thoughts » David MacDonald, composer

Can we ease up on Emily White a little bit?

Jun 242012

This past week, my Google Reader exploded.

Last Saturday, an unsuspecting Emily White posted a piece called “I Never Owned Any Music To Begin With” on NPR’s All Songs Considered Blog. In it, she describes herself as a music lover with a substantial library of digital music. However, Ms. White also claims to have only purchased a handful of recordings in her life.

I am an avid music listener, concertgoer, and college radio DJ. My world is music-centric. I’ve only bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds 11,000 songs.

She makes it clear that only a small handful of this collection was downloaded illegally with Kazaa when she was in the fifth grade. (That makes me feel old.) Most of this was acquired by swapping with friends and family as well as ripped from the CD collection at her college radio station.

As you might imagine, legions of music bloggers were shocked and appalled by this statement—or at the very least did an excellent job of feigning their righteous indignation. Perhaps the most viral of these responses was written by David Lowery of The Trichordist. Mr. Lowery’s 4,000-word response was condescending ¹ and involved a fair number of straw men. He frequently references the “Free Culture” movement, which he clearly does not understand. He also displays a startling lack of understanding of the way the web works by bringing Google, Verizon, and AT&T into the same category of piracy-mongers as Megaupload and The Pirate Bay. The more of Mr. Lowery’s article I read, the less impressed I was by his reasoning, but his heart is in the right place. We absolutely have an obligation to support the artists making the music we love and the ecosystem that allows them to make it. Buying CDs are only one of the many ways that we can support creativity.

In fact, Emily White wrote as much in her own post:

I’ve come to realize the gravity of what file-sharing means to the musicians I love. I can’t support them with concert tickets and T-shirts alone. But I honestly don’t think my peers and I will ever pay for albums. I do think we will pay for convenience.

People pay for things if they are convenient and reasonably priced. Piracy isn’t stealing music from anybody, and there’s no study that can prove that the industry is harmed by piracy because there’s no evidence that an illegally downloaded recording represents a lost sale. In fact, in Switzerland where “piracy” is legal, a study from this past December shows that piracy may actually be good for the entertainment industry.

Swiss citizens over 15 years old download pirated music, movies and games from the Internet. However, these people don’t spend less money as a result because the budgets they reserve for entertainment are fairly constant. This means that downloading is mostly complementary.

The other side of piracy, based on the Dutch study, is that downloaders are reported to be more frequent visitors to concerts, and game downloaders actually bought more games than those who didn’t. And in the music industry, lesser-know bands profit most from the sampling effect of file-sharing.

With every new disruptive technology there are winners and losers. And every time, the disruptees who are the slowest to change are the ones that lose, and the ones that fight hardest against the technology. Music streaming services represent the latest disruptive technology. Emily White and her generation love them. They will continue to “own” less and less music while consuming (and paying for) more and more of it. David Lowery vilifies these services in his article, and he certainly has a good reason. Spotify does not pay up-and-coming artists fairly compared to superstars. Despite these streaming services, however, people will continue to purchase recordings (though probably more and more digital copies) and concert tickets. And in fact, these lesser-known bands that get the lowest direct revenue from Spotify are the ones getting the biggest indirect benefits. The future of music involves many fewer superstars and many more journeymen and part-timers. That’s ok. Buggy-whip makers ² and blacksmiths aren’t doing so hot anymore either.

I think of piracy as the growing pains of digital distribution. Today, I consume music from the iTunes, Amazon, and Google digital music stores; I stream music on Spotify; I watch movies and TV on Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu; and on the rare occasion that I play a video game, I buy it as a digital download from Steam. None of these would exist if piracy hadn’t come first. Emily White is 20. She’s an intern at NPR. I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that she isn’t getting paid for that. In a few years, she’ll be able to spend money to support the artists she cares about, and it has taken a little bit of piracy to figure out who those people are. When she says that she doesn’t think her peers will ever pay for albums, I don’t think she means that they will never support artists.

Notes:

“Now, having said all that, I also deeply empathize with your generation. You have grown up in a time when technological and commercial interests are attempting to change our principles and morality.” ↩
That may not be a real thing. ↩

My Baby’s All Growed Up

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Mar 162012

Some composers get really nervous leading up to a premiere. I’ve never been that kind of composer. One of the great benefits of being a composer is that I don’t have to stress over performances. At the point that I’m sitting in the hall to hear the piece, there is literally nothing I can do that will affect the outcome of the performance. This realization is, I suppose, the cause of stress in other composers. I find this unproductive at best.

Having said all that, I’m a little nervous about a premiere of mine that’s happening tomorrow. “Why?” you might ask. This is one of the first times I’ve ever had a work premiered that I wasn’t attending and that I’ve never actually heard played in person. I have great faith in my friend Tim Rosenberg who is giving the premiere tomorrow in Tempe, Arizona. But Tim has been living in New York and Florida since we started this project. In fact, I don’t think I’ve even seen Tim in person for over a year. I’ve heard him play over Skype, and we’ve talked about the piece a lot, but it’s not the same.

Writing a piece and handing it off to a performer has often been compared to raising a child and sending it out into the world. I feel like I’ve driven my toddler to the airport, dropped him off at baggage check-in, handed him a $50 bill, and wished him the best of luck. I’m just hoping he makes it to wherever it is he’s going.

—

SIDE NOTE: Tim just redesigned his website. It’s both beautifully designed and humorously written. This is the kind of site all professional musicians should have. The virtuoso you can have a beer (or a bourbon) with. Click this link to go there. It will make his analytics go up, and that makes everybody feel good, right?

The Golijov Problem

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Feb 242012

About a week ago, I first read a story about a new Golijov piece that a couple of audience members believed had been plagiarized. My first thought was “No way. Golijov is a serious composer. He works with other people’s material in a kind of collage, but he wouldn’t be so silly as to blatantly rip off another composer.”

I’m beginning to sing a different tune. Especially now that I’ve heard the two pieces (which incidentally, do not sing different tunes). To demonstrate the similarities between these two compositions, I made a video with recordings I could find on the web. ¹

Can this be a “-gate” now? Lots of smart people have weighed in on this already, notably Alex Ross, Anne Midgette, and Rob Deemer.

My thoughts:

The piece is most definitely a rip-off. Golijov claims he cleared it with the original composer, but the original composer didn’t get any credit in the program, and he ain’t gettin’ paid by ASCAP/BMI when the work gets performed. Also, this was a large commission. According to one report, 35 orchestras each paid between $1,500 and $4,500 to join the consortium. Even if they all paid the lower amount, Golijov would have received more to write that piece than I made teaching college courses last year. They paid for something original, not an arrangement. They got an arrangement.

I would be remiss if I did not add this one last thing: Sidereus is a piece of junk! My first reaction when I listened to the piece (before hearing the Ward-Bergeman) was to wonder if the music I was hearing was really distinctive enough to be considered a copy. It’s boring. It goes nowhere in the sub-4-minute original work, and it doesn’t go any further when Golijov spins it out (mostly through repetition) to 9 minutes.

Notes:

Osvaldo Golijov: Sidereus, performed by the New England Conservatory Philharmonia, conducted by Mei-Ann Chen.

Michael Ward-Bergeman: Berbeich, performed by the composer. (Yeah, that’s right. MySpace.) ↩

The Future of Course Materials, part 1

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Jan 202012

I know, I haven’t blogged since November. Bad, bad blogger. I also apologize for blogging mostly about teaching and less about music recently. That trend will continue below, but I promise to write about some music in the coming weeks.

photo by brewbooks

A recent discussion with some colleagues at Grand Valley State has recently prompted me to wonder whether textbooks are still necessary for certain subjects (if not all of them). Each semester on the first day of classes, I go over a syllabus with my students. In that syllabus, there is usually at least one textbook and a CD that my students are required to purchase. I have actually had a student come up to me after the first class and say “I’m getting paid on Friday and then two Fridays after that. I can only afford to buy one of the course materials with each paycheck. Which one should I get first?” The web can and should solve this problem. Could a carefully cultivated website with a curated list of links and thoughtful commentary replace a textbook? Could a YouTube playlist and embedded videos in that site replace academic recording anthologies?

I’m going to take a few blog posts and discuss my thoughts on these questions. In this first post, I’d like to examine the virtues of the current system of textbook publishers. These are some of the things that I think a new, technology-based solution should maintain. Please share your thoughts below.

1) Books and CDs can be accessed anywhere at any time.

This is so obvious that it may be easy to overlook when examining eBooks and the web. Books do not require any other thing to use. They don’t require any particular computer software, an internet connection, or even power. CDs require a CD player and power, but a portable CD player and batteries can be had for less than $30 at the local WalMart (or Amazon). While this standard accessibility and compatibility isn’t completely achievable with digital alternatives, we need to get as close to it as we can..

2) Books and CDs are persistent.

If a student likes a course or finds it particularly useful (Hey, it could happen!), she has the option of keeping the course materials as a reference. She did not purchase a temporary license to content, but physical goods. If she doesn’t like the book, she can recover some of its purchase price by reselling it. The CD may be replaced by another audio format, but the student can always keep a local digital copy on her computer that is hers forever. Since she has a local copy of both the CD and the book, they can’t be changed or taken away by anyone else. Any digital alternative should be as portable as possible.

3) Books have a single scholarly viewpoint.

This is perhaps the single greatest advantage to the current system of textbooks. There is such an overwhelming quantity of knowledge in the world, and a good textbook author filters and organizes it with skill and care. Explaining complex subjects often requires initial simplification, long-running analogies, selective sequential presentation, and an internal consistency that may not reflect the use of this knowledge “in the wild.” Digital course materials must be more than the results of a Google search on the topic. Importantly, they still require the insightful input of scholars.

4) Books are written by other people.

Admittedly, this is not always a benefit. I have blogged previously about my disagreements with various textbook authors. Having said that, the major benefit of using somebody else’s textbook is that I don’t have to spend the time curating my own. Digital materials could be infinitely customizable, but they should not require infinite customization.

5) Books compensate authors.

Publishers pay authors to write textbooks. They edit, typeset, produce, market, and distribute them. It is prohibitively difficult to “pirate” a physical book. I do not think we should make it prohibitively difficult to copy and share digital course materials. The music industry has already proven to us that this is technologically impossible. In future postings, I will examine how we might generate enough revenue to compensate scholars for their contributions to digital course materials.

6) Books have cultural authority.

This is perhaps the steepest hurdle that digital materials have to climb. In the half-millennium since Gutenberg, books have become thought of as authoritative. Information “printed in black and white” is, for better or worse, thought of more highly than information gleaned on the web. Anyone can publish on the web, and readers are right to be skeptical of a medium with no barrier for entry. Academia is notoriously slow to change, and as new and innovative course materials take forms that gradually deviate more and more from Gutenberg’s bible, these new materials will have to work harder and harder to prove their reliability and trustworthiness.

I will continue posting about the future of course materials, discussing the ways new media might co-opt some of these benefits of books, how it might improve upon books, and how we might begin to create this new generation of educational content.

In the meanwhile, please share your thoughts in the comments. This is a work in progress. I am examining this concept because I am interested in trying to build these new materials. If this is a project you would be interested in (either contributing to or using), please email me or find me on Twitter.

Reliable Sources

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Nov 072011

So, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m a geek. I probably spend more time thinking about the web than most people. I probably spend a lot more time thinking about the web than most of my students. This can lead to problems when I say things like, “Sure, use as many web sources in your research project as you’d like. Just use your best judgement in evaluating what would make a credible source.”

In my MUS 218 World Music classes today, we talked about how to determine whether a web page might be reliable enough to be cited in a research paper. Here’s my presentation (Google Docs presentations). I’m publishing it here in part because someone might find it useful. However, I’m mostly sharing this with the world because I know there are lots of people who have spent more time thinking about this stuff than I have, and I’m hoping they might be willing to help me refine it. Please let me know what you think in the comments!

(PS – I know the GDocs embedded version chops off a little bit of the right side of each slide. Go fullscreen to fix it if you like.)

Steve Martin meets Bartók

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Sep 172011

Drew McManus of Adaptistration posted a hilarious video excerpt this week from a Steve Martin comedy special, Steve Martin’s Best Show Ever (1981). In the sketch, the brilliant and talented Martin struggles to find a way to incorporate a performance of a Bartók string quartet into his comedy special. Hilarity ensues.

from Adaptistration:

If you take anything away from that clip, I hope it’s this: we’ll be better off with relevancy when we stop trying so hard and just learn how to laugh at ourselves.

Introducing Ritual

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Sep 152011

I ask my Music 100 ¹ students to attend one concert during the semester and write a written response. I’m sure there will be some interesting responses, but that’s a topic for another post. In preparing my students for this assignment, I asked them to read an excerpt from Jonathan Bellman’s A Short Guide to Writing About Music on reviews. I also gave them some links to recent NY Times classical music reviews. The last thing I did was explain the ritual that is Orchestra Concert. My explanation when something like this:

While the audience is finding their seats, the members of the orchestra will gradually find their seats on the stage. They will be playing and warming up during this time. When the lights go out, the hall will get quiet. The concertmaster ² will come out. Despite the fact that he or she has yet to do anything at all, the audience will applaud, and the concertmaster will bow. The concertmaster will turn his or her back to the audience. The oboe will play a note, and the ensemble will join. This may be repeated. Then, the conductor will come out and receive the same treatment as the concert master. He or she ³ will then begin the concert.

At this point, I was unsure of how to proceed. I think that in general, not clapping between movements is kind of dumb and arbitrary. Do I tell them the custom and perpetuate it? Do I tell them to be sure to clap despite the disapproving stares they will inevitably get? Or do I tell them nothing about this custom and let the chips fall where they may? My cop-out was something along the lines of “I think this custom is kind of arbitrary, and it certainly isn’t how Mozart and Beethoven heard their music performed. However, it’s important to me that you feel comfortable attending as many concerts as you want to.”

Did I do the right thing here? What would you/have you told your friends and students attending an Orchestra Concert for the first time.

Notes:

Introduction to Music Literature, AKA Music Appreciation ↩
We’d just finished talking about sections of the orchestra and what the concertmaster does. ↩
Though in all likelihood, he. ↩

Melody is the pretty part.

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Sep 072011

And now it’s time for another installment of our sporadic series “Sh*t My Texbook Says.” ¹

Let me share with you the first paragraph of Dr. Wright’s excellent essay ~~“Understanding Poetry”~~ on melody:

A melody, simply put, is the tune. It’s the part we sing along with, the part we like and are willing to listen to again and again. TV pitchmen try to entice us to buy a CD set of “The Fifty All-Time Greatest Melodies,” but not a similar collection of rhythms or harmonies. Rhythm and harmony are merely supporting actors; melody is the star. The more the melody shines, the more beautiful is the music.

Had I not been sitting in a public place when I read this, I may have thrown the book across the room. First off, saying that the melody is the tune is completely useless. They are synonyms, and it’s important for students to know that the words are more-or-less interchangeable. However, if we’re trying to teach students to listen thoughtfully and make empirical observations about music, we’re going to need a better tool.

Second, rhythm cannot be separated from melody. We like to say that melody is a sequence of pitches. That’s a nifty saying, but it is most certainly not true. It isn’t just the order of the pitches that defines a melody, it’s also the rhythm in which those pitches occur. Rhythm is also more fundamental to the way we perceive sounds. You cannot hear a pitch without it occurring in time (rhythm), but you can definitely hear a rhythm without a definite pitch. (Take a moment here to clap a clave rhythm for yourself. You’ll feel better. I promise.)

Finally, Dr. Craig-M-Wright-PhD’s last sentence might as well end “…and therefore is better and more valuable than music that does not emphasize melody, but that stuff’s not really music anyway, right?”

Reading this book always reminds me of this:

Notes:

The textbook in question is Listening to Music by Dr. Craig M. Wright, Ph.D. ↩

Cut the Magic

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Aug 262011

I’m teaching a new (to me) class this semester, Introduction to Music Literature, AKA Music Appreciation. The textbook we’re using (not my pick) is Craig Wright’s Listening to Music. Let me share a brief quote with you from the first page of Chapter 1:

Want proof of the allure of music? Next time you’re riding on a bus, a train, or the subway, look around and you’ll find that about twice as many people are listening to music as are reading. This is true pretty much everywhere around the developed world. But why does music have such universal appeal? Simply said, music has power.

First of all, if this were Wikipedia, I’d log in and put a [citation needed] after that glaring statistic. “4 out of 5 dentists” works great in a toothpaste ad, but I think it’s ok to expect more out of academic writing than a 15-second spot on local television.

More importantly, can we ditch this “music is magic” stuff? Yes, music is great. I like it. I’ve spent a lot of time studying it, and I plan to spend a lot more. However, making it into this ethereal, supernatural entity makes it almost impossible to having a meaningful discussion about. The people on the subway aren’t listening to music; they’re just letting music fill in the space around them because it’s preferable to whatever other sounds (or lack thereof) are naturally there. As I see it, my job as a music appreciation teacher is to demonstrate to my students that actual listening requires something more akin to the attention and engagement of reading a book or newspaper. That, dear reader, is music appreciation.

Orwell Corollary

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Jul 092011

I happened to be reading a book by Brian Christian called The Most Human Human ¹, which deals a lot with human language, when I wrote that last blog post/rant about the way musicians talk and write about music. In the book, Christian cites a George Orwell essay called Politics and the English Language. I happen to like Orwell, so I checked it out. I found a couple of passages that I thought related to my last post so I thought I’d share.

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Orwell is demonstrating how “ugly and inaccurate” language affects politics, but I think it affects the arts as well. By writing thoughtlessly about music, our language becomes less meaningful. Without meaningful language to describe music, we will conceive and thus create thoughtless music. Orwell posits that this kind of writing “consists less and less of WORDS chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of PHRASES tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.” (emphasis in original)

He gives five examples of what he calls typical political writing and then lists several common shortfalls demonstrated in the examples. Two of them, “pretentious diction” and “meaningless words” are my biggest pet peeves in arts writing. I won’t copy them here; you can check out the essay for yourself. The underlying issue is that people are just putting these word-Legos together because they fist, not because they make a worthwhile thought.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing, is that it is easy. It is easier–even quicker, once you have the habit–to say IN MY OPINION IT IS A NOT UNJUSTIFIABLE ASSUMPTION THAT than to say I THINK.

See! George agrees with me!

Notes:

The Most Human Human is about an annual computer science competition called the Loebner Prize, in which software developers compete in the Turing Test. Alan Turing proposed the test in 1950 as a standard for evaluating a computer’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior by conversing with a human. Christian discusses what the research involved in developing these chat bots tells us about what it means to be human. ↩

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