No Deadline
Anti-Social Music—Call for Scores

If Anti-Social Music (ASM) digs it, they’ll play it. Several times, even. ASM does two shows of premieres every year, so they’ll get to it. And then they’ll keep it in rotation for their repertory shows. They pay – not much, but not nothing either. Eligibility/Guidelines: And it’s gotta gotta gotta be a world-premiere. ASM doesn’t have a core ensemble, per se. Their writ as an organization is that if the composer wants something specific, they’ll find a way to provide it. However, that said, ASM has certain instrumentations that are markedly easier for them to provide than others; and if you write for some combination of the following, it’s easier for ASM to produce and certainly more likely to stay in rotation: sax(cl), vc(trb), vln, acc, pno, trb, fl, gtr, Sop.

Submission Materials: ASM now accepts electronic submissions only. No more packages. It’s cheaper for you, and ASM moves around too much. So please email ASM with the following: 1) The score(s) you’d like ASM to consider, as a PDF. 2) One or two recordings (and scores) of previous stuff you’ve done. Streaming links are fine. If you send your website, Bandcamp, or MySpace address, please recommend what ASM should listen to. 3) Tell us the last good book, article, porn mag, etc. you read and what was so great about it. 4) One of the following: a haiku about why you compose, a drawing or picture about why you compose, a short mix tape/CD of your influences, or a brief letter of recommendation from a nonmusical family member or friend that talks about your non-composing interests and strengths as a person. To get an idea of what ASM has done in the past, visit their website below. AMS promises to listen to and look at everything they get. ASM does not promise to be entirely sober when they do so. And they’ll let you know even if they’re not going to play it. ASM looks forward to meeting you.

Anti-Social Music (No Mailing Address Provided)
Phone: (Not Provided)
Email: antisocialmusic@gmail.com
Website: www.antisocialmusic.org

Composers should be tripping over themselves to write for people like this.

“One of the most serious crimes in our musical community is that of choral directors photocopying the music of living composers in order to illegally perform their music…It is time for singers to report these atrocities!”

“Can we establish some sort of collective to reward whistle blowers?”

“Stealing is stealing. Don’t rationalize it.”

“However, a college or university choral director who photocopies choral parts that are not public domain—and whose choristers know that he does it—he or she is not only breaking the law, but is setting a bad moral and musical example for the singers who respect him or her. Those choral directors ARE evil people!”

First, allow me to say this: piracy, whatever you think of it, is not stealing. Intellectual property law professor Lawrence Lessig ¹ points out an important distinction in his book Free Culture. If I steal a score from the music store, that’s a score the store paid for and that they no longer have to sell. However, if I check a score out of the library and make a photocopy, that isn’t depriving anyone of a sale. If I could afford to buy the score, I probably would have. My copying of the score does not represent a lost sale to a music store, a publisher, a distributor, or (most importantly) a composer.

In the SCI discussion, church and school choir conductors  are the chief villains. Churches and schools (particularly public schools) are not exactly known the world over for their bulging arts budgets. The composers taking issue with these performers seem to think that they could put their kids through college if only these horrible, cheapskate conductors would put their money where their batons are and do the “right” thing. WRONG! The options are not photocopying your music on the one hand and purchasing it on the other; the options are photocopying your music and NOT PERFORMING IT AT ALL!

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather hear an “illicit” performance of a contemporary work than a legal performance of a public domain work by Mozart or Scarlatti. I’ve sold my music, and I will hopefully continue to do so. But don’t think for a second that I would tell somebody not to copy my work. Steal my music!

Got any thoughts on intellectual property? I knew you would. Feel free to have your voice heard in the comments.

We met at 7pm on a Friday in Detroit and were assigned a genre (Sci Fi), a character (Jason/Janice Strawberry, realtor), a prop (an award), and a line of dialogue (“Take your time.”). All of these things had to be included in a final film that we turned in at 7pm the following Sunday.

It was a pretty crazy 48 hours. I was the producer, and my great friend and frequent creative collaborator Sam Merciers was the director. I would guess that we each got about 7 hours of sleep over the whole weekend, but it was completely worth it. I had more fun than just about anything else I’ve done all summer long. I experienced some of the same satisfaction I experience as a performer when a lot of hard work and preparation comes to fruition. There was also the exhilaration of improvisation from being asked spontaneously create something that is at once artistic and appropriate and technically sound.

In the end, I am extremely proud of what we created, especially considering we had never made a film before on any schedule. We got to see it on the big screen (or at least a big screen) at the Main Art Theater in Royal Oak, MI along with an audience of around 500 people. The experience reminded me forcibly of the feeling I get at the premiere of a new piece I’ve written. I hope it goes well, but it might completely bomb, and worst of all, it’s completely out of my control at that point.

For your consideration: Download.

Tonight, we’re going back down to Detroit for the awards presentation. I’ll be sure to post back here with the results.

Here are a few pictures of us during the production:

If we deploy enough gear, we almost look like we know what we're doing. We didn't really have a compelling plot reason for shooting at SCENE, but Tim Lane was kind enough to give us permission and the place and the art just looks so dang cool, we couldn't pass it up.

Emiliano and Matt (left) are composing and recording the score. Ben (top right) is editing the audio recorded on set. Corrina (bottom right) is working on a logo graphic for the credits.

]]> http://davidmacdonaldmusic.com/be-creative-now/feed 1 http://davidmacdonaldmusic.com/das-ist-gut-ja http://davidmacdonaldmusic.com/das-ist-gut-ja#comments Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:29:48 +0000 David MacDonald http://davidmacdonaldmusic.com/?p=183 [...]]]> I’m pretty sure that’s German.

Sometimes, I like to Google the titles of my pieces in the hopes that I will find that they have been programmed by performers that I don’t know. It’s a bit silly, and I’ve not really found that many, but hope springs eternal (or something like that). I was doing just such a search yesterday when I came upon this. It’s a Wikipedia article about me.

The article is in what I can only surmise is perfect German. I have no idea who wrote it, and I don’t think I know of any Germans who have played or been involved in my music. Most vexingly, there is no corresponding article in the English Wikipedia.

Apparently, I’m huge in Germany. Add that to the list of things I have in common with David Hasselhoff.

He separated the audience into two groups for each piece: a group who had heard the work before and a group who hadn’t. The latter group he liked to call “the innocents,” and the masterclass mostly took the form of a focus group discussion. After each piece, Corigliano asked, “What did you hear?” He wasn’t interested in what anybody liked or didn’t like. He wanted their empirical observations about the materials, their development, and the form. It was a nice little experiment that proved one of the things that Dr. Lorenz has told me before: anytime you feel like you’re really beating the audience over the head with an idea, you’re only beginning to make it clear.”

Toward the end of the observation discussion for each piece, he allowed himself to slip into a few opinions. He told me the disintegrating ending of my quartet was “really quite lovely” and that it was a “great piece.” Not much to snip out and put on a website or anything, but I’ll take it.

It is right that the historian should indicate the summits of achievement in art (the poetry, architecture, and sculpture of ancient Greece, sixteenth- and eighteenth-century music, Renaissance painting, etc.); but in a sense this is of little use to us. The claims of life are stronger than the sublimest art; and even were we to agree that we had achieved the best and most beautiful it is possible to achieve, we should be impelled in the end, thirsting as we do more for life and experience than for perfection, to cry out: ‘Give us something else; give us something new; for Heaven’s sake give us something bad, so long as we feel we are alive and active and not just passive admirers of tradition!’

-Carl Nielsen

It’s a tough question, and it’s one that I know a lot of composers deal with, though not one we often talk about. I’m a one-thing-at-a-time kind of person. That’s bad, because it means if I get side-tracked by one of these “next projects,” I put off my main project and it loses momentum. There are some people that can successfully work on two pieces at once, but I’m not among them, and I think most of the composers I know would say the same thing. This can cause some problems. One of the most frustrating is that working on large-scale projects means that you can’t take on any new projects for a long time. Right now, I’m working on my dissertation. By the time I finish it, I’ll have been working on it for at least a year and a half. The worst part is when somebody says, “Hey, we should work on a piece. I want you to write something for me.” This doesn’t happen very often, and when it does and I can’t act, it’s pretty maddening. I have to tell them to come back in a year and ask me again.

The good thing about the one-piece-at-a-time policy is the moment I get the new idea. Nothing gets me more excited about finishing the piece I’m working on than the allure of diving into a new one. (Admittedly, the diving in can be painful, but in a hurts-so-good kind of way.) I know some composers that keep a written queue of pieces they want to write. I keep a mental list. Sometimes I bump things up and down the queue. I’ve been meaning to work on a one-act chamber opera for the better part of 5 years. But when things start to stagnate, it always helps me to start thinking of that next big thing.