I just dreamed that Charles Amirkhanian let me sit in the cockpit of a plane that Beethoven had once flown. I feel so duped.

Turns out David Byrne’s in the same boat I am vis-a-vis our internet radio stations. And contrary to what the unions are saying, Byrne sees through the corporate scam here, and is rooting for the webcasters. (Thanks to Alex Ross.)

Someone noted that by the time you get to paragraph 14 of one of my posts, you realize I haven’t really taken to the spirit of the blog format. It’s true, I’m not really into the whole brevity thing, El Duderino. I yearn for my glory days when the Voice used to give me a lovely, ad-less, 1700-word page to fill up, and to fit into that I’d have to shear 700 words off of my first draft. But this will be brief.

This Sunday night – Easter, admittedly – in Boston, Rodney Lister will give a concert for toy piano including my Paris Intermezzo (most of which was written on a plane returning from Paris in 1989) on a wonderful-sounding concert of many works for toy piano. In addition to my essay and other pre-existing ones by Eve Beglarian, Richard Whalley, and Dai Fujikura, he’s playing premieres of pieces written for him by Lyle Davidson, Pozzi Escot, Stephen Feigenbaum, Michael Finnissy, Philip Grange, John Heiss, Derek Hurst, Matthew McConnell, Matthew Mendez, Nico Muhly, Ketty Nez, Dave Smith, Jeremy Woodruff, William Zuckerman, and himself. (Some of the pieces involve violin, electronics, boombox, and so on.) The concert is on Sunday, April 8 at 8:00 PM in the Marshall Room in the Music Building at Boston University (855 Commonwealth Avenue).

The following Sunday April 15 at 7:30 – tax day, admittedly – the Da Capo ensemble will play my Hovenweep at Princeton, at Wolfensohn Hall at the Institute for Advanced Study. (Advanced study of what, I have no idea.) I just ran across a review that said, “If Brahms had delved into jazz, he might have come up with something similar to Kyle Gann’s Hovenweep.” I’ll buy that. It’s a concert modeled around folk influences, and the rest of the program includes composers Jon Magnussen, Joan Tower, Chinary Ung, Reza Vali, and Stefan Weisman.

For those of you who don’t subscribe to Times Select, I have to reprint a few of Glenn Branca’s 25 thought-provoking questions that form the endpiece to the Times‘s “The Score” blog of four composers. They’re not all equally thought-provoking, though, so rather than give away the whole deal for free I’ll only quote the best ones:

1. Should a modern composer be judged against only the very best works of the past?…

3. If a composer can write one or two or more great works of music why cannot all of his or her works be great?

4. Why does the contemporary musical establishment remain so conservative when all other fields of the arts embrace new ideas?

5. Should a composer, if confronted with a choice, write for the musicians who will play a piece or write for the audience who will hear it?

6. When is an audience big enough to satisfy a composer or a musician? 100? 1000? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? 100,000,000?…

12. Should a composer speak with the voice of his or her own time?

13. If there’s already so much good music to listen to what’s the point of more composers writing more music?…

15. Must all modern composers reject the past, a la John Cage or Milton Babbitt’s “Who Cares If You Listen?”

16. Is the symphony an antiquated idea or is it, like the novel in literature, still a viable long form of music?

17. Can harmony be non-linear?…

19. Artists are expected to accept criticism, should critics be expected to accept it as well?

20. Sometimes I’m tempted to talk about the role that corporate culture plays in the sale and distribution of illegal drugs throughout the United States and the world, and that the opium crop in Afghanistan has increased by 86 percent since the American occupation, and the fact that there are 126,000 civilian contractors in Iraq, but what does this have to do with music?…

22. When a visual artist can sell a one-of-a-kind work for hundreds of thousands of dollars and anyone on the internet can have a composer’s work for nothing, how is a composer going to survive? And does it matter?

23. Should composers try to reflect in their music the truth of their natures and the visions of their dreams whether or not this music appeals to a wide audience?

24. Why are advances in science and technology not paralleled by advances in music theory and compositional technique?

25. Post-Post Minimalism? Since Minimalism and Post-Minimalism we’ve seen a short-lived Neo-Romanticism, mainly based on misguided attempts to return to a 19th century tonality, then an improv scene which had little or nothing to do with composition, then a hodge-podge of styles: a little old “new music,” a little “60’s sound colorism”, then an eclectic pomo stew of jazz, rock and classical, then a little retro-chic Renaissance … even tonal 12-tonalism. And now in Germany some “conceptual” re-readings of Wagner. What have I left out? Where’s the music?

Give up? I’ll print the answers in my next entry.

I have a modest personal stake in the preceding discussion of classical composers borrowing pop elements: I’m writing a piano concerto largely based in jazz idioms. The reason is it’s a commission from the Orkest de Volharding in Amsterdam, and they have an unusual instrumentation: flute, three saxophones, three trumpets, three trombones, horn, and bass. When I first thought about it, I thought of the few classical pieces I’d heard for piano and brass, and recoiled. (The two great concerti for piano and winds are by Stravinsky and Kevin Volans, but they both have plenty of woodwinds, and I don’t.) If I’m going to write for solo piano with brass and reeds – instruments I’ve never focused on before – I’m going to use the one model for such instrumentation I dearly love, jazz band music of the 1920s. That led me to New Orleans, metaphorically speaking, and while I was considering this I happened to buy a DVD of Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke, which touched me deeply. So the piece started to gravitate toward New Orleans as subject matter. And when I considered that I was writing the piece for Amsterdam, another city built below sea level, the topic seemed fated.

It’s not like me to make reference to current events in my music. I don’t respond emotionally that quickly, and I’ve suffered through dozens of tediously sad pieces about the Holocaust, none of which ever came near doing justice to the unimaginable evil of their subject matter. I have no 9/11 piece. That I have a piece about Custer’s Last Stand is more typical of my creative lag time. But here I am, for once in my life, writing a piano concerto about a recent event, New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. The short, frenetic first movement is labeled “Before,” and the long, devastated second movement is labeled “After.”

And it’s a piece about jazz. The word about is chosen advisedly. It is a depiction of jazz. And not just “jazz” in general, which would be meaningless, but about specific moments in jazz history. The first movement is a collage based on the syle of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Seven, and even more of Bix Beiderbecke’s band with Frankie Trumbauer of 1927-28. Armstrong was from New Orleans, of course, Beiderbecke wasn’t, but Beiderbecke joined Armstrong’s band in Chicago, and that’s my image of the happy, innocent, partying New Orleans style. The second movement briefly features a New Orleans funeral of ghosts, led by Jelly Roll Morton and based on the chord changes of Morton’s “Dead Man Blues.” (I’ve wondered why ghosts figure so frequently in my music – I’ve never seen a ghost myself, though I thought I felt one once – and I don’t know.)

In any case, I am not writing jazz, and have no desire to do so – if anyone starts improvising in my piano concerto I will be offended. I am depicting 1920s jazz, the way a novelist might go back and write a narrative about the Roaring ’20s. Like the novelist, I include enough realistic detail to create the atmosphere I want. Also like the novelist, I am not obliged to confine myself to narrative conventions that might actually convince the audience that I’m writing from the 1920s.

I’ve studied a lot of jazz, and I’ve written piano and Disklavier homages to James P. Johnson, Bud Powell, and Bill Evans that have been well received, especially by jazz fans. I know you’re supposed to write whatever the hell kind of music you want and the audience be damned, but if jazz musicians had told me that I really didn’t understand jazz and should leave it alone, I probably would have. But the opposite has happened: jazz musicians have been appreciative and supportive, and as I blogged recently, my Disklavier CD made someone’s top-ten list for 2006 in Jazziz magazine. This was incredible good news to me. Because I feel that 20th-century classical music, with its stupid pitch tricks, dropped the ball in the area of harmony, and that only two profitable harmonic directions have presented themselves: microtonality (which I pursue in other media), and bebop harmony, which picked up where Debussy and Ravel left off and kept going. Since 2000, bebop has been my default harmonic language when I’m writing non-microtonal music. So I’m relieved, since I’m determined to go that way, that no jazz musician has ever given me grief and told me that that wasn’t my music to write, or that bebop harmony should never be notated.

Stick with me – I’m getting back to the pop-classical issue in a roundabout way.

In doing this I am acutely aware that I have opted into a classical tradition: the tradition of Rhapsody in Blue, of Copland’s Piano Concerto, of Milhaud’s Creation of the World, of Martinu’s Le Jazz. I’m especially aware of the Copland (since it’s another two-movement piano concerto), and also of the Coplandy early piano pieces that Conlon Nancarrow wrote, the Prelude and Blues and Sonatina. For years I’ve tried to find early stride piano that actually sounded like Copland’s and Nancarrow’s pieces, and I’ve come up dry. The image of jazz piano you get from 1920s and ’30s classical music just doesn’t match historical recordings of jazz piano itself. They evidently heard something in that music that we don’t now – mistakes, maybe? were they enchanted by wrong notes played by drunks at rent parties? – and exaggerated that, and didn’t understand the style very well. But 80 years later, who cares? We judge Copland’s Piano Concerto and Rhapsody in Blue today not on their fidelity to their models, which is pretty slipshod, but on whether the music itself is creative and enjoyable. The idea of a “creative misreading” – that wonderful art can result when an artist imitates something foreign to him and gets it wrong – has come to be accepted as a recurring source of artistic progress.

As John Shaw of Utopian Turtletop mentioned in a recent comment, Copland found jazz awfully limited, thought it possessed a sad (blues) style and a happy (dance music) style and not much else. That’s not true of me – I love that music, and listen to it for pleasure all the time. However, Beiderbecke and Armstrong were making music for people to dance to, and I’m making music for the concert hall. So my primary change has been to free that style from 4/4 meter, to let it go rhythmically wherever the melody wants to go. I run it through the Gann rhythmic gear-shifting mill and make it my own. It’s something I love to hear: 1920s jazz divested of metric regularity and song form:



I don’t feel, as Gershwin and Copland may well have, that I’m “improving” or “redeeming” the music I depict. But no one’s going to dance to my concerto, and so I don’t have the same job to do, or the same social or economic pressures, that Armstrong and Beiderbecke did, so why not?

A big difference separates me from Gershwin and Copland, and also from the pop-influenced composers of my generation: I’m depicting a style outside my training, but it’s not a contemporary style. The fantastic musicians whose music I draw from are dead. Their music has been about as well assimilated as it’s going to be. My concerto, whatever its success, will have no impact on the ongoing reception of 1920s jazz. And there’s another huge difference between Gershwin and Copland and the pop-influenced composers of my generation. In the 1920s, classical music was a dominant artform, and jazz was a scruffy newcomer, looked down on in highbrow circles. Jazz musicians may have resented the attention Gershwin and Copland received – I notice that to this day, they wrinkle their noses when you mention Rhapsody in Blue, because it was inferior to the jazz of its day, yet because it became so famous, for generations it misleadingly defined what jazz was about. Since jazz musicians were relatively powerless, however, protests defending their music against classical borrowings and encroachments didn’t draw much notice.

Today, however, we have a complete turnaround. Classical new music is now a minority culture constantly on the defensive, though it is stereotypically perceived as looking down its nose at pop music. Pop music, meanwhile, is a vastly dominant culture, a multi-billion-dollar industry, yet its fans see it as a feisty underdog. In other words, Goliath is a rickety old man in a wheel chair, David is chief CEO of an omnipotent corporation, and David’s fans get terribly upset when Goliath steals a riff from him, or even imitates him in homage. David can kick Goliath out into the street any time he wants and everyone cheers, because he’s, like, Goliath, man, the bad guy! And so pop music has inspired many composers my age, and they’ve depicted it, written music about it, some with more fidelity, some with less, maybe altered some things for creative effect, maybe creatively misunderstood. But the pop fans have it both ways: they speak for the dominant culture, but also carry the righteous indignation of those who have been snubbed. Holding all 52 cards, they insist on absolute fidelity to their music, and anyone who doesn’t provide it will be cast into the dungeon without regret – because not only are they powerless, they’re the bad guys, so there is double reason not to care about them.

(I do wonder one thing about composers who so so strongly identify with pop music – why are they composers, and not pop musicians? If pop music is the real, the true, the authentic music, why didn’t they go make that? Why would anyone devote their life to writing their second-favorite kind of music? Do they secretly feel guilty for having abandoned pop? Do they fear that their classical training is a betrayal? And when some of us neglect to measure our lives against pop music, do they salve their consciences by projecting that abandonment and betrayal onto us? Just thinking out loud here.)

This will pass. The historical process is well established. Composers (and other artists) borrow from a style other than their own. At the beginning, their fidelity to that style, or lack of it, is a big political issue. Depending on how much clout each style carries in the social order, protests about lack of fidelity may or may not carry weight. As the years pass, however, the fidelity issue fades away, and all that matters is whether the composers created something new and vibrant on its own terms. There’s nothing wrong with a musician borrowing from a style outside his training. If there were, we’d have to go back and condemn Bach for stealing from the Italian style in his Italian Concerto (which doesn’t really sound like Italian music of its day and wasn’t intended to, because Bach thought he could do better), then obliterate Rhapsody in Blue, Creation of the World, Stravinsky’s Ragtime, Colin McPhee’s Tabu Tabuhan, Henry Cowell’s Homage to Iran, Lou Harrison’s gamelan music, and a thousand other worthwhile pieces. Right now pop fans are so numerous, so in the ascendant, that one can’t go up against the horde of them. Twenty, 40, 80 years from now, the argument will seem academic, and we’ll rehear that pop-influenced music for what it did accomplish, not for what it wasn’t trying to. As long as the music is wild and creative on its own terms, who, ultimately, cares whether you “get it right”?

One thread of the pop-influenced-classical-music argument is becoming clearer to me from the comments to my previous post. A recurring refrain among younger musicians heavily invested in pop is that those composers who use pop instrumentation but don’t really use it in an authentic pop style do so because they don’t really respect pop music. They’re doing it to make themselves look hip, or to try to “redeem” pop elements by dressing up a classical piece with them. Now most of the composers one might gather in by this description are friends of mine, and I can tell you one thing for certain about every one of them: they all love and respect pop music. They listen to it, they buy it, they comb it for ideas. Almost all of them played it and wrote it in high school and college, if not afterward. At this point, however, they are not writing pop music, and they abstract elements from it for their own music the way Roy Lichtenstein might borrow images from comics, or the way Copland borrowed stride piano style for his Piano Concerto. But I know for a petrified fact that they pay homage to pop music in their own work because they really do admire it.

No young musician I’ve told this to has yet believed me.

And I can recount an interesting and recurring experience from my own teaching that is revealingly parallel. I’ve supervised many senior projects in pop music. Though my pop credentials are rather preternaturally thin, I’ve never hesitated to take one on. The Bard College music department was allowing students to do projects in pop music years before I came there, and as far as I know, not once in the ten years I’ve been there has any music professor tried to discourage a student from working in pop music, even for course credit. We have a pop songwriting course taught by Greg Armbruster, who’s got tons of real-world experience in styles from rap to Broadway, and whose course we consider a staple of the department. (Hell, I was once advisor to a stunning rhythm and blues project by a guy who had Ray Charles’s arranging and singing style down so cold it was scary. Needless to say, I learned more from this kid than he did from me.) Musical academia has many faults, as I’ve occasionally hinted, but as far as I can tell in 2007, taking a disapproving or condescending attitude toward pop music is not a widespread one.

Nevertheless, year after year after year, we hear a refrain from students: “I’d really rather do my senior project with my rock band, but I hear I can’t get credit for that.” “I wanted to major in music, but since I’m a pop musician I know the faculty won’t let me.” “I’m doing jazz for my senior concert, because the faculty won’t like it if I do a rock concert.” None of this is true. Not one member of the faculty flinches when a student expresses interest in pop, nor do those students receive less support than anyone else. Yet they’re all certain, and they all have chimerical third-hand evidence: “A friend of mine knew a guy who did a rock concert and the department flunked him.” Never happened. I’ve rewarded many a rock-band concert with an A.

(OK, there is one real, famous Bard story in support: sometime in the late ’60s, the department refused to let Donald Fagen, later of Steely Dan fame, become a music major. But the reason was he hadn’t bothered to learn to read music and he didn’t want to take theory courses, and according to my colleague Luis Garcia-Renart, who was on his board, Donald agreed with the committee’s decision that he’d probably be better off majoring in English. But sheesh, that was 40 years ago, give us a break. Since then we’ve been petrified that anyone we flunk will become famous and make us look foolish.)

The point is, year after year after year the students come to us believing something that is not true. WIth no malevolent intent, they will subconsciously concoct evidence to support their belief. It’s as though their self-esteem as rebellious teenagers requires them to invent a myth of the pop-disapproving faculty. I am tempted to conclude from this that young people cherish a widespread irrational faith that Pop Music Is Under Siege. We oldsters would love to get rid of it, and make everyone study classical music and jazz. Therefore, anyone of my generation who borrows pop influences without the air of authenticity cannot simply be incompetent, or abstracting elements for some non-pop-related purpose: they must be motivated by scorn. We all secretly hate pop music, and use it in our ineffective music to make pop music look bad. We so despise it that we rip off its elements superficially, without really listening to it. We’re trying to show the world that any idiot can do pop music.

Well, none of it’s true. Like the pop-influenced music of my generation or don’t like it, but if you imagine it is motivated by opportunism, condescension, or classical snobbism, you are merely projecting your own self-doubt and resentment onto it. That it is not is a historical fact. And if anyone born after 1975 believes me, I’ll be tremendously surprised.

An introvert, in Jung’s view, was someone who not only is focused on his own thoughts and perceptions, but considers his own viewpoint the final arbiter of reality. When popular opinion and one’s own perceptions come into conflict, the introvert cannot but decide that the world must be mistaken. However, in Jung’s view, every conscious principle is balanced by a compensatory principle in the unconscious, and it is common, he observed, almost necessary, for an introvert to elevate public opinion to a deity-like monolith with which it is useless to argue. Secretly, introverts assume they possess the truth, but also assume that the world holds all the cards.

I think composers of my own age and especially younger have internalized some such attitude toward pop music. They’ve studied classical music and can deconstruct it and criticize it, but the very popularity of pop, its perceived universal appeal, makes it, for them, immune to criticism. They compensate for a secret guilt over the self-consciousness of their classical background by considering pop music sacred. I’ve encountered this attitude for years with my undergrad students, and I discussed it at length with the more experienced composers at the Atlantic Center, because I truly want to understand it. It’s not a universal opinion, and there are many nuances and varying viewpoints, but the general attitude is too common to be ignored. My teachers’ generation considered pop music beneath serious discussion; my students believe that whenever pop and classical collide, classical must be in the wrong.

I happen to think that pop and classical have a lot to learn from each other, and that neither has a monopoly on musical truth. Sonata form was an important contribution to culture, and so was the concept album inaugurated by Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds. I believe, as an ethical principle, that classical composers should learn from pop, and incorporate what lessons they gather – because I think its popularity is based on something real, if not all-embracing. Having come to pop music comparatively late in life, I don’t appropriate its elements much myself, but some of the composers I admire most are those who have tried to fuse aspects of the two: Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, Mikel Rouse, Eve Beglarian, Ben Neill, Nick Didkovsky, and so on. I don’t believe, as some of my contemporaries have claimed to, that pop music is kind of a neutral vernacular with the same status as folk music: i.e., that borrowing pop influences is analogous to Haydn inserting rustic folk songs in his symphonies. Far from being anonymous, pop music is drenched in the personality of its performers; every byte of it is owned by someone, and often valued exactly for its personal associations. Nevertheless, if something of the physicality and contagious energy of pop can be imported into more extended or complex notated forms, so much the better for the progress of music.

But, as I’ve documented here before, I am not encouraged by the public reception of music that explores this aim. Music that borrows pop elements is rushed into an inevitable comparison with pop, and never to its advantage. Restrict yourself to cellos and oboes and marimbas and accordions and you can write whatever you want, but the second you insert an electric guitar or trap set, you’ve conjured up the genie of a pop-music comparison, and it is not going to go back into the bottle. For a hundred years or more, composers have been gleefully divesting classical audiences of their expectations: expectations of first and second themes, of tonality, of stylistic consistency, and a hundred other things have been thrown on the dust heap of history. But the expectations raised by comparisons with pop music are not to be denied. They are sacred.

For instance, many composers, in the habit of determining every rhythmic detail of a piece, have tried notating rhythms for trap set. But god help you if your drummer plays those rhythms accurately and doesn’t swing them, if they sound measured out rather than improvised in the heat of the moment. Pop fans are accustomed to a certain kind of time-distorting drummer energy, and if you tie your drummer down to a 32nd-note grid, it makes no difference at all how brilliant your rhythmic structure is: they are not going to be impressed. Pop musicians also determine their personality by the obsessive search for a particular high hat sound, an exact guitar distortion. Classical composers have never been in the habit of notating music with specific sounds in mind; you write a drum part, you notate the cymbal, and you assume that the drummer, whoever he turns out to be, owns a high hat cymbal. A little bit of classical new music gets made with exact timbral specificity – Poème Electronique springs to mind – but it is entirely exceptional.

In short, the pop record has turned its fans into cognoscenti of precise timbres. One reads constantly how proud they are of being able to recognize a tune or album from the first split second of a single note. There are possibly classical music mavens so familiar with recordings of the Brahms symphonies that they can recognize which orchestra is playing from the first note; but what does that have to do with Brahms’s intentions? Most instruments are neutral, and can be easily dissociated from the music they are associated with. We can hear a piano without being disappointed that it isn’t Chopin or Horowitz or Bud Powell, we hear an oboe without thinking of Mozart or Strauss, even an accordion without necessarily thinking of polkas. But trap sets and electric guitars, at this stage of the game, are not neutral, and cannot be bent to any compositional use the composer imagines. They make musicians want and expect to hear a certain kind of energy and virtuosity, and no music that fails in that comparison will be well received.

The attempt to compete timbrally with pop music is usually doomed to failure not only in terms of instrumental deficiencies but in terms of production values. The amount of money that went into making Sgt. Pepper, or any of Bjork’s albums, what they are is unimaginable to the new-music composer. Most of us make do with the machines and software we can afford to own. The great majority of electronic composers skirt the issue by relying on synthesized electronic timbres and gradual sonic transformations that never remind anyone of real instruments. Those of us reliant on MIDI, trying to simulate melodies, harmonies, and rhythms – in my case because I’m looking for tunings and polyrhythms that live ensembles can’t currently play – are generally reduced to a repertoire of sounds summarily dismissed by audio software experts who can recognize their source. And even those who have their own groups and record in the studio rarely have access to the best microphones, the best mastering, the best guitar-shredders in the business.

And finally, some composers will never use pop elements to pop fans’ satisfaction because they’re trying to do something else instead. What classical music, generally speaking, has to offer pop is a more global sense of structure, a reconceived relationship of detail to overall form. For those details to be as imagined by the composer, the performer can often not get carried away. You may set up some nested polyrhythms, or an interaction of two isorhythms, which would lose their rhythmic meaning were the drummer to play them imprecisely. Many composers, myself included, think music through notation, and there are limits to which the performer can interfere. What I listen for in music may be perfectly well satisfied by a composer using vernacular elements. But for most pop music fans, the points of comparison are sacred, and admit of no leeway.

Well, so what? I find it a little sad, because a tremendous amount of music that I find powerfully written and brilliantly conceived gets dismissed as worthless because of timbral and production-value reasons that have nothing to do with the music’s intent. I trust that the state of affairs is temporary. It may be that a new generation coming along now will become so expert at studio techniques that they will be able to merge a classical sense of composition with the most timbre-oriented recording values. It may be that a future generation less in thrall to pop records than ours will return to the pop-influenced music of the last 20 years and hear all the wonderful things it had to offer without perceiving as a negative the things it wasn’t trying to do. Whatever the case, I think we need to acknowledge that the sacredness of expectations based on pop music comparisons puts the would-be-pop-influenced composer in a difficult double bind. One can continue writing music that has nothing to do with pop, and resign yourself to endless facile charges of elitism no matter how transparent, pretty, or cogent your music is; or you can cross the line and try to draw on the other music you love listening to, and almost certainly draw yourself into a contest you are going to lose. I’ve become convinced: a pop-classical fusion may indeed be the eventual future of music, but given the way people are conditioned to listen today, there is no chance it will be the immediate future. I admire the people who try, but personally I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.

As part of New Music Box’s series on new-music economics, Vivien Schweitzer does a good job of succinctly summing up the advantages of having a publisher for your music versus not having a publisher. Namely, a publisher will market out your music to specific conductors and administrators who otherwise wouldn’t see it, but orchestras (and this I didn’t realize, but it makes sense) prefer to play music by self-published composers because the score and parts cost so much less. I will add that, as a critic, author, and program annotator, I always find it much easier when I can get a score from the composer. If I have to go through a publisher, the employees there are always as helpful as they can be, but the process is glacially slow, one often has to navigate endless and confusing web sites, and sometimes scores are for rental only and I can’t get what I want. If I had a choice between writing a profile about a self-published composer and one with a publisher, all else being equal, I’d take the self-published composer every time. It’s so much more convenient. I’d long ago decided that the sole function of publishers was to prevent music from being disseminated, and I’m surprised to learn from Ms. Schweitzer’s article that they play any positive role at all.

An excess of spicy food last night got me up extra early this morning, and I ended up where I often end up in the wee hours: Wikipedia. I noticed on my “watch list” that a change had been made to the Minimalism entry, and upon checking, found that the word “chicken” had been unaccountably added to a quote by Tom Johnson. A moment later, I found inserted into the text this line:

i think the music is very boring and to repitive so please get rid of it!!! [sic]

(One concludes the words “too” and “repetitive” were deemed too repetitive as well.) I reverted, and saw that both changes had been made by someone whose computer IP address was 217.179.116.58. Looking up his other activity, I found that he had committed eight acts of vandalism in the “Stem Cell Controversy” entry, and that he had replaced an entire paragraph of Keanu Reeves’s biography with the sentiment, “he is GAY! lololololololololol.”

UPDATE: I note that, pursuant to further adventures, 217.179.116.58 has been blocked by Wikipedia administrators. The block was extended after he worded a request to end the temporary block thusly: “unblock me you fucking twats or il shove a spade up your old wrinkley ass[.]” 217.179.116.58 clearly harbors modernist sympathies, and is not the type likely to interpret musical stasis in terms of cultural relativism.

I’ve linked to articles expressing outrage about the recent decision of the Copyright Royalty Board that threatens to shut down a wide swath of internet radio stations, including my own PostClassic Radio. Just so you know what the other side is saying, I print here a letter a friend sent me that he received from his musicians’ union. It’s a nice piece of propaganda, framing the CRB decision as being entirely motivated to make sure musicians (not corporations, of course) get paid their due. My own comments are bold-faced:

A recent pro-musician decision of the Copyright Royalty Board has sparked a lot of adverse press. Even worse, webcasters and broadcasters have instigated a “grass-roots” campaign urging music fans to complain to Congress about the decision. The purpose of this e-mail is to make sure that musicians are informed about the facts – and to ask you to send your own pro-musician message to your representatives in Washington!

The Background. The Copyright Act requires webcasters and broadcasters to pay royalties when they stream sound recordings on the internet. By law, 50% of the royalties for streaming go to performers. SoundExchange collects the royalties and pays 45% of them directly to individual featured performers. SoundExchange pays 5% (the share set by statute) to the AFM and AFTRA Fund for distribution to session musicians and vocalists. The remaining 50% goes to the sound recording copyright owner – which is usually a record label [interestingly soft-pedaled admission] but in some cases [!] is also the performer.

The Decision. The judges heard 48 days of testimony and reviewed thousands of pages of evidence about the webcasting business and about the businesses of performers and record labels. AFM Vice President Harold Bradley and member Cathy Fink testified about the creative work musicians do in the recording process, and about how important this new income stream is to musicians. President Tom Lee testified about the ways SoundExchange works for musicians. And then the judges carefully considered all they had heard – and got it right. They wrote a careful, 115-page decision that acknowledged the value of musicians’ creative work and the importance of fairly compensating us when businesses [“businesses” – there’s a loaded word that totally misrepresents most internet stations likely to be killed by the ruling] use our product. [“Our” product – whaddya mean “we,” paleface?]

The Webcaster Backlash. Although the webcasters and broadcasters presented a complex and detailed case to the judges – and although the hearing process is one that they asked Congress to create – some don’t like the result and are seeking a Congressional override. This makes no sense. What is worse is that large (and wealthy) webcasters like AOL and Yahoo are hiding behind a few [thousand] small webcasters who complain that as “small businesses,” they can’t afford to pay the royalties [or are making no income at all, doing it as a labor of love or mere means of exposure]. Webcasters made similar complaints the last time rates were set in 2002 – and since then, webcaster revenues overall have jumped from $50 million to $500 million per year. [Tenfold? I’d bet the number of webcasters has increased more than tenfold since 2002, so that’s a meaningless statistic.]

Performers Need to Be Paid for Use of Our Work. Most musicians need to patch together lots of income streams in order survive – including royalties for the use of our recordings. Please let Congress know how important this money is to musicians! Urge your representatives to resist the pressure to override the rates set by the CRB.

There follows a sample letter to be sent to one’s congressperson, hitting most of the same talking points. I think I need hardly point out that PostClassic Radio costs me about $300 a year to run, and that I derive no income from it at all. The composers I play are almost all greatly in need of exposure, and I’ve heard abundant anecdotal evidence of people buying CDs to get what they’ve heard on PostClassic Radio. Shut me down, price Live365 out of my affordable range, and a few hundred composers will suddenly not be heard on internet radio at all, and will get nothing – no exposure, no royalties, no CD sales. Becoming entirely commercial, internet radio will then be forced back into the same deadening lack of variety that radio has suffered in recent years.