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.

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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?

first system of alone together

I just sent an email to my Kickstarter backers with a PDF of the score, and hard copies are going in the mail today. Right after I finished sending the PDF out, I checked my usual web comics and found this gem on Married to the Sea:

Married to the Sea, 5 March 2012

This was today’s comic! I swear I didn’t plan that.

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.

See what I mean?

[source: YouTube via The Rest is Noise]

[http://www.mattmontag.com/smasher/]

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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: