Posts by brian
Ditty a Day #12: What Our Garden Grew
Hi All, Brian here filling in for the illustrious JT. Here’s a little something I whipped (say whip, say cool whip, now say whip…) up yesterday. Ah, the Garden State!
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
The Sense of Musical Innovation
Greetings from the trenches of the classical guitar world! This week your intrepid reporter is in search of some mad guitar skillz at the 20th incarnation of the National Guitar Workshop Classical Guitar Summit in lovely New Milford, CT. In fact, I’m preparing this dispatch while seated at the front window of the charming Bank Street Coffee House in that same city. The coffee is excellent; it’s a highly recommended stop if you’re ever here in New Milford. In any case, I’ll spare you the guitar shop talk and poetic waxing about the finest of instruments (do head on over to my usual haunt if you do want to suffer in that particular fashion, though), and instead hip you to something every musician or music lover should check out.
The back story: One of the courses I’m taking here at the festival is called “The Sense of Sound” and it’s taught by the encyclopedically brilliant, musically unparalleled, and astoundingly inspiring Julian Gray, who also happens to be my teacher down at Peabody (you should be very jealous). The course is meant as an examination of the two meanings of the word “sense” and an exploration of how the two possible understandings of the phrase “the sense of sound” affect music making. In other words, answering the questions ”how does one make sense of music, and how does a performer go about expressing that sense to a listener?” and “how do all of a performer’s senses work together to produce musical sound?” Today Julian pointed out that when some individuals set out to make sense of music their genius, or their curiosity, or whatever else leads them to discover something that had never existed before — that new styles are forged only when a new understanding of musical grammar or emotional content is reached. To prove his point he played two recordings of the same cornet player, one Louis Armstrong, on either side of his discovery of jazz. The first, from I think 1931, smacks of the typical, it could be any dixieland trumpeter tooting out a bugle call. The second, however, from 1933, is a revelation. It swings, it groves, there’s breath in sound of some notes, and pitches swirl in an intoxicating stew of heartfelt emotion. It’s also blatantly clear that the playing is Armstrong’s. It could be no one else. What’s incredible, though, is that the arpeggio of the bugle call still looms large. The basic musical material is exactly the same. What’s different truly is that Armstrong understanding of what that bugle call is and means. He truly birthed jazz by making sense of the arpeggio in a new and unprecedented way.
Thinking about musical innovation in this way is, I think, eye opening. We’ve had the same 12 notes for more or less 800 or so years, and the system of organizing them that still predominates both popular and “classical” music we’ve had for about 400. But just think for a second about the range of styles, both personal and collective, that have come and gone and come back again in that time. Think about how much grew out of so little. Words don’t quite do justice to this concept, so go out and grab an Armstrong collection and compare early and later stuff(seriously, do it, don’t just look at me like I’m crazy). Check out the world of difference between the two — he’s playing the same notes, but man does he make sense out of them in wildly divergent ways.
Sailing
Without divulging too much about the present whereabouts of this page’s usual wordsmith, I’ll tell you that he’s presently enjoying the company of his extended family while afloat on some sort of raft or sailboat.
Meanwhile, I’ll be enduring the gathering of mine while crammed in to my parent’s backyard today. Oh how suffering enjoys parallels. Consequently, I’m short on time for writing today, so here’s something to keep you occupied.
No, sir, we don’t sell books here
Something occurred to me while picking up a copy of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being at my local Barnes and Noble Booksellers yesterday: Metalica are a bunch of whiney old rockers who’ve totally missed the boat when it comes to the changing face of the music industry. Don’t look at me with that face — this was a major breakthrough for me. Let me explain.
A few months ago JT turned me on to Andrew Dubber and his incredible blog New Music Strategies, where among all sorts of other wisdom, Dubber derides the 30-second promotional clip and instead encourages artists to give whole entire songs, hell, why not whole catalogues, away for free. The model by which musicians do business, he explains, is changing, as it has many times before. Bach worked under a patronage model, Beethoven the live performance model, Brahms the print sales model, and the Beatles the record model. What, with the entrance of the internet in to the marked, we’ve been experiencing in the past decade or so has been the transition to the relationship model, wherein artists no longer sell recordings, but instead relationships and connections. The dawn of Web 2.0 — social networking sites like Facebook, blogs like this one, YouTube, del.icio.us, Wikipedia, and other hyperlinked, user-content populated internet real estate — has confirmed this change, as the web has morphed from something like a digital library and shopping mall in to an environment where people come to interact and exchange information. To cut it in this environment, Dubber says, artists need to make personal connections with their fans and help their fans forge personal relationships with one another. The way we musicians do this, obviously, is through our music. By giving it away.
Now, I admit, I used to despise file sharing. As much as I thought Lars and the Metalica gang were shooting themselves in the foot with all their complaining, I was glad someone was doing it. Lots of work – by the artists, the engineers, the producers, the art people, the ad people, etc – goes in to making an album, and those people deserve remuneration for that work, damnit. Even after reading Dubber and buying in to his explanation of how the business model is changing due to the web, I couldn’t make sense of how this relationship-building nonsense made anyone any money. You don’t sell anything, you don’t make any money.
Then yesterday I walked in to Barnes and Noble. At our local Barnes and Noble they’ve got big, plush armchairs — lots of them. These chairs are often arranged in groups. Sometimes around tables. People like to sit in these chairs and look at (maybe even read) books, which they sometimes buy but more often put back on the shelves. Sometimes they do this in groups, or just strike up a conversation with whatever other bibliophile happens to sit down next to them. It always seemed to me an awful lot more like a library than any place wanting to sell books should be. Yesterday, though, I got it. Barnes and Noble’s chief concern isn’t selling books, it’s selling relationships — between reader and a particular body of literature as well as between reader and other readers — that will lead to selling books. Have you ever noticed how many damn books someone who’s a bona-fide expert on a subject, say a professor, owns? That’s because that person has an intense and intimate relationship with that topic, and has a need – no, a desire – to own books taking on that subject from all sorts of angles. Since Barnes and Noble provides its customers the time and space (free!) to become something of an aficionado of whatever might intrigue them, to establish a relationship with the literature, they can turn the merely curious in to mini-experts like our professor above, and thus sell more books. Once that happens and our cadre of experts start running in to each other at the conveniently situated Barnes and Noble Cafe, or around the armchairs, recommendations will start flying like shot on the first day of open season. And that means, you guessed it, more book sales. Ca-ching!
Clearly, then, selling relationships works. It worked to the tune of $5.4 billion in sales for Barnes and Noble last year. But in the end I’m still skeptical. Booksellers are still slinging a material product. We’re selling vibrating air. And if we go with Dubber’s plan, that vibrating air will be available in any home with an internet connection for free. At least if a consumer wants to take a book home she has to pay for it. Does this mean that we have to depend on upping our relationships with our audience to the point that they’ll want to shell out bucks to see us live? Where else do we have an opportunity to get paid for what we do? I’m starting to see the light on this, but those lingering questions really make me nervous. What do you think?
No, we’re not brothers…
Charming, really, what an introduction: “…If nothing else, it will be funny.” Thanks a ton, John.
Oh, hi there, didn’t see you reading, sorry for the snark. Please, let me introduce myself. My name’s Brian and I’ll be stopping by here to fill in while JT is gone. John and I go way, way back. We’re also frequently incorrectly assumed brothers — it’s pretty strange. In any case, my usual musings over at my own little corner of the web tend to gravitate towards classical music and the classical guitar, though like John I sometimes take the occasional peep in to the ridiculousness of the media. I’m also, however, a closet musical theatre sometimes lover and sometimes hater, and I suppose in John’s absence I’ll do some thinking about that neighborhood of the musical world in this space. I’ll be back with something of real substance soon, I promise. And to make JT happy I guess I’ll work on making it funny, too.
