentially smashed-together splotches of existing songs. Unethical? For the artists who created the original songs, I’d say yes. If I had composed a work that became a part of one of these pieces, though, I probably would not be too concerned. It’d have been nice to get permission first, but if it doesn’t cut into my (hypothetical) profit margin I wouldn’t be too bothered.
Profit is everything, in most cases. If money isn’t involved, people are much less likely to care… with nothing to lose, there’s little to be upset about. Artists gain extra publicity in most cases, which may actually stimulate sales.
I don’t like the music, though — I’d much rather they mishmash a collection of songs that I actually like in the first place. Ah well, I guess that could be a project for myself when I feel like evading the law.
Pandora’s Future
ZDNet conducted an interview with Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora, an internet radio service. Pandora allows you to choose any song, artist, or genre as a seed; it will then select other songs based on the characteristics of the song/artist/genre you selected. For instance, a song by a jazz pianist might be tagged with “fast piano lines” or “slow chord progression”; each song has been classified with many such labels.
The result? Pandora often selects an excellent stream of songs, customized to your particular listening desire.
They even have an iPhone application, which lets me get a Pandora stream from the cell phone network connection; essentially a 24/7 radio service custom-tailored to my desires.
The problem, politically speaking, has been that online radio stations currently face disproportionate taxes on the songs that they play, as opposed to traditional broadcast stations. They currently make $23-$24 million in revenue each year, but they pay $17 million in royalty fees, according to ZDNet’s interview. As a result, Tim Westergren had said that the future of Pandora might be bleak; his comments sparked an outpouring of support for the station.
Pandora does provide an excellent service to musicians and listeners; the article goes into more depth, describing how Pandora often brings attention to smaller artists and encourages listeners to buy the artists’ music.
Pandora really is a win-win: Listeners discover music that they’re likely to purchase, and musicians (even less prominent ones) receive exposure and profit. But if the royalty fees are disproportionately high — enough to kill off online radio services like Pandora — both camps will lose.
I hope Pandora succeeds as they work with the music industry to lower the royalty rates to a fairer level. The internet only becomes more prominent in everyday life; it’d be a shame to let bureaucracy get in the way of new services that benefit musicians and audiences alike.
On Minimalism and Your Wife
Being asked to write about the current state of minimalism is like being asked if you’ve stopped beating your wife.
