The Future of Arts Patronage? All or Nothing!

 thoughts  2 Responses »
Jan 202011
 

J.S. Bach had the Lutheran Church.

Haydn had the Esterhazy family.

Beethoven had Archduke Rudolph.

Bartók, Stravinsky, and Copland had Koussevitzky, Diaghilev, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

People with lots of money, we’re talkin’ Esterhazy money, are not, by and large, spending it on the patronage of classical music the way they might have 250 years ago. There are certainly some who are, and while the NEA is funded less and less each year, there are still a handful of composers (mostly already well-established) that are receiving commissions from individuals and government/non-profit grants. They are, however, the exceptions.

In addition to people like Rich Uncle Pennybags and non-profits, one of the biggest support groups for composers has historically been performers, particularly over the last hundred years or so. Conductor Serge Koussevitzky commissioned Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra; clarinetist Benny Goodman commissioned Copland’s Clarinet Concerto.

The internet has lowered the entry cost of so many industries and other ventures. Why not patronage? In Spring 2010, Facebook ruffled feathers with some new policies about privacy (and a leak of some personal info). Many informed users were worried that Facebook had too much control over the internet and users, and up popped a little startup called Diaspora. Diaspora was working on a new kind of social network to compete with Facebook, and to raise money, they turned to Kickstarter. Kickstarter allows users to pledge support to creative products. It brings together people who are creating niche products with the niches they want to access and influence. Diaspora was able to raise over $200,000 mostly with donations of $5 to $25.

Kickstarter has an interesting all-or-nothing approach to fundraising. When starting a project, you set a goal and a deadline. People pledge various amounts. Different amounts get different rewards. If you reach your goal, backers’ credit cards are charged for their pledges and you get the money. If not, no money changes hands. This makes sense. The Diaspora folks couldn’t have done much with $200, and it would suck to be one of the people who gave part of the $200 just to see nothing come of it.

That got me thinking about my own niche, contemporary concert music. How could this model work for us that are creating music which unfortunately (yet honestly) has a very small audience? Kickstarter could be perfect for arts patronage in the internet age. Commissioning consortia have been around for quite a while, but when was the last time you heard of a commission that you could participate in for twenty-five bucks? (crickets)

So, I’m going to try it. I’m going to use Kickstarter to put together a commissioning consortium for a solo saxophone piece I’ll start working on this summer with Tim Rosenberg. I’ll keep updates on the blog, and on the Kickstarter project page. I’ll have a link to that here when I launch the project. My goal is to raise at least $500 in 90 days. Wish me luck!

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Teaching Philosophy, pt. 2

 thoughts  1 Response »
Nov 292010
 

This is a follow-up to my last post about teaching philosophy statements. That post yielded some solid advice from my friends Patrick Dell (public school choir director) and Matt Schoendorff (instructor at Wayne State University), the latter of whom was kind enough to send me the teaching philosophy he’s been working on and using over the last couple of years.

I had some time to think about my teaching philosophy statement over the Thanksgiving weekend. I basically have no idea what I’m doing with regard to the length or scope or detail or really much of anything with regard to this document. Basically what I’m saying is this: I’d appreciate your thoughts in the comments.

David MacDonald, composer
Teaching Philosophy Statement

Before entering formal music training, we are all used to hearing music and reacting to it on an emotional level. We talk about how music makes us feel. I believe that we all also have the capacity to engage with music intellectually. To put it as simply as possible, this is what I strive to teach students, to think about music, not just feel about it. Thinking about music allows us to talk and write about music in meaningful, objective ways. We can then use those observations to understand why music makes us feel a certain way, or at least what it is about the music that makes us feel that way. This is as important to composers, performers, conductors, educators, and audience members. The goal of any theory course I teach is to give students cognitive tools they can use in any of those pursuits.

To teach that, I try to surround every concept I teach in music theory with thoughtfully selected musical examples. Abstractions, like scales in whole notes or triads in close position, are useful distillations of complex ideas. However, I’ve never lost a class’s attention faster than when I begin and end with abstractions. There are challenges to using real-world musical excerpts. For instance, composers don’t necessarily follow the “rules” exactly all the time. This can cause some consternation in students, but I think it’s worth that small amount of difficulty to present real art in the classroom. It also allows them to develop an appropriately nuanced understanding of music.

When I use examples, I think it is just as important to let them hear the music as it is to look at the score. I am always emphasizing the difference between music, which is made up of sounds, and the score, which is made up of visual symbols on paper. After all, most of the time when we’re experiencing music we don’t have the score in front of us. For example, when I have taught sonata form, I have begun by playing a recording and talking about the sections and cadences as they went by. It is important for students to connect the skills they develop in their written theory classes with those that they develop in their aural skills classes.

I use a broad range of evaluations and assessments, but the ones that I find most valuable and reliable are those that require some creative problem solving. For example, not just writing out a scale, but writing a melody that uses the scale or analyzing pieces that stretch the strict definitions of forms discussed in class. Larger assignments would include small compositions and writing assignments.

The final goal of any theory class is to equip students with the critical thinking skills they need to deal intellectually with music whether or not they have the score in front of them. They won’t always have a conductor or a teacher to explain a piece of music to them. In fact, in many cases, they will have to be the ones doing the explaining. I try to get students to a level of understanding at which they feel comfortable engaging intellectually with the kinds of music they may actually encounter in these situations as they go on to become well-rounded  and thoughtful performers, composers, educators, and listeners.

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Teaching Philosophy, pt. 1

 thoughts  3 Responses »
Nov 172010
 

No, no. Not teaching about philosophy. Philosophy about teaching. As an undergrad at the University of Missouri, most of my friends were music education majors. I saw them go through a lot of assignments about developing a teaching philosophy. These assignments were universally loathed. On the rare occasions they were mentioned in social settings, I gathered that these were multi-page BS-fests full of buzz words and devoid of anything meaningful.

Imagine my reaction when perusing the application requirements for a number of newly posted professorships included some form of “a statement of the applicant’s philosophy of teaching.” Gah! Five effing years of graduate school, ostensibly in preparation for a university teaching position, and nobody ever thought to teach me this?! I’m still not sure if I’m madder that I have to write this extra document, or that none of my professors have done more than acknowledge the existence of such documents. 1

One of the first things I do these days when I find myself in this kind of dilemma is tweet about it, especially when I’m pretty sure some of my friends have been through the same thing. I did this in my usual snarky way. Responses came in pretty quickly from friends who teach music at just about every level from grade school to college. My very good friend and frequent intellectual sparring partner Tim Rosenberg, who has a music education degree and is currently teaching saxophone at Ithaca College, told me I should take this task more seriously. He told me that “[A] teaching philosophy is important and describes why you act the way you do while teaching. Writing them is a clarifying experience.” Normally I’m all about clarity, but people who talk about “clarifying experiences” are usually trying to sell you something herbal. Though, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that he was (as he is on an alarmingly regular basis) completely right. 2 Part of the reason I blog is to clarify my thoughts for myself. As E. M. Forster famously wrote, “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”

Another sure fire helper, after my friends and colleagues, is the all-knowing Google, through which I found this extremely helpful article from the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2003. There are quite a lot of people writing on the web about teaching philosophies, but almost none of them are about higher education. Later that evening, my friend Matt Schoendorff, who also holds a music ed degree and is currently teaching at Wayne State University, was kind enough to send me the document he’s been including in his recent job applications.

So, the more I think about it, the less I’m dreading writing this thing. I’ll continue posting my thoughts as I gather them. Check back in the next few days for a fully(ish)-cooked teaching philosophy. Here’s where I’m starting:

1. This note from Tim:

“Start by outlining, sans buzzwords, about why you teach and why it’s important. Then move to how you teach and why you do it that way.”

2. This excerpt from the Chronicle article I found:

If you’re still feeling overwhelmed by the task at hand, try to focus on concrete questions, as opposed to the abstract question of “What’s my philosophy?” says Mr. Kaplan 3.

“Breaking down that broad question into component parts — for example, What do you believe about teaching? What do you believe about learning? Why? How is that played out in your classroom? How does student identity and background make a difference in how you teach? What do you still struggle with in terms of teaching and student learning? — is often easier,” he says. “Those more concrete questions get you thinking, and then you can decide what you want to expand on.”

Notes:

  1. To be fair to my professors, my research indicates that requiring teaching philosophy statements of university job applicants is a relatively new development. I doubt most of them had to write anything like them when they were applying for their current jobs in higher education. But I”m still mad about it. They should be teaching me about academia as it is, not as it was, right? ↩
  2. Congratulations, Tim, on finishing your document! I can’t wait to read it. ↩
  3. Matt Kaplan of the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan ↩
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Put your money where your mouth is.

 thoughts  No Responses »
Nov 052010
 

<soapbox>

It seems that at least once a week, I see or hear a conversation among composers that goes something like this:

composer 1: Nobody ever comes to our concerts.

composer 2: Tell me about it. I spend months writing a piece. Then, I have to beg performers to practice, rehearse and perform it. I tell everybody I know, put up flyers, and after all that effort, only a dozen people show up to hear the thing. Heck, there are usually more people on the stage than in the audience!

composer 1: Why doesn’t anybody support new music?

There are a lot of reasons people don’t go to recitals or concerts. I understand people are busy. But this Monday night, I went to a composition recital by Matt Karram, a talented undergraduate composer here at MSU. I don’t know how many students are in the composition studio, but it’s at least twenty. At Matt’s recital, I counted no more than five composers (outside of Matt).

How can we expect other people to support new music when we don’t even support each other? It’s simple. We can’t.

</soapbox>

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Great Googly Moogly

 thoughts  4 Responses »
Oct 232010
 

I have a new favorite author and blogger, Jeff Jarvis. My first introduction to Jarvis was watching him as an analyst on one of my favorite “new tv” shows, This Week in Google, on the TWiT network. A couple of weekends ago, I drove from East Lansing, MI to Kansas City, MO and back for a friend’s wedding. On the way back, I listened to the audiobook of Jarvis’s What Would Google Do?. (Get it.You’ll thank me later.) It is instantly clear when reading either his book or his blog, BuzzMachine, that Jarvis “gets” the internet and new media as much as anyone. His book discusses Google’s philosophies about business, customers, publicness, creativity, and community, and how they all might be applied to other institutions.

Jarvis does a really excellent job of distilling some principles of Googliness (one of the many fun, Google-related words he invents) in a way that makes them meaningful while being general enough to apply to a lot of different circumstances. Here are some of my favorites:

  • “Give the people control, and we will use it.”
  • “The link changes everything…Do what you do best and link to the rest.”
  • “If you’re not searchable, you wont be found…Your customers are your ad agency.”
  • The mass market has been (or is being) replaced by the mass of niches.
  • “Atoms are a drag.”

…and, perhaps his most radical proclamation…

  • “Free is a business model.”

My favorite sections of the book, however, are after Jarvis has explained the basic tenets of Googliness. He goes through several hypothetical Googly institutions. Near then end of these is “Google U,” a hypothetical university. Appropriately, Jarvis has made this chapter available as a blog post on his website. He wonders why, in this world of seemingly infinite communications technology, why do students have to be limited to taking classes at a single university? Why can’t they take classes a la carte from programs around the country?


I’m not sure I think this is practical. How do you control the curriculum in such an institution? How do the institutions control their enrollment numbers and standards? I don’t have answers to these questions. However, one thing I do like about the idea is that a degree-holder (would they even have degrees?) would have to be evaluated on something other than the name-brand familiarity of the institutions they attended.

One of my favorite websites seems to be working toward this idea already, and best of all it’s free! You can watch videos of lectures from many courses at top institutions at Academic Earth. However, when you look through the available lectures, you might notice something missing: the arts (now we’re back to my neck of the woods). There are a handful of offerings in creative writing and a course in Roman architecture, but there are no classes in music (not even theory or musicology), and no classes in artistic “practice.” Courses that are so basic to art programs(life drawing or color theory) and music programs (counterpoint and aural skills) seem to defy the model.

I’ve been wracking my brains since reading and listening to this chapter. I really want for the arts not to be an exception to  the Google U model. I really want arts education (and the arts themselves) to flourish in the Google Age. Is it the art that has to change or is it the way its taught? Or, do the arts simply defy our current communications technology? It’s probably a little of both, and of course the combination of the crusty academics and curmudgeonly classical musicians means that music programs will probably be the last parts of their respective universities to make such a change.

Is it possible to start a “free” university-style music school for the internet? I don’t know. Who wants to help me try?

I know there are a LOT of question marks in this blog post. I don’t normally like writing that way, but there are some many questions and so few certainties. If you have any thoughts on the matter, please share away in the comments!

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Out There

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Oct 042010
 

A few weeks ago I went to Flat Black and Circular, a nice little used record store here in East Lansing. I bought an Eric Dolphy album called Out There (Amazon, iTunes), recorded in 1960. I tossed it in my backpack and forgot about it until last week. I had some time to kill before teaching a lab (20th Century Music Theory), so I popped the disc into the classroom’s CD player and pulled out the liner notes. (There are a lot of very thoughtful and creative liner notes from jazz albums of this period.)

Some of my students came in and really dug the music, others came in with a “What the $^&$@ is that crap?” look on their faces. I found a nice paragraph in the liner notes that I decided to share with the students at the beginning of class.

Out There, Eric Dolphy

It would be best to acknowledge, right from the outset, that this is not the most easily grasped jazz album you are ever likely to hear. And it is also appropriate to say that, like many things which require careful attention, it repays that attention with a greater reward than you might get from music that reveals its total character the first time around.

As soon as I finished reading it, one student piped up “I disagree with that completely.” I told him that it was time to consider developing a more mature outlook on art.

In our class this semester, we will be studying music by Hindemith, Bartok, Schoenberg, Carter, Babbitt, and others whose music is not “easily grasped” the first, or even the second or seventh times around. In fact, many people might never grasp it. I do think that music should give the attentive listener some reward the first time, but if it gives you everything the first time, there’s not a whole lot of incentive to listen to it again. One of the things that appeals most to me about great music is that I can hear something new in it even after I think I know it really well.

Last year, I heard the Chicago Symphony under David Robertson perform one of the great “Top 40″ orchestral hits, Dvorak’s New World Symphony. As many times as I’ve heard (and played) that piece, I heard some brilliant counterpoint that evening that I’d never noticed before. The saying goes that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but maybe you can’t be so sure about it even after the first reading.

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The Value of Newness

 thoughts  1 Response »
Sep 252010
 

There are people who collect stamps. There are people who collect baseball cards. There are people who collect books, spoons, coffee mugs, ties, shoes, rocks, and sand. I bet if I can think of a thing, there’s somebody who gets really excited about collecting it in massive quantities. There are even some people who collect things that are less concrete. Some people like to collect anagrams or recipes. Personally, I like cool words (like agathokakological) and university nicknames/mascots (UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs).

Sometimes I joke that I collect hobbies, and it’s probably my most significant collection of all. I think this comes from my passion for learning about new things. Some of them, like music, have stuck around and remain a large part of my life. Others, like the stop-motion animations I used to make with my Dad’s first digital camera, have been left behind in earlier parts of my life. When I think about picking up a new hobby to add to my collection, one of my concerns is the cost. Picking up golf would cost me hundreds of dollars or more, but picking up disc golf (as I did a few years back) only cost about ten or fifteen bucks. What, then, is the value of collecting these hobbies?

The wide variety of hobbies gets me thinking about things differently, like having your whole music library on shuffle. Listening to Bartok, then Ellington, then Berio, then the Beatles will cause you to think about Bartok, Ellington, Berio, and the Beatles differently.

Double Shadow

One of the most recent hobbies added to my collection was art. A couple of years ago, I picked up a basic acrylic paint set to occupy the hours not taken up by class. Never having taken an art class, I really didn’t know what I was getting into. Everything I was doing was an experiment. I learned what kinds of paper held the paint effectively, how paints behaved differently on canvases, and what interesting things I could mix into the paints to create different textures. It was just as exciting to me as learning about the basics of composition, instrumentation, and chord voicings; or learning about basic concepts in electronics or literature. Buried so mind-numbingly deep in studying music, I had forgotten that feeling of discovery, and painting helped me regain it.

I think my friend Matt Schoendorff might say the same thing about quantum physics. He became so enamored of the subject that he wrote as his doctoral dissertation a set of character pieces about quantum particles for wind band.

All too often, fear keeps us from trying new things. Fear of failure may be reasonable in, say, trying a Wild West-type pistols-at-dawn duel for the first time. But most of the time, trying something new isn’t as risky as that. Create something new, I think you’ll find that it’s worth it.

Most recently, I’ve tried producing a film and this.

What new things have you tried recently? How have they changed the way you think about other parts of your life?

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Old Composers are People Too

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Sep 172010
 

I don’t like a lot of old music. Mozart, Brahms, et al. don’t really whet my whistle, tickle my fancy, float my boat, or light my fire. Having said that, I’ve always had a bit of a thing for Bach. I think counterpoint is just about the coolest dang thing any musician ever thought of, and nobody’s ever done it better than Johann. That’s why I was so excited when I read about Don Freund (composer and professor at Indiana University) putting a series of lectures on YouTube called “Composition Lessons from J. S. Bach.”

They seem to be geared toward an audience that may not have a thorough technical understanding of the music already, but there is a lot of compelling information in them. Freund runs through a significant chunk of the first book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, pointing out anything that he finds particularly interesting. That’s really a lot of what composers do when they listen to music, though. “Hey that sounds neat. I’ll take some of that.” Here’s a couple of the videos Freund has posted: part of the introduction, and part of the discussion of the C-sharp minor fugue. I encourage you to check out more of them on his YouTube channel.

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Technology Creates a Performance Tailored to Each Viewer

 news, thoughts  No Responses »
Sep 062010
 

My parents are both scientists. They taught me to value science, curiosity, and learning. To their chagrin, I went into music. However, I never lost my love for science, and in particular, technology. Many people assume that art and artists don’t really go with technology, but there are some people who do brilliant work bringing the two together.

One new web technology I’m particularly excited about is HTML5. It’s going to change the web fundamentally, and it will do away with proprietary plugins (like Adobe’s Flash) and codecs. HTML5 is an open standard currently supported by Google’s Chrome browser and Apple’s Safari, with Firefox and Internet Explorer soon to follow. With tech development becoming an increasingly litigious affair, the only way to move forward together (with everyone in the world) is open standards and open source.

…which brings me to Arcade Fire. They recently released a new video for their song “We Used to Wait.” The video, which is called “The Wilderness Downtown,” did not debut on MTV or VH1, or even YouTube. It’s on it’s own HTML5 site. There, you enter the address of your childhood home, and the music video experience is tailored to you. As the song plays, you’ll see a music video experience that includes images from your own neighborhood pulled from Google’s vast geographical image database. This is all the brainchild of director Chris Milk, and it would not be possible without the open standard of HTML5, Google’s open API’s, and people who can think creatively about both technology and art!

Go there now, but make sure you’re using Chrome (or Safari, but seriously, use Chrome).

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Creative Call for Scores

 thoughts  No Responses »
Sep 022010
 

Regular readers of this blog might be shocked to see it updated twice in one week, which is probably why I don’t have any regular readers (except you, Mom). Anyway, I was just perusing the new listings in the American Music Center Opportunity Update and came across a call for scores that was so unlike any of the others that it bears repeating. I do not know these people, and they did not ask me to post their call, but it makes me want to write them a piece…bad.

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.

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