Category: Articles

View From The East: Moving Music

Posted on September 1, 2001 by Greg Sandow - Articles, Commentary

Greg Sandow

I was deeply moved when I heard the premiere of Ingram Marshall‘s Kingdom Come, played by the American Composers Orchestra in 1997, and I wasn’t alone. The piece got an ovation. I left the concert with two members of the ACO’s board. Both had been as touched as I was; one said he’d been in tears.

Now Kingdom Come has been recorded by the ACO on a Nonesuch release, and I can hear it again. If anything, I love it even more. Right from the start, it’s strongly emotional, with a timpani roll leading into an unhappy minor triad, which rises through the orchestra from the low strings to the flutes and violins. Then all this happens once more, though now it’s a different minor triad, entering underneath the first one almost like a shudder.

But then strong emotion is a constant trait of Ingram’s music, growing from—or pervading; this is like the chicken and the egg; which comes first, style or content?—what sounds like tonal harmony. But are the triads really tonal? They sound as if they are, and so do the descending scalar passages, lovingly harmonized, that slowly appear perhaps a minute and 20 seconds into the piece. (They’re really two-note figures, pulling downwards, now filling in the space between top and bottom in the reverse direction, starting at the clear, untroubled top.)

But I don’t think the chords here function tonally. Sometimes, as in those loving scalar passages, chords might connect in what sounds like a tonal progression, carrying an emotional charge remembered from tonality. But moments like these sound, to me, like reminiscences. In longer spans, the chords don’t sound as if they move like tonal chords, responding to the gravitation of a central key. (This is also true in Gavin Bryars‘s music.) Instead they tend to hang there, not motionless, but moving slowly in a weightless space.

The only force they carry is emotional. Anything that might seem too emotional—like the taped choruses, or the high trumpet that starts to sing five minutes after the beginning, or the hymn (or what sounds like one) that comes a little later, more quietly in the lower brass and which urges the trumpet toward a melody—all this gets strengthened by the underlying shudder, which keeps returning like an emotional and musical motif. Some nine minutes in, the shudder seems to fill the music, as if the choral voices were melting on each other and over the orchestral chords. Ingram, as he himself says, is best known as an electronic composer, and here acoustic sounds, even in the orchestra, are piled upon each other like layers of a tape collage. That, too, is an obvious departure from tonal harmony; the notes (or so it seems to me) have lost their structural connection.

Two-thirds of the way toward the end the orchestra subsides, and something troubled buzzes like a stubborn fly. To me this sounds as if it had been spawned by the shudders. I’m not sure what sound the buzzing is; probably some transformation of what Ingram’s liner notes tell me is an old recording of a Bosnian Muslim gusle singer. I hadn’t remembered (or maybe I never knew; did I read the program notes in 1997?) that Kingdom Come is filled with the pain and sorrow of the former (now tortured) Yugoslavia; it’s dedicated to the memory of Ingram’s brother-in-law, Francis Tomasic, who was killed working as a journalist in Bosnia. Maybe that explains the shudder. We often act these days as if we’re frightened of emotion. By “we” of course I mean sophisticates who like new music, and one reason we shy from feeling that’s too blatant or too obvious is that we’ve seen it turn to dishonest sentimental mush in the more commercial regions of pop culture, like pop-song hits and network television. Earlier, our modernist forebears distrusted blatant feeling for similar reasons. And now it’s also not hip to be emotional; when I worked at Entertainment Weekly, one editor blanched when I put feeling into pop reviews, as if I’d revealed myself as some kind of drooling geek.

But as I wrote last month, there really are some problems with emotion, in our present age, or rather reasons why it easily can grow so sentimental. If we think that we can create a good life simply because we have good feelings, then surely we’ve forgotten everything we should have learned from history. There’s painful trouble in the world; we can feel joyful, but if our joy doesn’t also capture the pain that’s inevitably near us (linked through everything we buy, everything we consume, from food to energy to ideas), then it’s empty. Ingram’s music clearly touches pain, not just in Kingdom Come, but in everything I’ve heard from him. The melancholy fog that I associate with him—maybe an unfair generalization of his most famous piece, Fog Tropes, for brass and tapes of foghorns, along with other sounds, like distant seagulls—reads to me like genuine regret for all the things in life that, right now, we don’t know how to change.

Kingdom Come takes just 16 minutes of the CD it’s on, whose full title is Kingdom Come/Hymnodic Delays/Fog Tropes II. The four movements of Hymnodic Delays, for a four-voice madrigal group and digital processing, help demonstrate why Ingram’s harmony isn’t really tonal. They’re based on early New England choral music, and when once or twice they seem to literally reproduce their sources, they seem a little jarring. The rhythms don’t float; the harmony has structure and direction. And that, in Ingram’s context, makes the music seem a little obvious (though in its original setting, it surely wouldn’t).

Fog Tropes II is a reexamination of Fog Tropes for string quartet and the varied twilight sounds on tape. It’s worth studying to see how stabbing chords and tremolos expose themselves without losing any dignity, and how the seagulls—which, along with the recorded sound of waves, are cliché of sentimental new-age music—do as well. Grown-up regret is far from sentimental. Fog still can be evocative (we’d better enjoy it, like everything in nature, while we can). And one function of music ought to be to help us mine our souls.

Ingram seems to mine his depth of memory on Evensongs, a 1997 CD from New Albion, a label that’s recorded him for years. The memories here are, externally at least, both of hymns and classical chamber music. The piece that grips me most is a long (20 minutes) piano quartet, In My Beginning Is My End (a title suggested by T.S. Eliot‘s Four Quartets), played with stunning unashamed passion by the Dunsmuir Piano Quartet. It has a striking, unexpected, almost bouncy, rhythmical beginning
, which segues into music that’s more lyrical, and almost sounds as if it could be French (César Franck? Debussy?). Then there’s a harmless-seeming pause, the same kind that separated bounciness from lyricism—and all at once comes something for the strings alone, so high and sad it seems (in context) almost like a child’s premonitions of adulthood.

Rhythmic sections alternate with sadness; the piece starts to sound like a collage again, but this time a horizontal one, of moments juxtaposed without (or, once again, so it seems to me) a structural relationship. The piece, as I hear it, doesn’t unfold like classical chamber music. Instead it reconstructs how chamber music sounds.

The more I hear it, the more astonishing it seems. The second movement, Ingram says, could be called a set of variations, though in a formal sense I’m not sure it really is one, because I don’t hear a theme whose structural elements Ingram systematically elaborates. In his liner notes, he says something that seems very much like this, and puts it in a lovely way—he says the movement “dwells on” two hymns. “Dwelling on them” (returning to them, lingering around them) is more relaxed than “varying” them. The separate “variations”—not separated by formal stops and starts, but still made distinct, as they’d be in Brahms or Beethoven, by sound and gesture—function, once again, as reminiscences, this time of the idea of writing variations.

Though at this point, I can’t help wondering what Ingram would think of what I’m saying, if he’d think my conceit of reminiscence has any meaning in his music. I feel a little helpless, as if I’ve gotten lost in abstractions, and lost my simple love of music. I only know this piano quartet wows me, contents me, and delights me. My only complaint might be with the recording, and with the recordings of every other piece on these two CDs—they all should be more distant. We don’t need to hear the physicality of each separate instrument, and even less the breathiness of voices in Hymnodic Delays. The music, paradoxically, would seem more tangible if its separate parts were less so, if the microphones had stepped back, to let us hear the sounds blending in a larger space.

But that’s a small thing, which didn’t stop me from being utterly absorbed by what I heard. Ingram is a treasure (a master composer, but even more a treasure). I wish he were more widely recognized as one, and I hope that these recordings help.

Are composers who use early music techniques writing new music?

Posted on September 1, 2001 by NewMusicBox Staff - Articles, Commentary

	Dennis Busch “Who attends performances of modern music? A handful of curiosity seekers. The general public are at home and they are listening to Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms (and hopefully Busch)…”
	Elodie Lauten “As far as Baroque compositional style is concerned, I don’t use typical theme-development or counterpoint schemes. The only Baroque style quote is a brief harpsichord cadenza in “Fear,” contrasting with an otherwise organic, chromatic piece without themes…”
	Stefania De Kenessey “The newest of the “new” must now return to tradition, to sonorities, techniques and idioms that are somehow familiar. Not blindly, not stupidly, and certainly not as a retrogressive gesture…”
	Robert Sirico “Many modern compositions are so esoteric with rhythms that are so bizarre that one may feel “assaulted” by the sounds. On the contrary I am looking to the “familiar” to soothe, to comfort, and to inspire…”
	Milos Raickovich “Since 1979, I have been composing in a “style” which I like to call New Classicism….Its form is classical (e.g. the sonata cycle), but the tonality is reduced to only a few notes of the scale…”
	Roy Whelden “With the fresh timbres of seventeenth and eighteenth-century instruments comes a new set of resources for the composer to explore…”

Time Present and Time Past Are Both Perhaps Present in Time Future.

Posted on September 1, 2001 by Frank J. Oteri - Articles, Commentary

Frank J. Oteri
Photo by Melissa Richard

Standard repertoire apologists who are loathe to acknowledge the scarcity of new music in orchestral programs or on the radio frequently make the claim that for people who’ve never heard the music of Mozart or Beethoven, their music is new music.

This line of reasoning has always struck me as somewhat disingenuous. It’s almost like saying that for people who don’t know Harry S Truman is dead, he’s still alive! The music of Mozart and Beethoven is old music. That doesn’t make it any less exciting to experience, but it is NOT new music.

So what is new music? And what is old music? With today’s exciting stylistic pluralism, there is no overarching element that applies to all new music other than the fact that it’s being written now. In the year 2001, in addition to composers writing advanced electronic scores and exploring their own microtonal scale systems, there are also composers writing symphonies that sound like Haydn, liturgical music that sounds Medieval, and chamber music that sounds like it was written in the late nineteenth century, as if the entire twentieth century never happened. There are also a great many composers still exploring integral 12-tone serialism as if the last half-century of indeterminacy, minimalism, totalism, and rock never happened. And, if you have open minds and ears, all of this music, if it is well crafted and has something to say, can be equally valid.

To throw a monkey wrench into the whole notion of new music, we’re devoting the September issue to exploring new music which on the surface appears much older. We spoke with Richard Einhorn about how the ghosts of the music of the past inevitably intrude upon the music of today. Craig Zeichner has supplied us with a fascinating overview of new music composers and early music performers who have come together to forge a truly post-modern sound world. We asked a group of six composers whose music may appear to be anachronistic to folks with set notions about what the music of our time should sound like to explain why they write the music they write. And John Luther Adams wonders if all this recent interest in the music of the eighteenth century and earlier is not so much a throwback but rather the natural course of music making which somehow got side-tracked during the nineteenth century. What do you think?

The issue of timeliness was a big part of Greg Sandow’s “Kitsch-O-Meter” last month which prompted Ingram Marshall, whose music is also deeply indebted to early music practices and who was the subject of last month’s In The First Person conversation, to wonder where he fit in. To add another layer to this cross-relational chain, this month Greg Sandow responds to Ingram Marshall. Other items in News&Views include information about the Hechinger Fund’s new Encores commissioning project, Harvestworks incursion of experimental music into DJ culture, and Steve Heitzeg’s new Nobel Symphony, created for an upcoming gathering of Nobel laureates. And, of course, the newest concerts and recordings featuring American repertoire are included in our Hear&Now and SoundTracks compendia regardless of what anyone thinks about their “timeliness.”

So where does all this time warping fit in with the folks who say that Mozart and Beethoven are new music? Well, listeners might be better served if we celebrated Mozart and Beethoven as well as Roger Sessions, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Thelonious Monk as old music, and concentrated on all the new music being written today—from the latest piano trio in c minor to a chance experiment involving 500 kazoos attached to ring modulators—as new music!

New vs. Immortal

Posted on August 1, 2001 by Frank J. Oteri - Articles, Commentary

Frank J. Oteri
Photo by Melissa Richard

The term “new music” is somewhat amorphous. For many people, the serial music of Schoenberg and his disciples is still new music even though the 50th anniversary of Schoenberg’s death came and went last month. Some people even think that Charles Ives is new music and he stopped composing soon after World War One. So when does new music become old music?

So much of what is exciting about “new music” is what distinguishes it from older music. A wider harmonic vocabulary, a wider array of timbre resources, etc. Will the 43-tone just intonation experiments of Harry Partch one day seem as quaint as the one-time radical use of major seventh chords in Beethoven’s Eroica? Will the vintage synthesizers of Donald Buchla and Robert Moog, so important to the music of Morton Subotnick, John Eaton and scores of other composers one day be the domain of period-instrument specialists? Will all the experimental music of the past 100 years continue to thrill audiences a century from now when this music will be as far away from us as we are from composers like Camille Saint-Saëns?

Last month, the American Music Center’s historic collection of over 80,000 scores and an almost equal number of recordings on LPs, reel-to-reels and other analog formats, was moved to The New York Public Library where it will begin a second life as one of the most significant historical resources for information about 20th century American music. Like so many other AMC member composers, I rushed madly to get as many scores of mine in there as possible. Pulling several all-nighters to try to get every last piece in before the deadline. Why the urgency? I barely have a savings account and I don’t even have a will. I’m still relatively young and I rarely think about the future, let alone what people may do with my music then. Like most composers, I’m happy if I’m able to get something performed in the present. Yet the closing of the paper collection of scores by American composers triggered a whole host of thoughts about the future.

How concerned should composers be about the distant future? Ingram Marshall doesn’t seem too worried that many of his most important scores will be virtually unplayable without him, but his legacy is assured by a remarkable discography. Bart McLean, however, is not so sure about the future and has compiled an exhaustive compendium of archival resources for composers to consider if they are concerned about what will happen to their music after they die. We asked Cecile Bazelon (widow of composer Irwin Bazelon), Walter von Wayditch (son of the late opera composer Gabriel von Wayditch), Roswell Rudd (student and friend of the late jazz composer Herbie Nichols), and Virigina Bortin, biographer of composer Elinor Remick Warren and the Secretary of the Elinor Remick Warren Society to share their thoughts with us on the legacies of these important, yet still not widely known composers. And we ask you to think about how you would like to be remembered in the future.

In our News&Views section this month, Judy Dunaway has done extensive research into how the MP3 phenomenon has affected the promotion of innovative music, which will have significant impact on the dissemination of music in the future. Dean Suzuki looks at the very present tense phenomenon of composer residencies and composer-led ensembles, while Greg Sandow ponders how composers can write tonal music nowadays without sounding anachronistic, or ever worse, like kitsch. Molly Sheridan talked with the three American finalists in the international Masterprize competition, which promises to find the masterpieces of tomorrow, and Amanda MacBlane sifts through 35 new recordings that have come our way which are now part of our musical history as long as CD players are around! Of course, the one thing you can’t put off until tomorrow are today’s concerts. We urge you to revisit our Hear&Now concert database throughout the month and discover new American music as it happens right now!

Will any of this new music be immortal? Who knows? Once upon a time the music of Telemann was everywhere, while the music of Bach was only known to a few lucky people who attended his sporadic church gigs. So there’s a distinct possibility that the RealAudio sample you came across in SoundTracks this month by some composer you’ve never heard of before might just contain tomorrow’s Musical Offering…

What Might Happen To Your Music After You Die (and What You Can Do About It)

Posted on August 1, 2001 by Barton McLean - Analysis, Articles

Bart McLean
Photo by Hasnul Saidon

The research for this article was prompted by my pondering how my own music would fare in the hereafter. It was soon clear to me that there were very few answers available. As the research grew and as I touched base with many of my colleagues, it was clear that something needed to be done about fostering an awareness of the issues, which have never been raised in the arts media with any degree of comprehensiveness and clarity.

In the course of this exploration, I have had multiple communications from many of the major players in the field (those heading organizations directly involved with archival/custodial issues). I am greatly indebted to their enthusiastic help in pointing me in certain directions, expounding on their own programs, and reading and editing the finished manuscript. Among them have been Betty Auman, Donor Relations Officer of the Library of Congress, Charles Eubanks, Administrator at The New York Public Library, Judy Klein, NY Public Library Consultant on the composers archive, Richard Kessler, Execuitve Director of the American Music Center, Deborah Atherton, Executive Director of American Composers Alliance (along with Richard Brooks, President of ACA), Joel Chadabe, President of the Electronic Music Foundation, Frank Proschan and Jeff Place from the Smithsonian Institution, Marcia Bauman from the Stanford IDEAMA Project, Johannes Goebel, head of the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (IDEAMA in Europe), and Gerald Warfield, former Manager of the Society of Composers, Inc. and Treasurer of the American Composers Alliance, among others. Additionally, I have been given access to a number of invaluable papers given by members of the Society of American Archivists and InterPARES dealing with these issues.

In these uncertain times composers who wish their music to live on after they pass away are in significant danger of their hard-fought life’s work slipping quietly away as the years and decades post mortem relegate their work to leisurely disappearance. This is exacerbated by:

the diminishing ability of publishers and CD companies to make a profit on new music;
the lack of secure financial underpinning and personnel at these companies, causing many to eventually cease to exist;
the rapid change in media technology causing whole formats of music to be discarded due to technological obsolescence (such as the LP record, as evidenced by this author as I witnessed 13 LPs by my wife Priscilla and myself go out of print);
societal/cultural factors;
At the beginning of the 3rd Millennium the arts/educational community being confronted with an existing body of output from living composers and other artists far greater than all the other composers/artists who have lived since the beginning of civilization.

Our output will certainly need assistance as it finds its place among the deluge of the voices of future generations.

On a more optimistic note, occasionally changing (and more affordable) technology can be a positive force. For instance, I have just become aware of certain CD companies’ commitment toward making their older LP catalogs available once again, through a ‘one off’ process. This entails first digitizing their tape masters along with all liner notes, LP graphics, and then burning them one at a time on a CD-R format on demand. Smithsonian/Folkways has just made its entire catalog available in this fashion, and CRI and Louisville Orchestra Recordings may be headed in this direction. I would urge all composers to pressure smaller CD/LP companies to get on board.

During the next fifty years, the classical arts as we know them and their place in society will be far different, and perhaps even unrecognizable from their present position, as societal, political, and commercial forces shape them in ways that no one can now foresee. Based on my research one could adopt a worst-case premise that most current small publishers or CD companies will be gone in twenty years, most large, well-funded publisher/CD companies will be unrecognizable in thirty years (due to their being merged or bought out, and their contents rendered unobtainable), and most current large arts organizations will cease in 50 years except the very largest and broadest-based, such as the American Music Center. Take the Society of Composers, Inc., one of the most stable and successful in terms of membership and broad-based geographical representation. One could argue that, to project a life of 50 years beyond 2001, one would also have to postulate that the university as we know it, with its elaborate structure of being able to sustain performances, physical housing, etc. will still be in existence, a premise that I am not willing to accept in light of the rapid growth of web-based universities and the ever more burdensome cost to the student of the traditional education model, as well as the probability of a sea change in the societal/educational mission of the university of the future. Of course, I could be wrong about any of this, but that is not the point. The point is that, in order to develop realistic guidelines for the securance of one’s music, one has to start with a best-guess skeptical premise of the future.

And so what can we as artists do to ensure that our creative voices continue to be heard in the decades to come after our death? There are three aspects of how our work resonates in the future.

First, there is the Storage in an Archival Repository of our music, and attendant documents such as letters, biographical material, articles, etc., for research and educational purposes. (I have outlined a series of questions a composer should consider asking an archival institution along with a list of helpful hints for approaching such an organization.)

Second, there is the securing of the Continuation of Publication of scores and aural data (currently in CD format), as well as formats such as video, CD-ROM, etc. (I have compiled a list of technical issues for long-term storage of archival media as well as information about the InterPARES Project whose goal is the permanent preservation of authentic records created in electronic systems, and the Indiana University Digital Library Project which will establish a digital music library test bed, develop appropriate software, and seek answers to the thorny issues surrounding music-related intellectual property rights. I have also recounted the pitfalls that have befallen the International Digital Electroacoustic Music Archive, a pioneering effort to archive electro-acoustic music in 1990.)

Third, there is the matter of what I shall call a ‘Center for Advocacy,’ a central entity which can assure that information and access to and about the composers’ works is maintained, most efficiently at present on a dedicated Web site. Before exploring the exciting new programs offered by a number of arts/educational/archival organizations to implement various combinations of these three criteria, it is important to first understand some basic issues relating to long-term archival repository and access.

[I distinguish between ‘archival’ care, which means preserving the music in its original form with original documents (including the possibility of digitization for research and educational purposes), without securing copyright, and ‘custodial,’ which is more along the lines of a publishing company, with the organization arranging copyright and accepting publisher royalty fees from ASCAP or BMI. ‘Advocacy’ refers to composer membership organizations which provide and update information about composers and their music, and actively promote it, from the composers’, not the institution’s point of view.]

At present there is no one single entity that can or will employ all three areas of service (storage in an archival repository, continuation of publication, and center for advocacy) to a composer posthumously. However, a number of partial solutions are in place or soon to be implemented, some quite promising, and are explored below. Due to constraints of length, I have focused on American institutions. A good introductory portal to international efforts might be the Gaudeamus Foundation’s Web site.

With all the opportunities for one’s artistic work and documents to be preserved after death, I find serious gaps still prevailing. Concerning archival opportunities, where it is certainly possible and advisable to deposit or have deposited one’s CDs and scores in any number of libraries, ostensibly remaining for the indefinite future, this is by no means guaranteed merely by virtue of their being included in the catalog. Libraries also are not composer-driven, but rather are institutionally-driven in their approach. The main exception, the American Music Center’s NewMusicJukeBox program, is certainly composer-driven in that it connects to a central composer Web site with links to other archival and publishing entities. But the AMC is not, in its present plans for NewMusicJukeBox, accepting anything but scores and audio materials, ruling out not only historical documents and non-standard multimedia materials but video as well. And, like general libraries, the AMC is not specifically set up as a posthumous archival program, only a de facto one. True posthumous archival programs such as those at the special collections of the Library of Congress and New York Public Library which do remedy some of these issues, themselves present difficulties in that they will probably not accept most composers as being “worthy” of inclusion into their special collections. And even if one does manage to establish a good relationship with a more local university or community archive, they are, by their very localized nature, not as universal as the LOC or NYPL, and materials deposited in them may never be found by researchers in decades to come.

Regarding custodial membership programs, the American Composers Alliance has taken bold steps toward making the music of its members available via publication posthumously. It is certainly composer-driven as well. But ACA has had recent periods in which it has had to shut down operations due to financial and staff concerns.

Regarding advocacy programs, the AMC and ACA both have components that provide additional information (biographical, other links, etc.) via the Internet, the AMC program accomplishing this with an individualized Web site controlled by the composer (or heirs). But both Web sites are limited in what they will provide. Moreover, both AMC and ACA possess passive rather than active advocacy programs after the death of the composer. That is, the information data banks for individual composers are more or less on automatic pilot once established and will only change when the composer (who is dead) or her heirs contribute additional information. Why is this important? Supposing a publisher discontinues publishing a composer’s score or CD for some reason. Supposing a previously unknown score by the composer was discovered? Supposing an important new book or review is published about the composer. Supposing important news regarding a performance of the composer’s work, such as a 50-year anniversary, is printed in a newspaper. Supposing important new research on the composer’s work was published from, say, a doctoral dissertation. None of this would be picked up on the Web sites of either of these organizations, simply because they are not set up to deal with active advocacy (neither will much of this information appear on search engines as they are now constituted). What is sorely needed is not only an active information advocacy program but also one in which discontinued CDs and scores can be again made available via publication with the advocacy organization acting as the default publisher. The definition of an active advocacy program, then, is one in which the staff ROUTINELY AND FREQUENTLY, AS PART OF ITS MISSION, scans all of these as well as other areas to ensure that all of the composer’s music is being continually distributed and that the composer’s Web site is being continually updated as new information becomes available. I have been talking with Joel Chadabe, founder and president of the Electronic Music Foundation, to determine if the EMF, perhaps in direct collaboration with any one of the organizations mentioned above, could establish a type of hybrid archival/advocacy/default custodial program that will close these remaining gaps in the services now collectively provided by other groups.

It should be mentioned in passing that the American Composers Forum and the Society of Composers, Inc., both have elements of advocacy in their programs as well, but neither of these important and worthy organizations has any interest in archival repository or custodial membership, and so are not relevant to the topic of this article.

What might happen to your music after you die can very well be a crap shoot. It is hoped that this research will empower composers as to what they can do about it by showing how the dice can be loaded in their favor, and hopefully may even propel organizations and individuals who are in a position to contribute to come forward and form coalitions which can close the gaps now evident.

After all, if we work so hard to produce our music, then we should endeavor with equal effort to do whatever we can to ensure that it lives on.

(Petersburg, NY, 7/19/2001)

Criteria for choosing an archival institution:

Since the current and upcoming programs of the American Composers Alliance, the American Music Center, the Library of Congress, and The New York Public Library as well as a proposed program by the Electronic Music Foundation are really not in competition with one another, and since none are exclusive (except insofar as ACA acts as a publisher), my primary advice would be to not limit oneself to any single program. On the contrary one would be well advised to embark on relationships with as many as feasible. Summing up a consensus among several of the composers who replied to my inquiry, John Duesenberry writes that, “I would b
e more interested in having my recordings scattered – like ashes, if you will – to as many locations anywhere in the world as will accept them, including any sort of library, musical institution or archive, broadcast facility, and of course the Web. I believe this increases the probability (already very low) that the work will survive.”

Valuable as this advice is, it is nonetheless important to establish a relationship with one primary archival source to store original documents, letters, and musical materials. Often the very best source will be the local university where the composer has taught, or the local community where she/he has lived and worked. In choosing a source, some questions might be properly asked:

Does the primary archival repository have expert staff and an ongoing program of archival support of artists?(I am reminded of one recent unfortunate incident where an old friend, a composer who taught music his whole life at a small college, recently died. His wife sought to place his rather extensive manuscripts, letters and documents in an archive. Finally, due to his stature at the local college (a recital hall was named after him) the local college library agreed to archive and preserve all of his materials. Unfortunately, these materials are now sitting in a darkened room, uncatalogued and inaccessible, due to the lack of an ongoing archival program at the college.)
Does the mission of the institution match the characteristics of the materials to be deposited?
Does the institution have a history of long-term financial stability? How long has it been in business? What is its history?
Does the institution draw on financial support relationships outside its own narrow focus? Is it associated with a larger institutional entity that can maintain stability (as, for example, the Smithsonian Institution or the Library of Congress)?
If it is not immediately perceived to exist as part of a larger library, government agency, or museum as noted above, then as a private not-for-profit foundation does it have an ongoing history of securing financing from a variety of foundation and/or government support?
Is it candid about divulging its financial and organizational records to prospective participants?
Does it have sufficient staff to carry on its mission? Has there been significant recent staff turnover?

Lastly, before choosing one or more of the organizations’ services, it would be very well advised to check with some of their current members (preferably those who are still alive!) to determine how efficiently their services have been operating. Of course, a potential custodial/archival institution may very well be an excellent one and not meet all the above criteria. As always, it is the balance that counts.

Helpful hints at approaching a primary source for archival repository:

Dartmouth College has an excellent ongoing program of archival repository for local composers and faculty, and may serve as a model of how one can approach her/his own local institution. I am indebted to Philip N. Cronenwett, Dartmouth curator of manuscripts and special collections, for the following information and advice, from which I quote:

“We are very interested in the entire corpus of the work of a composer, so we would want to have all that you mention above (scores, audio tapes, videotapes, letters, other documents, photographs, contracts, etc.). I think it is very important to be as complete as possible in the acquisition. It may be bulky and hard to handle, but we don’t know now what will be important in 50 years.”

As to preferred formats, Mr. Cronenwett writes, “This would depend on the stability of the medium. If the original is unstable, we would give serious consideration to reformatting to stabilize. Originals are always preferable, but not always possible.”

I asked, “Do you prefer to work with the living composer, or with her estate after death?”

His reply, “The facetious response is that it depends on the personality of the composer. In reality, it is invariably better to work with the creator of the material as she or he can answer questions and help flesh out the collection (with an oral history, for example). After the composer’s death, it means working with someone who knows less about the material.”

I then asked if Dartmouth had any plans to make any of this material available over the

Web, either a catalog or the actual materials. He replied, “Our catalog is Web-based so it can be used now on the Internet. We also will be mounting finding aids, the detailed listings of the collections, this spring. We do not have plans at the moment to mount content on the Web. We [provide research assistance] by mail, in person, by phone, by fax, and by e-mail.”

Finally, I asked what advice he would give a local composer at his university or in his community on how to approach an archivist? He emphatically replied to “Call the archivist NOW and make arrangements to talk. Have the archivist look at the material you have NOW. In some cases, creators of material store materials improperly and guarantee early degradation. Early discussions can be very helpful for both the creator of papers and the archivist.”

Charles Eubanks, librarian from the NYPL Music Division adds, “Each collection is different, but normally we welcome help from donors in organizing collections. We want to receive a collection as the creator left it.”

Another important factor is cost. Historically, when an individual or foundation donates a complex set of materials to an archive, a financial stipend often accompanies it, recognizing the costs and difficulties of the task. I can certainly attest that, all other factors being equal, one will receive better treatment (one archivist tells me that the material will tend to go higher in the pile of individuals to be serviced) if there is a financial element to the gift dedicated to the cost of processing and continuing the maintenance of the materials. I would strongly urge this, either while alive or posthumously in a will.

The Society of American Archivists (SAA) posts an excellent guide to the broader questions and considerations of archival repository entitled “A Guide to Donating your Personal or Family Papers to a Repository.” It is also available in brochure form from the SAA. Excerpts are quoted below, but by all means read the full text on the Web, or request the brochure:

“Potential donors and repository representatives should review the materials being offered for donation and discuss repository policies and procedures for the care and use of donated materials. If both parties agree that the repository is an appropriate place for preservation of the materials, they complete and sign a deed of gift… The deed of gift is a formal, legal, agreement that transfers ownership of, and legal rights in, the materials to be donated.”

The typical deed of gift identifies the donor, transfers legal ownership of the materials to the repository, establishes provisions for their use, specifies ownership of intellectual property rights in the materials, and indicates what the repository should do with unwanted materials.

The donor formally agrees to transfer legal ownership and physical custody of the materials, including future donations, to the repository. The deed will specify a point in time (usually upon signing the deed or upon physical transfer of the material to the repository) when the materials become the legal property of the repository. It will manage and care for them, employing the best professional judgment of its staff
and according to accepted professional standards and its mission and objectives. Repositories prefer to accept materials through transfer of ownership. The cost of storing, preserving, and making collections available for research is so high that repositories generally can only afford to do so for materials they own. As the professional staff of the repository reviews the materials you donated, there may be reason to reformat some or all of them. Long-term preservation of fragile materials, for instance, is a primary reason for microfilming or copying papers for use by researchers.

An essential mission of repositories is to make their collections open and available for research use. They are able to do this because most donors do not limit access to the materials they donate.

Ownership of intellectual property rights (primarily copyright, but including trademarks and patent rights) may also be legally transferred by the deed of gift. Copyright generally belongs to the creator of writings or other original material (such as photographs and music). Donors are encouraged to transfer all rights they possess in and to the materials donated to the repository; this assists researchers in their scholarship by making it easier to quote from documents. If you wish to retain all or a portion of the intellectual property rights you own, you may include such a provision in the deed of gift, but you and the representative should agree upon a date after which the rights will be transferred to the repository. You are not able to transfer ownership of rights to the works of others found in the materials you donate. These works might include such items as letters written to you by others.

From What Might Happen To Your Music After You Die and What You Can Do About It
by Barton McLean
© 2001 NewMusicBox

Foreknowledge of the proper media for ultimate storage of one’s scores, audio/video materials and attendant documents is crucial, since it will often affect the choice of media for one’s current work. Basically, it comes down to two basic issues. First, the storage medium has to be stable over a long period of time (50-100 years, allowing that digital formats will have to be migrated to another format at least once during that period). Second, the medium has to be in a format that can be easily accessed and/or distributed. The first criteria can be satisfied in its most basic sense by merely preserving the score in a dark, humidity-controlled space. But this makes access difficult. Greater access can be obtained by digitizing the score in a format such as PDF, or doing the same with audio/video files on a CD/DVD, all of which can be more easily accessed via a local jukebox configuration or distributed over the Internet. But these strategies have many problems in terms of complexity of administration, along with indefinite long-term viability. You see, operating systems change and playback realization software becomes obsolete, causing tremendous expense as the archival entity needs to continually ‘migrate’ the score or audio/video file to conform with the latest playback technology. As it turns out, these two criteria (long-term stability and accessibility) are usually at odds with each other, and together have formed the basis for an almost complete frustration and lack of progress on the part of the archival communities in library and government who are entrusted with the task of hammering out formats, protocols and standards that can be utilized over the widest variety of disciplines and installed in the most libraries.

To Digitize or Not

The prospect of digitization as the long-term storage and preservation solution hangs as a merry-go-round ring just out of reach for the two principal organizations entrusted with storage protocols, namely the Society of American Archivists and the National Archive Records Administration of the U.S. Government. Their Web sites are replete with forum papers and seminars where they talk around the problem without suggesting solutions due to the sheer complexity of the problem. Before I sample some of the current discussion below it should be stated what we mean by the material we are digitizing. First, of course, there is the artistic material itself, whether it be music, video, photo, graphic, text, or other documents. Second, there is what archivists call the ‘metadata,’ which consists of all the information surrounding the artistic document, including its history, geographical location, storage format, dates of receipt and storage, software and hardware used to retrieve and realize it, authentication (a very real problem with certain types of files such as text, which can easily be altered, thus compelling archivists to establish an authentication/security protocol), to name a few.

The case against digitizing:

The principal case against digitization is not in terms of the feasibility or stability of the storage medium, but rather the obsolescence of the playback medium that the file will eventually be realized on. For example, finding a late-model computer to read a 5.25-inch floppy disk — a format common only a few years ago — or the software to translate MacWrite or WordPerfect 4.0 is practically impossible. On a government and industry level, the retrieval problem is magnified: old DECtape and UNIVAC drives, which recorded massive amounts of government data, are long retired, and programs like FORTRAN II are history. The data stored by these machines in now obsolete formats are virtually inaccessible. Hardware and software manufacturers have shown more interest in discovering new technology than in preserving today’s data.

Margaret Hedstrom, associate professor in the School of Information and Library Studies at the University of Michigan, in a recent address sums up the dilemma succinctly, even if she is a bit biased and overly cautious about the viability of digital storage in my opinion:

“My concept of digital preservation encompasses material that begins its life in digital form as well as material that is converted from traditional to digital formats. Recording media for digital materials are vulnerable to deterioration and catastrophic loss, and even under ideal conditions they are short lived relative to traditional format materials. Although archivists have been battling acid-based papers, thermo-fax, nitrate film, and other fragile media for decades, the threat posed by magnetic and optical media is qualitatively different. They are the first reusable media and they can deteriorate rapidly, making the time frame for decisions and actions to prevent loss is a matter of years, not decades. More insidious and challenging than media deterioration is the problem of obsolescence in retrieval and playback technologies… Devices, processes, and software for recording and storing information are being replaced with new products and methods on a regular three- to five-year cycle, driven primarily by market f
orces. Records created in digital form in the first instance and those converted retrospectively from paper or microfilm to digital form are equally vulnerable to technological obsolescence. Another challenge is the absence of established standards, protocols, and proven methods for preserving digital information. With few exceptions, digital library research has focused on architectures and systems for information organization and retrieval, presentation and visualization, and administration of intellectual property rights (Levy and Marshall). The critical role of digital libraries and archives in ensuring the future accessibility of information with enduring value has taken a back seat to enhancing access to current and actively used materials. As a consequence, digital preservation remains largely experimental and replete with the risks associated with untested methods; and digital preservation requirements have not been factored into the architecture, resource allocation, or planning for digital libraries.”

She further states that “It seems ironic that just as libraries and archives are discovering digital conversion as a cost-effective preservation method for certain deteriorating materials, much information that begins its life in electronic form is printed on paper or microfilm for safe, secure long-term storage. Yet, high-quality acid neutral paper can last a century or longer while archival quality microfilm is projected to last 300 years or more. Paper and microfilm have the additional advantage of requiring no special hardware or software for retrieval or viewing. Perhaps this explains why in many digital conversion projects, the digital images serve as a complement to rather than a replacement for the original hard copy materials (Conway, 1994).”

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the US government agency most responsible for storing the bulk of government records, takes a decidedly conservative approach to digital vs. paper/tape/microfilm storage. In fact, they have not yet implemented any significant effort in digitizing records and disseminating them over the Web, although they have recently developed highly specific and technical guidelines for doing so (go to the NARA Guidelines for Digitizing Archival Materials for Electronic Access). Even so, these guidelines do not include any source material that is time-based (music, video, film, as opposed to text and graphics).

Their Web site includes the following statement of policy: “In an era of digitization, why does NARA continue to microfilm records? Microfilm is a low-cost, reliable, long-term, standardized image storage medium. The equipment needed to view microfilm images is simple, consisting of light and magnification. The medium has a life-expectancy of hundreds of years. Digital images, on the other hand, consist of a wide variety of machine codes that require computer hardware and software to be made visible. To avoid the obsolescence of changing computer technology, digital images must be reformatted periodically. The cost of maintaining microfilm is small compared with that of digital images. Microfilm only needs shelving in a cool, dry place for a very long period of time.”

The case for digitizing on hard drive/optical media:

Two principal benefits accrue from digitizing audio/video sources, images, and paper documents… First, it is generally understood from the research I have done that non-tape digital storage media such as CD, CD-ROM and DVD are more robust than analog or digital tape media. Hard drives, although not suitable for long-term storage, are a good choice for information and files that are regularly read and disseminated. Second, the benefits of greater accessibility and flexibility in handling the data are compelling with all non-tape digital media. Thus, although no single, large-scale program of disseminating digitized artistic material is now in place, a general tendency toward digitizing all artistic output for long-term storage seems inevitable. Even now successful smaller scale efforts, such as the RealAudio Composerver program under the direction of Tom Wells at Ohio State University as part of the Society of Composers, Inc., programs are taking place, although none of these are directly concerned with establishing a permanent posthumous archive (although they conceivably could be).

Another compelling reason for digitizing is the spotty record of traditional storage methods and the instability of traditional media such as tape. In February 1995, National Public Radio reported that their vast audio recordings from the ‘70s were becoming unusable. NPR commiserated that their neighbor, the Smithsonian, had similar trouble with its audio holdings. Moreover, CBS found major degradation in its Viet Nam era video master tapes. Susan Stamberg and Walter Cronkite, lost forever? I personally have seen most of my master tapes recorded on the infamous Ampex 406/407 audiotape during the 1980s become virtually unplayable. Ralph Hodges, in “Things That May Not Last,” (Stereo Review, September 1993, page 128) quoting Terry O’Kelly of BASF bemoans “the tendency of some ferri-cobalt formulations to lose high frequencies with age. This instability, when present, seems to occur whether the tape is played frequently or not, and is not correctable. Print-through, on the other hand, can be addressed through the time-honored method of storing the afflicted cassette with Side A “tail out,” meaning that you’ll have to rewind the cassette if you wish to play it from the beginning. Such storage will progressively erase the print-through that has occurred while encouraging the development of print-through in the opposite tape direction…”

“You can’t say you haven’t been warned and that audio and eternity are eternally incompatible.”

Adrienne Petty, in The Wall Street Journal (October 4, 1993), says, “Contrary to popular opinion, videotape may not last for generations. In fact, it may last only 15 years, and failure to care for it may shorten its life even further.” Similar articles and horror stories about audiotape abound and must be heeded.

Similarly, in the realm of paper documents (musical scores, photos, graphic items), although historical documents have generally held up well under proper care, a new element of risk has been added with the ubiquitous use of computer printing and paper/inks. A number of studies have recently shown these documents to be subject to sometimes even drastic fading over a short period of time (even six months for some ink-jet printer inks). In an era where computer companies are more interested in quick and snappy printer results than in their lasting for 50-100 years, we simply have to become skeptical about any paper document printed on a computer lasting very long in stable condition. Even with microfilm, the method of choice for the Library of Congress, their policy allows for a shelf-life of only 100 years, provided the emulsion used is silver halide (the most common variety now in use). That may be well and good as far as it goes, but if and when the medium deteriorates, and it becomes necessary to migrate the data to another microfilm, generation loss becomes an issue (as it does in photocopying or analog tape dubbing). With a digital medium, there is no generation loss.

To make the case for the desirability of CD-R, CD-ROM and DVD media, one can browse the various technical publications of the manufacturers linked from the CD-Info Company Web site. Here you will also find information about Compact Disc (CD) & Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) in all their forms (physical and data formats), especially how they are manufactured and used for electronic publishing. They also present links to other websites with more information on these subjects. From these one gleans a consensus of a 50-70 year shelf life, longer for read and somewhat shorter for write modes. Another common number bandied about is ‘1000 plays’ with no degradation. A superior link to DVD matters is the DVD Forum. And, for an opposing point of view promoting the new DVD+RW format, visit dvdrw.com.

Although I would not have any hesitation in adopting the CD-R format for long-term storage at this point, there may be reservations about the newer DVD format, namely:

the information being much more dense, allowing for less margin of error;
the lack of verification of company testing for long-term viability, due in part to the reluctance of individual companies to divulge proprietary specifications of this newer media; and
the dizzying plethora of DVD formats available.

To this date there is still no clear winner in DVD formats, especially in the audio world, and one would be foolish to try to choose a single format to project its viability into the future (for a comprehensive look at the current state of DVD, go to p. 144 in the Feb. 2001 issue of Electronic Musician).

As John D. Dvorak says in a recent Forbes magazine article, “Anarchy has reigned over DVD optical storage. Battling formats and technologies are confusing the marketplace. Recently a witches’ brew of a specification called DVD Multi has emerged as a way to end the feuding and halt customer confusion…”

Mr. Dvorak goes on to give a breakdown of current DVD formats:

DVD Video: Used for movies. Total capacity is 17 gigabytes if two layers on both sides of the disk are utilized, but typically only one layer of one side is used, which amounts to 4.7 gigabytes, or about one movie.

DVD-ROM: The same basic technology as DVD Video, with computer-friendly file formats. Used to store data. Should supplant CD-ROM soon.

DVD-R: Developed separately by Panasonic, Hitachi, Pioneer and Philips, this technology has standardized at 4.7 gigabytes. Fully compatible drives should ship by year-end at around $1,500 to $2,000 each. As with CD-R, the user can write only once to the disc. This is the format that was expected to be used to copy movies from DVD to DVD.

DVD-RAM: Developed by Hitachi, Toshiba and Panasonic, this makes a DVD act like a hard disk with a random read-write access. Aopen (Acer), JVC, LG, Samsung and Teac have joined this team. Products should be out by year-end. No prices have been announced. This was initially a 2.6-gigabyte drive but it, too, became a 4.7-gigabyte-per-side disc.

DVD-RW: Similar to DVD-RAM except that the technology mimics CD-RW and uses a sequential read-write access more like a phonograph than a hard disk. Developed by Pioneer. Ricoh and possibly Sony are expected to join forces. Has a read-write capacity of 4.7 gigabytes per side.

DVD+RW: A technology developed by Philips and Sony, initially designed to deliver 3 gigabytes per side, is expected to increase to 4.7 gigabytes. Sony seems to have lost interest in it while Philips announced plans to ship the device someday. No one else is taking it seriously.

DVD Audio: New audio format introduced by Panasonic that arguably doubles the fidelity of a standard CD. Should eventually replace the CD recording. Sony has gone its own way with SuperCD.

HDVD: Developed by Sony and others to present high-definition TV signals from a special DVD. Nobody expects to see this for at least two years. It won’t be included in any DVD Multi specification.

The DVD Forum, a consortium of DVD technology companies, recognizes that the format chaos is costing them a bundle. Consumers are not going to invest time and money on a medium that risks being orphaned a year later. And so DVD Multi aims to deliver a truce that will draw consumers back to the retail counter.

While DVD Multi doesn’t make everyone adopt the same standard, it does intend for a DVD multiplayer/recorder to be able to read and write multiple formats. This kind of thinking years ago would have resulted in a VCR that played both VHS and Beta. It’s a fine idea that should make everyone happy–at a price. A multiplayer will require more components and redundant mechanisms such as multiple heads.

Computer and consumer (as in home theater) DVD drives using the trademarked DVD Multi logo will be required to read DVD-Video, -ROM, -Audio, -RAM, -RW and -R discs as well as standard CD-ROM and CD audio discs. In addition, the computer drive must be able to write on DVD-RAM, DVD-RW and DVD-R discs. If this device comes to market at a reasonable price, it’s what you should buy.

Although recent optical CD media have become more predictable and standardized, there is still a choice between the two dyes used, cyanine and phthalocyanine, and their implications for long-term viability. Dana J. Parker, the co-author of New Riders’ Guide to CD-ROM, CD-ROM Fundamentals, and CD-ROM Professional’s CD-Recordable Handbook, in a posting on the CD Info Company’s Web site writes, “…there are other, very important aspects to evaluating CD-R media besides estimated longevity and a preference for chicken soup or pea soup. It is not quite so cut-and-dried as ‘phthalocyanine discs last longer, so they are better.’ There are far too many CD-R users who, from long experience, swear by cyanine media as staunchly as you and others do by phthalocyanine. As it turns out, they have good reason to do so… It is true that phthalocyanine dye is less sensitive to ordinary light — incoherent, random light such as sunshine, ultra violet, incandescent, and fluorescent light normally found in the real world outside of CD recorders. That means that prolonged exposure to bright light–particularly bright UV light–will render cyanine media unreadable sooner than phthalocyanine. Phthalocyanine will probably last longer and preserve information better under these adverse, but extremely unlikely conditions. If we store information on CD-R media that is so valuable as to merit preservation for a long period of time–say 30 years or more, assuming, of course,
that there will be hardware capable of playing the disc at that point in the future–are we going to leave those precious discs laying out in the light and heat? No, we are going to store them carefully in their jewel cases, away from the light, heat, and scratches that are the biggest threats to data loss. Then again, if an application does not require that the data remain readable 30 days from now, who cares if the data fades in 50 years or 100? The important thing is how reliably the disc can be written and read today.” (That is the other side of light sensitivity, and it’s a significant one… It further ensures that cyanine media offers a higher likelihood of compatibility with more CD recorders…)

“Most existing CD Recorders are designed to record to cyanine media. Some CD players and CD-ROM drives will read discs recorded on cyanine media more readily and reliably than they will read discs recorded on phthalocyanine media. This compatibility is tied in with a little-discussed concept known as write strategy.”

Personally, I would strongly recommend the following for all composers concerned with their work being available in the future: acquire a CD burner and record everything you can as a documentary archive — music, papers, video, images, etc. on CD-R. On a separate CD-R, record in the most standard text file an index of the recordings. Do this on two separate formulations of CD (I am not recommending brands since they change formulations too often) producing two identical collections of documents. Although technical information and the protocols of DVD burning are still in the formative stages, this too may be a good choice for the future, especially for video, but not quite yet for audio.

Preservation of composer-specific formats:

Many of us have produced creative works in non-standard formats which are often driven by custom software, use spatialization and sound diffusion protocols, utilize hardware instruments for sound realization, employ multimedia formats, or work in areas of performance art and improvisation. Even such currently ubiquitous ‘non-standard’ formats as MAX/MSP must be considered, if history has any relevance, to be ones that will almost certainly be worthless as systems for recreating and performing the art work of the present in the posthumous future. I would even go as far to say that the CD-ROM should be considered suspect as a viable vehicle for future realization of current data. Notwithstanding the relative ease in preserving the actual data in these formats, the problem will lie in the lack of a hardware/software/system software combination to play them or realize them on. And it is clear from my research that no arts archival organization or library will be willing or able to deal with the complexities of any but the most standard playback/realization systems. As a general guide to determine which formats will last and deserving of utilization as preservation vehicles, I would employ a simple rule: Use any format but only those formats that are widely accepted in a multitude of educational, societal, archival and cultural venues, and which touch many disparate academic and artistic disciplines.

From What Might Happen To Your Music After You Die and What You Can Do About It
by Barton McLean
© 2001 NewMusicBox

It is outside the scope of this article to inquire in great detail as to the various ramifications of copyright as they apply to posthumous custodial/archival considerations. A point of emphasis might be appropriate here though. One views copyright differently from the standpoint of how it enhances and supports one while alive, from how copyright interacts with the composer’s music after death. While alive, the composer requires copyright protection as a basic floor from which she/he can realize income and delegate publication of the music. When the composer dies, this same structure may very well serve to inhibit the dissemination of the music, particularly by an archival or advocacy program, and most particularly over the Internet. For example, a publisher of a score or CD can, and often does, terminate publication, and the masters are often lost or the contractual permission to switch copyright ownership is in legal limbo. Or, the publisher might restrict dissemination of a CD or score via the Internet for research or promotional purposes via an archival service. In fact, some publishers and CD companies have very restrictive contracts in this regard. For this reason it is essential that any composer wishing to establish meaningful availability of his music after death peruse each contract with a publisher and CD company to ensure that, at the very least, she can enter into non-exclusive distribution agreements with archival establishments, so they can make the music available for research and special performances. Dead composers do not need royalties, but their music does need to grow and prosper unencumbered by inappropriate legal roadblocks (to amplify this point, see the section explaining the SAA’s Deed of Gift in Approaching Archives).

To amplify this point, Frank Proschan at the Smithsonian Institution writes to me, “At the LC conference in December, it was pointed out that most European countries in their copyright laws provide for copyright and phonogram rights to be taken over by a third party if their owner neglects them (for instance, if RCA were to decide to sit on Carter Family or Jimmie Rodgers masters, Bear Family in Germany can publish them under German copyright law, while Rounder in the U.S. can only do so with RCA’s permission). The U.S. seems to be the only major country that allows a rights-holder to consign material to legal oblivion.”

A vivid example of this was provided by Marcia Bauman, who worked on the IDEAMA project at Stanford University. About securing permission to secure archival tapes, she writes, “Elsewhere, publishers prohibited IDEAMA use of materials. Such was the case, for example, with the works of Mario Davidovsky.”

I should point out that there is a difference of opinion between archivists and librarians regarding the ownership of intellectual property. Browsing the guidelines of the Society of American Archivists, one will note that the SAA definitely prefers for the archival institution to own the intellectual rights. Betty Auman of the Library of Congress informs me that the LOC and other library institutions prefer to not own these rights. And so, when a researcher wishes to make a copy of any document not in the public domain at the LOC (or most other libraries), they must obtain permission from the copyright holder. It is my impression that librarians are simply not aware of the tremendous roadblock this impediment presents against a composer’s music being fully accessible and available after her death.

From What Might Happen To Your Music After You Die and What You Can Do About It
by Barton McLean
© 2001 NewMusicBox

The InterPARES Project is a major international research initiative based in Canada in which archival scholars, computer engineering scholars, national archival institutions and private industry representatives are collaborating to develop the theoretical and methodological knowledge required for the permanent preservation of authentic records created in electronic systems. The resulting 5015.2 standard is now being used by the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency to certify RMA vendors. This deals primarily with active records and data.

The second phase of the University of British Columbia-based project was intended to address the long-term preservation of inactive electronic records (i.e. records which are no longer needed for day-to-day business but which must be preserved for operational, legal or historical reasons). Some of the issues embedded in these reports available from their comprehensive Web site include: Authentication (signatures); third party digital time stamp (for verification); tagging, codifying, numbering data; administrative, other contexts under which documents were created; technological context of storage (hardware, software, operating system, many more criteria); formats of the data itself (text, graphic, image, sound).

From What Might Happen To Your Music After You Die and What You Can Do About It
by Barton McLean
© 2001 NewMusicBox

Indiana University has just received a $3 million grant from the Digital Libraries Initiative -Phase 2, a multi-agency federal program with funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The four-year grant will allow IU staff to establish a digital music library test bed, develop appropriate software, and seek answers to the thorny issues surrounding music-related intellectual property rights.

An essential goal of IU’s DLI2 proposal is to greatly expand access to the Digital Music Library testbed by demonstrating that users at other colleges and universities can have similar interaction with the digital collections and educational applications as will be available to students, teachers and scholars at Indiana University. Testing and evaluation of such access across national and international networks — including the commodity Internet and experimental high-performance networks — is an important component of this project. Major areas of testing will include: demonstration of interoperability, performance evaluation of network services, tests of usability, and expert evaluation of applications for music instruction and music library services.

Since IU has been in the forefront of developments in areas of digitizing and access, this would be an interesting development to follow, even though it is not directly connected to custodial/archival programs for composers.

From What Might Happen To Your Music After You Die and What You Can Do About It
by Barton McLean
© 2001 NewMusicBox

The International Digital Electroacoustic Music Archive (IDEAMA), a pioneering effort founded in 1990 and initially spearheaded by Max Mathews, was a collaborative effort between Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) and Stanford University‘s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). The following institutions were collaborating as Partner Institutions: Groupe de Recherches Musicales (INA/GRM), Paris; Institut de Recherches et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), Paris; National Center for Science Information Systems (NACSIS), Tokyo; Groupe de Musique Experimentale de Bourges (GMEB); Stiftelsen Elektro-Akustik Musik i Sverige (EMS), Stockholm; New York Public Library (NYPL), Instituut voor Sonologie, Den Haag and Instituut voor Psychoakustika een Elektronische Muziek (IPEM), Ghent. Although the NYPL was listed in this CCRMA web posting as a collaborative agent, the IDEAMA materials have not yet been cataloged, due to their being originally formatted on what, in hindsight, appears to be inaccessible or obsolete configurations.

An initial target collection of 700 electro-acoustic works and auxiliary materials of the early days (up to c. 1970), selected by boards in the USA and Europe, accompanied by a database catalogue, was established and transmitted to the affiliated institutions. On the North American side, CCRMA has been able to contribute approximately 220 works to the IDEAMA, substantially less than the anticipated 400 works that had been targeted. As a “paperless” archive, IDEAMA stored all materials entirely in digital form. The IDEAMA collection was to be publicly accessible, but, because of lack of funding and interest, is now distributed only sporadically in Europe and not at all in the USA, the only American repository being at CCRMA of Stanford University with its access severely limited due to its metadata being formatted on obsolete equipment (NeXT computer) and software (FileMaker Pro on floppy diskettes). In corresponding with some of the principals involved, it appears that all further work on this project was halted indefinitely in 1996. This must be a frustration for those who dedicated so much time to the project. The initial funding from the Mellon Foundation was substantial, supplemented subsequently by funds from the NEA and CCRMA.

What went wrong? My best guess is that they bit off more than they could chew in this pioneering time of the early 90s. Although they succeeded in finishing and digitizing the basic reduced collection, a heroic effort in itself considering the low funding amount for such a large project, the critical point of bogging down came with its organization and dissemination. For example, just consider their mission regarding this second stage as stated in a Web posting:

“Specialists at ZKM and CCRMA are developing a machine-readable database that will be linked with library retrieval systems and accessed by remote locations world-wide. The technology at IDEAMA is based on existing commercial hardware (computers, recording media, etc.), with programs de
signed for public access. Scholars, researchers, and those interested in electro-acoustic music can browse through IDEAMA’s on-line catalog, which is being designed to be consistent with international cataloging standards. Semiautomatic access to archive contents will enable music selections to be heard via jukebox or CD players.”

None of this ever happened, at least in the USA, despite the tireless dedication of some of the staff directly involved in implementing the project. The following narration may be instructive to all those who rush into an archival project without a clear vision of the end game. Marcia L. Bauman, who was most closely involved with the actual implementation of the project, recently tried to access the IDEAMA files and music after a two-year hiatus. Upon arriving at Stanford, she “was ready to log onto the NeXT machine (NeXT had been CCRMA’s platform for development during the archive years). Unfortunately, the NeXT machines had mostly been replaced, the facility is now PC/Linux based, and it seemed as though access to the online archive data was lost. But fortunately a grad student had a NeXT of his own, so we ported the text over to it, de-gibberrished it, and voilà, here it is. It is scary, as well, because the database, using FileMaker Pro, and all the information, lists of works, etc. are on floppy discs, which are becoming obsolete… I guess it’s not enough to preserve music in an archive; one has to preserve the archive with all the changing technology!!! Perhaps in the spring Jonathan will be able to get the key to the metal filing cabinet in which the archive is stored (you would never know what is in there, given how it is buried beneath old equipment and other debris in the basement!) I thought the plan to distribute it in a jukebox for the cost, which I forget, but it was very high, was not the best plan to interest other institutions…”

Other factors undoubtedly entered into the decision to halt the project, not the least of which may have been CCRMA’s institutional mission, which is more along the lines of developing software/hardware systems than fostering the resultant music. In the case of the IDEAMA program, it seems to me that the primary host institutions also lacked the structure of a collaborating library to implement the final phase of the project. My research shows that, no matter how careful the collection is assembled, it is crucial to plug into a powerful library structure at some point. This was done at one point here, when the Stanford Library advised IDEAMA on the MARC format, which is a standard archival format adopted by the Society of American Archivists. The intention to scan information such as program notes and LP jackets was abandoned, as was the original intention to use MARC format. MARC format is designed to catalog physical objects, such as a disk or text, on which information resides. However, in the case of the IDEAMA, it was the information itself that was to be cataloged, although some of the MARC format fields could be used to catalog IDEAMA information. Ultimately, the commercial database FileMaker Pro was selected, with the IDEAMA now envisioned as a simple, stand-alone entity consisting of a computer terminal and a jukebox which could be activated via the computer terminal.

And so, at this crucial point the IDEAMA project decided to abandon the collaboration with the library access structure (MARC) and go on its own, partially due to financing and external circumstances. But this may have been a mistake. Even the AMC archival and the ACA custodial programs are now closely working with libraries and professional archivists. Only libraries and archival institutions are fully equipped to deal with the mind-boggling complexities of how the archive eventually interfaces with the public. As a composer it is important to know this in evaluating the ability of an organization to carry its archival mission to completion.

Preservation is only half the game. Access is the end game.

From What Might Happen To Your Music After You Die and What You Can Do About It
by Barton McLean
© 2001 NewMusicBox

For many years the American Music Center has accepted scores and recordings (CDs in most recent years) from American composers to be placed in its library for anyone wishing to peruse the materials on site. AMC members could also request for scores and recordings to be mailed to them on loan. Materials remained with the AMC until 25 years after the composer’s death. After that period, the materials were then transferred to the Americana Collection at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Most of the holdings in the AMC Scores/Recordings Library are listed in the online searchable catalog.

As of July 1, 2001, the Collection was moved to The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, located at Lincoln Center, and is now known as the American Music Center Collection at The New York Public Library (NYPL). The most significant change in the AMC Collection policy is the fact that the AMC has closed the Collection to new donations of PAPER scores. Although the non-CD recordings were included in the move, the CD collection remains at the AMC administrative offices, and the AMC will continue to accept CD donations from members. The American Music Center Collection at The New York Public Library is, in effect, a collection of works from the 20th century. Under the new agreement, AMC will continue to circulate perusal copies of scores from the Collection throughout the world, and NYPL will house, maintain and make the original items from the Collection available for on-site perusal, listening and research. [Ed. Note: NYPL’s Lincoln Center location has been closed for renovation and will reopen in October 2001. Until then, those wishing to peruse scores from the AMC Collection should make arrangements through the AMC Information Services.]

As for the future of AMC’s promotional service to its members, a new comprehensive set of programs now under development, under the working title of NewMusicJukeBox, will function as a central clearinghouse/portal on the World Wide Web for contemporary American music and the artists who create and perform it. By providing on-demand access to audio recordings, music scores, and core information on new music artists, NewMusicJukeBox will serve as a 24-hour “virtual” listening room for new American music, with streaming and downloadable sound files and score samples for listening and perusal. Using the latest online technologies, NewMusicJukeBox will provide the new music field, as well as general audiences, with unprecedented access to composers’ works in a way that protects the artist and the integrity of the artists’ original work. AMC is making every effort to proactively address the issue of intellectual property rights throughout the architecture and design of NewMusicJukeBox. As a key part of the project development, the AMC will be addressing issues of digital rights management, rights clearance, licensing, etc.

Since this program is under intense development as I write this, there will be some changes from what I describe here to the program as finally implemented. What follows is the compilation of information from many phone calls and emails between the American Music Center’s Executive Dir
ector Richard Kessler and myself, and I am grateful to him for such a comprehensive peek at what must be a defining step for AMC and for all composers.

Regarding the transition to the new program (see below), Kessler writes: “For NewMusicJukeBox, we will accept works written during the 20th century, but only in digital format. As the years go by, we anticipate that NewMusicJukeBox will consist of a significant number of works from the 20th century.”

NewMusicJukeBox is being constructed to serve as that unique and powerful “gateway,” a single site where one can access the works of thousands of composers. As currently proposed, the NewMusicJukeBox website will consist of the following primary components:

A search engine based on composer name, musical genre, instrumentation, duration, composers’ professional interest or focus; key word, and more.
An Internet radio/webcast component with curated program themes.
Links to individual composer, performer, and/or a publisher Web sites, not just to artists and works within AMC’s own Collection, but also to resources outside the AMC Collection.
An e-commerce component, allowing users to order performance materials for purchase or rental. Here a user could order parts for a particular work, pay the purchase or rental fee online, and initiate a process whereby the parts would be printed out, bound, and mailed by a third party (such as Kinko’s Documents on Demand Center). Payment would go directly to the composers, with the AMC charging a minimal transmittal fee.

NewMusicJukeBox will utilize the most cutting-edge technology available for reproducing and distributing music over the Internet. This will require the creation of a sophisticated architecture of computer hardware, database and digital rights software, and professionally managed web server and hosting services.

NewMusicJukeBox will be supported by its own server infrastructure utilizing the Microsoft 2000 platform. Registered AMC members will use a browser-based interface to administer their works and data within NewMusicJukeBox. Composers will be able to create their own biography, inform users of their performance schedules, provide contact information, and upload audio and score files. By uploading music files with metadata to NewMusicJukeBox’s Windows Media server, members will be able to take advantage of the “On-Demand” and “Webcast” features of NewMusicJukeBox. When accessing the “On-Demand” portion of the site, users will be able to search AMC’s vast collection of works by a variety of queries, such as, composer name, title, duration, and instrumentation. The “Webcast” or “Internet Radio” aspect of the site will offer random and thematic music programming with direct links to promotional information about composers in the collection. Digital Rights Management software will ensure NewMusicJukeBox is a secure environment for composers to promote their works.

Although perusal copies of all existing scores currently in the AMC Collection at NYPL, including those of non-AMC members, will continue to circulate, the acceptance of new “virtual” scores and materials will only be on behalf of AMC members. Similarly, only AMC members will be able to take advantage of the new service. There will also be a modest fee charged for the service in addition to the AMC membership.

Notice that the inclusion of reference scores and audio materials (tapes, CDs) constitutes the body of this project. A major drawback in terms of making it possible to perform a composer’s music posthumously is that only scores are accepted — parts are not. [Ed. Note: The AMC Library was created for the sole purpose of promoting the music of American composers via perusal materials and was never intended as a resource for performance parts. However, it has always been the practice of AMC to provide information regarding sources for parts.] Even scores for, say, instrument and stereo tape will only find the score accepted, even if (as I firmly believe) the composer considers the tape part an integral part of the score. Conceivably the tape part (or its CD counterpart) can be catalogued as a separate work. Also, electro-acoustic and experimental/media composers, although they can include any materials within that traditional framework, will be prohibited from including more esoteric materials such as software, hardware, multimedia, etc., unless it can be documented within the traditional formats. Articles, work papers, diagrams of software, letters, etc. will NOT be a part of the AMC program. Instead, composers will be asked to deposit these in a library or local archive and the AMC program will provide links to these localities.

Once the basic program is in place, there may be a “secondary” thrust to include and catalog video. This will bring in more experimental and multimedia composers (such as documenting a performance using a particular hardware or experimental instrument, or documenting a performance art work).

All scores and audio materials in the program will continue to be serviced after the composer’s death according to current practices, including materials on NewMusicJukeBox (providing the composer is a member of AMC of course). No additional charges will be assessed. And so on the face of it the AMC program, although not specifically advertised as a posthumous archival service, is nevertheless a de facto one. Not being specified as such, it seems to me that could easily change in the future however.

Regarding implementation, at the time of this writing Mr. Kessler writes that “an in-house test of this program will occur in October 2001 and we expect that it will contain the works of a sample base of 25 or so composers’ works.” This is the one that also links to the Web site as described above. The sound files will be streamed in Windows Media format and mp3, and the scores in either PDF (for hand-copied, etc.) or a Sibelius format for scores available in Finale. For more experimental and handwritten scores, PDF format will be employed.

Regarding my inquiry as to exactly how AMC would deal with intellectual rights issues with scores, Mr. Kessler writes, “With NewMusicJukeBox, the copyright owner gets to determine how promotion will be handled. So, if a composer wants to allow people to print out parts from a downloaded Sibelius file–they could authorize that. If they only want people to print out a score or view the score without being able to print it out, they could do that too. If the copyright holder wants to limit access of the score to hardcopy mailed by the composer and/or agent, that can be done as well. Similarly with PDF, people could print out the score or only view it on screen. I am not saying that this solves everything–on the score side–but I think it will work out in most instances.

“On the sound file side, that’s a different question. Clearances will have to be had–I think what we will see will be different approaches depending on the clearances that a composer or publisher has for commercial recordings–whether we stream complete works or just excerpts. On the non-commercial side, where a composer has a live recording of their work, again, clearances will dictate what we can or cannot use. We also expect that there will be MIDI recordings available.”

It should be stated that the AMC programs are not specifically set up to service deceased composers. Nevertheless it is clear that they intend to do so, as Mr. Kessler states in a note to me, “The database of NewMusicJukeBox will have links to both composers’ archives/websites of composers who have work in the AMC
Collection and composers who do not. As long as the archives and Web sites remain intact, the links will remain in the database. An important point is that NewMusicJukeBox’s database will include data on all the works in the AMC Collection at NYPL.

“The works in NewMusicJukeBox (scores, sounds files, etc) will remain in NewMusicJukeBox, indefinitely. At some point, the issue of archiving will emerge–but right now, I anticipate that we will not be removing works by composers who are deceased.”

The AMC has garnered major financial support for this program from several private foundations and government agencies, including the Helen F. Whitaker Fund and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. In addition, promising applications are now pending to the National Endowment for the Arts and other agencies. In light of these prospects, and AMC’s prior history with its library program, I think we can assume that it will be around for a long time. Mr. Kessler considers the program the “core of what we do at the American Music Center.”

From What Might Happen To Your Music After You Die and What You Can Do About It
by Barton McLean
© 2001 NewMusicBox

The Library of Congress (LOC) is by far the largest archival repository and the one with which most composers are involved, whether they realize it or not. In fact there is some confusion about how this congressional research body works. First, many publishing and CD companies send their output to the LOC for placement in its general collection and obtain what is know as a Library of Congress Number. Composers may check to see if any of their output is in the general LOC collection by checking its Web search engine. If your materials are not there, contact your publisher and request that they deposit their collection in the LOC, since this is the single most important and basic archival/reference entity there is, although it is institutional-, not composer-driven. That is, there are no attendant papers, reviews, links of any kind to accompany the music in the general collection.

Second, the LOC has established over 500 special music collections. These comprise historical materials from not only composers, but critics, performers, conductors, and other music personalities, with an emphasis on ‘historical’ items. Most composers in these special collections finished their activity long before most of us were born, and include Stravinsky, Bartók, Schoenberg, etc. One of the most current composer relevant to composers living today would be Vladimir Ussachevsky, whose collection comprises personal papers, analog audiotapes, educational materials and music manuscripts. None of these are digitized nor is there any present intention to do so. Regarding the LOC’s policy of accepting materials from composers, Elizabeth Auman, curator at the LOC says in a recent far-ranging note (this refers only to special collections, not the general collection above):

“Almost all of our composers’ archives are presented in the context of special collections. Just about the only cases where this is not true is when the materials sent to us by the composer are only in one format (most frequently only musical scores). We certainly accept these, and happily, but much prefer the composer or the composer’s estate be willing to send us mixed format collections–not only music scores in manuscript, printed or computer formats, but also correspondence, programs, scrapbooks, photographs, legal and financial records, engagement books and diaries, their writings and/or lectures about music, sound and video recordings, and the like–the entire documentation of the composer’s life and works. In these cases, rather than do ‘traditional cataloging,’ which would result in the splitting of the collection by format, we create a special mixed format collection for the composer and the materials remain together. Obviously the ‘neatest’ way to deal with this is with the family or estate after the death of a composer, but we particularly enjoy working with living composers who deposit (a legal term for us, with its own kind of paperwork) their collections with us as they are able. The document involved speaks of a deposit with intent to convert to gift (usually upon the death of the composer). This lets us set up the eventual structure of the special collection, and makes archival material no longer needed in its original format by the composer available to scholars and performers within the restrictions set out by the Instrument of Deposit. It is our practice, unless the composer designates otherwise, that what we come to ‘own’ is only the physical property–the intellectual rights remain with whomever the holder normally would be.”

Regarding present composers wishing to donate materials, she continues, “There is no obligation on the part of an American classical composer (or other type of musician) to donate her archives to the Music Division of the Library, nor is there an obligation on the part of the Library to accept such offers. Typically, we look for archives of musicians (not only composers) of a certain stature. There are no firm guidelines. The hope is that there is a certain significant body of works, that–let’s assume we are talking about composers here–there have been professional performances of a number of these works, that there are sound recordings (commercial and non-commercial), that the composer (or other musician) has attained some amount of attention other than in his or her own immediate community.”

The third way a composer will be affected by the LOC is when she/he submits a work to the United States Copyright Office, which is a separate arm of the LOC. Again I quote Elizabeth Auman (to whom I am most grateful for her extensive advice on many aspects of this article), “The Copyright Office is indeed a separate part of the Library, though it is also the source of the majority (in numbers) of our general collections. Theoretically, every score or sound recording that has been copyrighted has received some form of cataloging. The Copyright Office maintains its own catalogs, however, and they are not those available on-line to users of the ‘regular’ Library of Congress catalog. The copyright catalogs can only be consulted onsite, either by a private researcher who can come to the Library, or by a member of the Copyright Office Information and Reference Division staff. Staff of that division will do searches for the public and issue reports for an hourly fee.”

And so, for all composers wishing to ensure future availability of their music, the LOC is definitely a first step. It should be pointed out that the first and third categories of the LOC above are not strictly composer archival programs, since their primary purposes are different. Neither is a new program being launched by the American Music Center strictly designed for posthumous archival repository. But both the LOC and AMC programs, as well as that of The New York Public Library, serve well as de facto archival repositories.

From What Might Happen To Your Music After You Die and What You Can D
o About It
by Barton McLean
© 2001 NewMusicBox

The New York Public Library For The Performing Arts (NYPL) is quite similar to the Library of Congress (LOC) in its importance for composers wishing to establish their music in an archival repository. Like the LOC, it contains two of the three constituents mentioned above, namely, the general circulating collection of the Branch Libraries which includes scores and CDs, and the non-circulating Research Collections administered by the Music Division, containing historical papers and documents often along with scores and CDs. Also similar to the LOC, the NYPL Music Division Research Collections will reveal, upon browsing its on-line general collections catalog, to have holdings of many composers, most typically catalogued without the special status of being amassed together as a unit with important papers, documents, etc. I was impressed to discover, for example, that virtually all of my published scores were among its holdings, unknown to me.

The Music Division houses a genuine archival repository of composer documents and papers, similar to the LOC in its organization and means of access. Some sample listings include:

The John Cage Music Manuscript Collection
The Composers’ Forum Archives
The William Schuman Papers
The Henry Cowell Papers
The Otto Luening Papers

[Ed. note: And, most recently, The New York Public Library acquired the American Music Center‘s historic collection of more than 60,000 scores and recordings of works by American composers, which will henceforth be known as the American Music Center Collection at The New York Public Library.)

Unlike the LOC, there seems to be an emphasis at the NYPL Music Division on more contemporary composers and organizations, although the LOC is taking steps to remedy this, as in its recent collaborations with Roger Reynolds. While there are no set criteria for inclusion in the archives, the Music Division decided to start with regional composers and those whose work was in the greatest danger of disappearing. Preference was also given to those composers without an institutional affiliation.

An interesting new development is the Music Division’s inclusion of electro-acoustic music among its archives. The purpose is to create an archive of electro-acoustic music of prominent regional composers. All materials will be collected, including composers’ work notes and work tapes and, of course, the music itself. Whenever possible, the original documents are kept in the form in which they were created (i.e. paper documents–notes, etc.). All music, work tapes, etc., were originally digitized and cataloged on DAT or ADAT, with plans to transfer them to hard disk. As with all research collections, they may be consulted only in the Library’s reading room.

This ambitious project is still in its early stages, having gone through changes in administration, levels of funding, and digital formats. To date, none of the half dozen or so composers’ digital archives originally slated for this project have been completed, due largely to the enormous expense involved, and the program awaits further commitment and funding.

My advice to all composers, similar to that given for the LOC, is to contact your publisher/CD company and urge that the music be deposited in the NYPL. Before offering to donate one’s archival material, however, I would strongly suggest browsing its Web site to determine if one’s output is consonant with NYPL’s institutional mission (always good advice for any archival repository). Additionally I would recommend contacting a curator at the NYPL.

From What Might Happen To Your Music After You Die and What You Can Do About It
by Barton McLean
© 2001 NewMusicBox

According to its Web site, the American Composers Alliance (ACA) Custodial Membership Plan, “guarantees the continued availability of a composer’s music for performance, recording or publication and provides other related services for the dissemination of the composer’s works after his or her death. (Note that the composer need not be a composer-member of ACA.)

Specifically the plan:

Acts as a publisher, maintaining score and part masters, distributing scores and parts for sale or rental, and royalties as a publisher would.
Provides information to musicians and the public regarding the composer, the composer’s works, and the availability of works for performance, publication or recording whether or not those works are distributed by ACA, along with maintaining an ACA catalog of the works.
Provides a place where the heirs or estate may bring questions regarding any aspect of performance, publication, copyright, or recording of the composer’s works.”

In response to the above, I wrote the Executive Director of ACA, Deborah Atherton, posing a number of thorny questions. I include her response below (which are edited for brevity) with my thanks for her taking the time for such a comprehensive reply:

“Unlike other publishers of music, we are fortunate in being able to offer a wonderful archival state-of-the art repository for their works at the University of Maryland. We encourage our composers to make separate arrangements with the University of Maryland for the originals of their works and for any papers, documents, recordings, or photographs associated with their careers that they would like to preserve. But ACA is currently committed to being, not an archive, but an active publisher. Our job is not to preserve the original physical work (except insofar as it is needed for publishing) but to keep the music itself in circulation and available. It is important to emphasize that we do not own copyrights, and do not own the original work. We are not a non-profit organization, but an association incorporated to serve our members. Our income is from our members, through dues and through the annual publisher’s share of royalties from BMI.

“Consequently, we do not have a separate non-profit organization established for custodial membership. There is a separate interest-bearing fund for custodial members fees, and very careful bookkeeping, which shows interest and amortizes the membership as the initial deposit or deposits are used. If ACA was forced to close at some time in the future, all remaining funds would be returned to the designated heirs, while the deposited works would remain at the University of Maryland. ACA takes a tiny administrative fee for administering this fund and program, one-half of one percent
of interest earned, and this, in fact, is one of the issues currently under discussion as we take a look at ACA’s future. But we encourage our composers to find a home for their original scores, papers, and recordings, in all formats; we would greatly prefer NOT to have the only original copies in our possession.

“As to the future of ACA… There is no completely safe place for art–libraries feel quite free to de-accession work they no longer want to hold (although I confess I was shocked when I first learned that). Even the wealthiest non-profits sometimes run into trouble–it wasn’t too long ago that the NYPL was in deep trouble–and for small arts organizations the future always has a big question mark. ACA is set up in such a way that both the funds and the musical works revert to the custodial members or their heirs in the case of ACA’s going out of business–and all the scores in our possession are preserved at the University of Maryland’s Performing Arts Library. Composers and their heirs will never lose anything by their arrangement with ACA, and are in fact, guaranteed a place in the University of Maryland’s collection. I think it’s a pretty good deal, though I agree, that if we could establish a very well-funded archive for contemporary music, to be held in perpetuity, it would be an even better deal. However, I would add that ACA has been in existence since 1937, and we cheerfully anticipate being in existence in 2037.”

ACA has only a BMI license, and is not licensed as an ASCAP publisher. As such, ASCAP composers are allowed to join its Custodial membership program but not ACA itself. ASCAP composers will have most privileges that BMI composers have. In return for ACA’s loss of income from publishers’ royalties of ASCAP composers’ music, ASCAP Custodial Membership composers will need to pay a somewhat larger startup fee.

The ACA Custodial membership Program is probably the only one of its kind in existence. Its goal is laudable and ambitious, and its concept is one that is sorely needed in our world. Additional correspondence with present and former officers of ACA has turned up some more thorny issues that need airing. Nevertheless, and with thanks for the honesty with which all the people responded, I will just cite some areas that composers should be aware of. First, there has been some history of the regular ACA membership program borrowing from the custodial program to meet current expenses. I am told that this is not so much an issue at present, but it is not prohibited in the bylaws. Second, ACA has undergone a bit of turmoil during the past few years, in terms of change of staff, financing and overall questioning of its mission. During that time it ceased to service current ACA members’ scores for over a year. There has also been a somewhat unsettlingly high degree of turnover in its personnel, and as of this writing, it is once again seeking another executive director (Deborah Atherton, the Executive Director quoted above, has recently resigned and a new director is being sought as this goes to press). Unlike the American Music Center, ACA’s sources of income seem to be largely derived from members’ fees and the BMI guarantee, which has been somewhat reduced over the years. One should embark on this journey (as all other journeys) with eyes open, and judge the long-term viability of any program on the total weight of the evidence.

From What Might Happen To Your Music After You Die and What You Can Do About It
by Barton McLean
© 2001 NewMusicBox

The Electronic Music Foundation seems a natural fit for establishing a type of hybrid archival/advocacy/default custodial program, perhaps in direct collaboration with one of the organizations that already has a custodial program in place, since it can effectively deal with the problem of creative formats that are virtually outside the realm of the other programs — formats such as CD-ROM, other multimedia, video, etc. It also has a history and reputation in complex web information distribution technology and programs. Whether or not this actually comes to fruition will depend on a number of factors, including the response to readers of this article (emails to me are welcome). Ideally, a prominent composer organization could take on the administration of the program, with EMF being contracted to implement the various components. The broad outlines of this very tentative proposal are as follows…

Primary Goal: To ensure that the composer’s output, research materials, history and biography be readily available to the future public. All other goals, such as financially serving the composers estate, shall be secondary insofar as they conflict with the primary goal (note: this would be a complement to the exactly opposite ACA approach). In other words, this is primarily an archival approach, and only secondarily as a default publishing approach, with the primary goal of aiding future students, researchers and devotees in the process of obtaining a comprehensive picture of where the composer’s materials may be found and accessed.

Primary strategy: To act as a composer-driven central clearinghouse, linking various sources of the composer’s music, bios, written materials, archives, etc. To implement this strategy, it would be important to encourage the member to, before formally joining the program, ensure that her/his physical works and documents (scores, CDs, letters, contracts, other papers, etc.) are deposited in one principal archival institution, and also available in as many libraries as possible (and/or be a member of the ACA custodial program and the AMC program as well). EMFCAAMP would then ideally link up to these sources rather than store the materials itself. EMFCAAMP would, however, serve as a publisher of last resort in the event of a CD or score being out of print, or the publishing/record company ceasing to exist.

It should be emphasized that, unlike most institutional archival programs, this would be totally composer-driven, in terms of the nature of its Web site, the creative output to be serviced, etc. This would come at a cost steeper than that charged by an institutionally-driven program. This cost should in large part be borne by the composer member, as the price to pay for the ability to shape the future of his artistic oeuvre.

Services Provided by EMFCAAMP:

Maintain Web site of a composer, and update into new digital formats. Periodically scan Internet, prominent doctoral dissertation archives, publications, performance venues, and find new research concerning composers’ works. Integrate any new articles, research into site with links or direct posting.

Part of this Web site would establish a list of “core” libraries. These would be large, well-known libraries which have a database of holdings searchable from the Internet (a feature which is increasingly becoming available). Incidentally, although it’s possible to log onto a particular library of this nature and search its holdings, these holding usually will NOT appear in a general Web search (say, a search under a composer’s name). That is why this service would be so important. For each custodial member, list all of his/her holdings at the core libraries in this Web site. Supplement this with a list of additional libraries that the member him/herself designates, along with its holdings of his works, this supplemental list to be provided by the member. This feature would encourage members to work with their local and regiona
l libraries to provide as much storage and archival services away from the EMF site as possible. ACA might be one such primary source to which the database could refer.

Maintain an online (streaming or download) archive of all music, video, software with development and implementation notes, media materials the composer releases to EMFCAAMP. This material must be capable of being easily digitized and must be able to be read on standard, currently available end user formats. Regarding music requiring non-standard means of technical realization (such as MAX/MSP or C language software), the primary goal shall NOT be to be able to realize a composition in live performance at a date far into the future, but rather to aid research into how the composer constructed the work. EMFCAAMP shall stay clear of archiving hardware associated with a particular performance realization, or any other type of software or hardware that required specialized maintenance skills, apart from those of maintaining and updating media in standardized formats readily playable on current technology platforms. EMFCAAMP has the sole option of accepting or rejecting any part or all of a composer’s submission of output, based on the selection criteria established above.

One aspect of this digital archive would be to make available all CDs that have gone out of print, along with other files the composer may designate (rehearsal tapes, performances, work tapes, etc.). Before death, the composer would deposit two copies of each CD to be maintained, along with a nonexclusive distribution agreement signed by the current publisher and composer, or a copy of the contract between composer and publisher which states that the composer has these rights and can release them to EMFCAAMP pending demise of the publisher or the CD going out of print.

Maintain presence of composer in the CD catalogs (equivalent of Schwann).

Develop an on-line mailing list of performers, libraries, composers, music departments, institutions, etc. Periodically send them a newsletter on-line, apprising them of the existence of each member’s work, research about her, and the availability of her work. This will keep the member’s name in front of the public. It will also serve to advertise the existence of the program, and will attract new members.

In the event of a CD (or video) company ceasing to distribute a composer’s work, the EMFCAAMP, according to a legal document set up originally between the composer, record/media company and EMFCAAMP, shall make the CD or video with liner notes and graphics available, either through the streaming/download archive, or manually via analog copy sent through mail. This would potentially mean that the copyright on the recording might revert to EMFCAAMP, and all monies accruing as the result of distribution and performance of the work would go to EMFCAAMP. (This clause inserted not to enhance EMF’s coffers, but rather to spare the EMFCAAMP from the time-consuming task of setting up a royalty distribution system to pay the estates of the composers sums which would be rather inconsequential anyway). In order to implement this particular feature, the composer would, at the time of initial commitment, need to pay an additional fee to cover the costs of a potential additional administrative burden on EMF. This fee might be on a sliding scale — sort of an insurance policy against obsolescence. It would be solely based on the potential expenses incurred by EMFCAAMP in implementing the service.

(In researching this point, all composers contacted said that they were far more interested in the ability of their work to exist and be available in perpetuity than they were in maintaining copyright protection which would only net a very small sum to their heirs and may very well complicate the process to the point of their work’s continuation being unaffordable).

Maintain an archive of paper scores either in PDF or microfilm format with digitized audio files (CD/DVD) for purposes of research and limited performance. In instances where an organization will want to perform the work and it is unavailable from the publisher (who may have ceased to exist or to publish the work), EMFCAAMP shall make it available on rental to that organization, provided the organization provide the full cost, including labor, materials, mailing, overhead, etc.). Thus, if the EMFCAAMP had in its possession a work which required an outdated hardware or software component, or extensive research into its realization, the requesting organization’s budget would be the factor determining whether or not the EMFCAAMP would make the work available. Additionally, the composer herself has the ultimate say as to whether or not her work in a non-standardized format will be performed in the future, by allocating an additional sum consonant with the complexity of maintaining any additional hardware or software necessary for the future realization of the work.

In the event a composer’s publisher of scores (and scores plus tapes) shall cease to exist, or shall return the work to the composer’s estate, EMFCAAMP shall serve as de facto publisher, maintaining this work in the archive as stated above, according to prior agreement between the composer, publisher, and EMFCAAMP. EMFCAAMP would then own the copyright, and all royalties accruing from the performance would go to EMFCAAMP.

The EMFCAAMP would take out BMI, ASCAP, SESAC licenses as copyright owner and as publisher, and would receive royalties thereof, which would go toward operating expenses of the program.

EMFCAAMP shall monitor the public domain status of all composers’ materials and as soon as a work becomes public domain, EMFCAAMP shall so clearly indicate in a prominent area on the composer’s Web site.

In the event of termination of EMFCAAMP, ownership of all materials deposited, and all digitized material related to the composer’s output, with all rights thereof, shall revert to the composer members’ heirs, as specified in the original agreement.

Before I recommend that the Electronic Music Foundation explore relationships with other composer organizations to implement some or all of these tasks, we should await ongoing developments, particularly those at AMC. It may very well be that AMC would in fact assume many of these tasks as the broad outlines of its NewMusicJukeBox jell into reality.

From What Might Happen To Your Music After You Die and What You Can Do About It
by Barton McLean
© 2001 NewMusicBox

Barton McLean has experienced both the academic and the professional worlds of the composer, having had a 20-year teaching career in theory/composition in which, as director of the electronic music/music technology programs at Indiana University-South bend and the University of Texas-Austin he and his colleagues pioneered the first large-scale commercially-available digital sequencer and sampler, and with his wife Priscilla produced 14 recordings, some of which have become staples in electronic music courses. In 1983 he and Priscilla left academia to develop their electro-acoustic duo The McLean Mix, which has proven itself in hundreds of concerts and installations throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, and the Pacific Rim.

Barton McLean’s music is characterized by the integration of nature sounds into the web of traditional and non-traditional structures, the use
of technology to articulate ideas based on environmental and cultural concerns, and the development of new instruments such as the recent sound/light project the “Sparkling Light Console.” A signature McLean Mix collaboration, Rainforest Images, has been released on compact disc by Capstone recordings. This 48-minute major work co-authored by Priscilla McLean uses resources on four continents, eleven organizations, seven live performers, and five major studios and has taken five years to assemble. Also even more recently on the Capstone label appears Gods, Demons and the Earth, and The Electric Performer. The two most recent CD releases have been his Song of the Nahutal and Etunytude on CRI, and Ritual of the Dawn, Forgotten Shadows, and Happy Days, also on CRI, both funded with grants from the Virgil Thompson Foundation. Of the four ‘signature’ Capstone recordings, Ray Tuttle writes in classical.net: “Again and again, The McLean Mix comes up with awesome sounds and textures — and I mean ‘awesome’ quite literally. Even though this is modern music that places communication with a non-specialist audience high on its agenda, listeners will get no free rides from it. They’ll have to put aside their prejudices and hear it for what it is.”

Most recently, Barton and Priscilla have collaborated on a grand multimedia installation commissioned by a consortium of universities and museums, called “The Ultimate Symphonius 2000,” premiered in 2/2000 at the Massachussets Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), and subsequently taken on tour. In addition to over 100 recent residencies at universities, and an equal number at arts centers and museums in the USA and abroad, the McLeans have recently completed residencies as guest composers at the Asian Composers League in Manila, and at the Universiti Malaysia – Sarawak.

Barton McLean is also a widely-published and respected writer and lecturer on various aspects of composer issues, esthetics, and music technology. Articles originally published in journals such as Perspectives of New Music, Leonardo Journal, SEAMUS Journal, Electronic Musician, SCI Newsletter, Sounds Australian, Music in New Zealand, and others featuring various composer issues can be read on his Web site.

From What Might Happen To Your Music After You Die and What You Can Do About It
by Barton McLean
© 2001 NewMusicBox

View from the East: Kitschometer

Posted on August 1, 2001 by Greg Sandow - Articles, Commentary

Greg Sandow

I’ve been listening to a splashy and not very wonderful (though in the end instructive) CD – The Music of Peter Boyer, a collection of orchestral works released this year by Koch. Boyer is an ambitious 31-year-old, who, his press kit says, is “fast becoming one of the most prominent young American composers.” He has roots in both film scores and symphonic composition, and to get an idea of what makes his work not very wonderful, take a look at some of his titles (and the ideas behind them): Celebration Overture, Titanic, Three Olympians – which is about three familiar Greek gods: Apollo, Aphrodite, and Ares – and finally The Ghosts of Troy, a symphonic poem based on Homer’s Iliad, with movements like “The Rage of Achilles” and “The Ransom and Burial of Hector.”

Note first that none of these subjects holds any surprise. It’s fine to write accessible music, which Boyer is proud to do, but accessible doesn’t have to mean obvious. And these pieces are obvious: We know in advance what we’re supposed to feel about every one of them. That’s most true, of course, about Titanic (which at least was written before the movie came out), and while it’s least true about The Ghosts of Troy – because most of us don’t spend much time these days with Homer – there’s something curiously ossified about making music based on Greek mythology in 2001.

Already by 1858, Greek antiquity had become so hackneyed – so corny, stiff and academic – that Offenbach parodied it in Orpheus in the Underworld, a wicked operetta in which Orpheus bores Eurydice whenever he starts to play his legendary music, and Jupiter, to pursue a woman, changes himself not into something elegant, like a swan, but into a buzzing fly. (Later, in La Belle Helène, Offenbach pictured the heroes of the Trojan War – whom Boyer glorifies – as utter, total fools.) Now, nearly 150 years later, you can write music about the ancient Greeks if you want (who’s going to stop you?), but you’d better have something striking and original to say.

Boyer doesn’t – not about the Greeks, not about Titanic, not about celebrations. We already know, as I said, exactly what we’re supposed to feel about these things, and that’s precisely what he gives us. So Titanic, with its ominous beginning, its ship’s band playing dance music, and a tam-tam crash when the iceberg hits, isn’t tragic, or even mildly sad; instead it’s almost comforting, because it’s so predictable.

In Three Olympians, Ares, the god of war, sounds vigorous, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love, sounds lyrical, but not in any way that makes either figure live. Their qualities don’t seem to come from life, or from an active imagination, but from other peoples’ music. Ares is vigorous, not as a god might be vigorous, but as many tonal works from the last century have been; Aphrodite is lyrical the way film scores are lyrical. Neither sounds remotely Greek, ancient, or anything else (superhuman? primitive? cruel?) that might make them worth writing music about.

Worse still, these secondhand feelings are dressed in secondhand music. The last piece on Boyer’s CD, New Beginnings, commissioned by a hospital in Michigan, to celebrate the opening of a new facility, starts with a figure right out of Carmina Burana (the beginning of “Were diu werlt alle min“). Celebration Overture borrows something a little more highbrow; it starts with a fanfare straight from Stravinsky‘s Agon. “Ares” gets caught in memories of “Gnomus,” from Pictures at an Exhibition; the second Troy movement visits West Side Story. I once heard a classical piano piece by Billy Joel; it was competently written, but every bar, I thought, should have had a footnote to piano music by Debussy or Rachmaninoff. I feel the same way about The Music of Peter Boyer; every moment could probably be traced to some earlier (and better) source.

Why does this matter? Not because Boyer ‘s music is middlebrow; so is Massenet‘s, but Massenet is wonderfully elegant and sensual. Nor do I mind that Boyer is ambitious, able to score commissions from the Kalamazoo hospital and from orchestras like the Toledo Symphony (and, most impressively, to raise money to pay for this CD, stunningly recorded with the London Symphony). I can only congratulate him. This is an age, after all, when many, if not most, classical recordings are subsidized, and when major opera companies ask composers to raise their own commission fees (a dismaying fact I’ve only recently learned); Boyer sets an example for all of us.

Nor is it troubling that Boyer is good at what he does, not so much in constructing his works (they tend to be patchy), but in writing catchy themes (even when they’re partly by other composers), and, above all, orchestrating brilliantly. There’s something at the end of Celebration Overture where a piccolo blesses a gloopy movie theme, and sounds like all the stars in the sky bending down to kiss the searchlights at a movie premiere. I wouldn’t quite call writing that an artistic achievement, but still it’s stunning.

No, this music matters, at least to me, for two other reasons. First, I think I can guess why it’s found at least some small success. (“I don’t remember any other time when we did new music that it was received like Titanic,” said Andrew Massey, the music director in Toledo. “It got an instantaneous standing ovation from the whole audience.”) A large part of the symphony audience likes comfortable music. It likes familiar music. It likes repeating the same familiar music many times. And here we have a composer who repeats familiar sounds, repeats familiar feelings, and even repeats some of the familiar music that (except for Agon) his audience already likes. He touches on safe and tasty motifs from popular culture, even while his Greek themes make his music se
em like art. Happily for sponsors, its style makes it sound like advertising. Even if he never gets to the Cleveland Orchestra, he’s bound to get somewhere.

And his music also matters for a deeper reason. I wrote three months ago that we ought to look at our return to tonality, to ask what it means, what it’s doing, why it’s classical, why it’s worth more than advertising jingles. Or, alternatively, why it doesn’t need to be – as long as we know why we’re writing it.

Boyer offers one way to start this discussion. When we freed ourselves from the atonal yoke, we sighed with relief, because now we could write anything we wanted. (No, I’m not saying that atonal music is bad – see my Wall Street Journal piece on Webern on my Web site to see how much I love some of it – but only that it oppressed many of us when it was the dominant, all but compulsory style.)

But where, exactly, did we want to go with our freedom? The atonal crowd, Charles Wuorinen most vocally (but also Pierre Boulez, and Charles Rosen, writing a few years ago in the New York Review of Books), is happy – feels vindicated, I think – to assume that new tonal music is, by its very nature, empty, weak, nostalgic. Boyer shows that this is sometimes true, but what standards do the rest of us have? Or, more precisely, have we ever said what they are? What was the meaning of the tonal music composers like Sibelius, Barber, and Vaughan Williams wrote while the atonal wave was growing higher? We don’t have to accept the old view that 20th-century music progressed to Schoenberg, and then to Webern, Carter, and Boulez, leaving everybody else spinning in backward eddies, but what can we put in its place? I’m not happy simply to say we’re free again to express ourselves, as if self-expression was in itself an absolute good. What’s being expressed? Has new tonal music been shaped by the atonal experience? (Boyer’s doesn’t sound like it was.) Should it be? How could we tell?

I don’t have answers, but maybe I can start to clarify the questions.

There’s already a familiar (and not always pleasant) term that might describe Peter Boyer’s music – kitsch. This is a word I’ve resisted in the past, because it’s long been linked, most famously by the seminal modernist art critic Clement Greenberg (in his 1939 essay “The Avant-Garde and Kitsch“), with disdain for popular culture. Greenberg took for granted that all pop culture (not that this phrase existed then) was kitsch, or in other words cheap, sentimental, manufactured trash, and others made that assumption, too. So when he so famously wrote that “The alternative to abstraction is not Michelangelo but kitsch,” he was defending abstract art – which needed defending in 1939 – against absolutely all current alternatives: All popular culture, and almost all new figurative art. That makes him the godfather of our own atonal purists. Compare his position to Boulez‘s: Boulez says anyone writing tonal music today is engaged in nostalgia (which would make their work an especially sentimental kind of kitsch), and once, years ago, he told me that all rock songs were alike, presumably because the “culture industry” manufactures them for sale to the masses. (This used to be a dominant idea in culture theory, stemming from the work of Theodor Adorno.)

But luckily a younger generation of culture theorists (not to mention a younger generation of artists, working in the wake of pop art) has freed the concept. Some of them embrace kitsch with real affection; others show how it can be used as a weapon against both high-art pretense and commercial trash. (If Jeff Koons paints something coldly commercial, he’s both showing how offensive it can be to make a fetish of paintings, and also how bad commercial things can be.) Finally, these theorists have noted what by now ought to be obvious, that high culture has married itself to commerce (and also, though this point isn’t made enough, to the crassest self-promotion in the non-profit sector), and that popular culture can often be far more honest and creative. In any case, something very much like Greenberg’s battle gets fought in pop culture, too, though the terms are very different, and the good and bad guys harder to tell apart, even with a scorecard, especially since kitsch gets routinely used as a weapon. When the Pet Shop Boys turned U2‘s “Where the Streets Have No Name” into trashy dance music, combining it with Frankie Valli‘s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” they were making fun of both U2 and trash (though from a conversation I had with them – and of course from their music – it’s obvious that they like trash a lot better, except for really flagrant pop-chart junk).

But in any case kitsch – both the concept, and some of the literature about it – makes a good start for the discussion of tonal music I want to have. Why is tonal music, written now or during the growth and reign of atonality, not kitsch? Are there ways in which it can be sentimental or retrogressive? What did it mean when it came back to challenge atonal music in the ’80s and ’90s?

I may not answer all these giant questions, but the theory of kitsch can teach us something. Unlike music critics, art and culture critics discuss these things with genuine depth. They’ve calibrated their vocabulary, by which I mean that so many of them have discussed these subjects that they’ve forged some common understanding of what words and concepts mean. We can use them to calibrate our own thinking, to help us understand what’s really going on. (And the theory of kitsch is just a beginning. Though I’m not going to do it here, we might also look at what art critics wrote when representational art came back. Changes in music haven’t happened in a vacuum, which makes it comical, sometimes, to read Wuorinen‘s complaints. Though simply painting Wuorinen as Clement Greenberg’s heir shows just how out of date he is.)

So what is kitsch? All of us more or less know. In the words of one dictionary, the Random House Webster‘s, it’s “something of tawdry design, appearance, or content created to appeal to popular or undiscriminating taste.” But then the American Heritage Dictionary calls it “Art or artwork characterized by sentimental, often pretentious bad taste,” which, it’s impossible not to notice, isn’t quite the same definition. Kitsch, it’s clear, isn’t a word with one fixed meaning. Instead, it evokes a constellation of related thoughts – not just that some piece of art is cheap or trashy, but that it’s sentimental and pretentious, and maybe manufactured, deliberately, for people who have no taste. That last notion complicates the word. It’s too harsh for Peter Boyer’s work. He might have bad taste himself, but I doubt he panders to anyone; surely he likes his music as much as his audience does.

Moving onward, here are more words I’ve found attached to the notion of kitsch: “schmaltz,” “glitz,” “garish,” and “gaudy,” though of course all of these can describe things some of us adore, like (take your pick) Ein Heldenleben, Star Wars, or Messiaen‘s Turangalila Symphony. But here we run into a delightful ambiguity, because to some of us these words are almost always negative, while others of us might sometimes like what they describe, while in other cases finding it excessive. Take, for instance, the music director of one of our leading orchestras, who conducted Turangalila and then told me with a wicked smile backstage that the piece is really kitsch. And yet he conducted it, which means he must think it has some kind of value. Kitsch doesn’t have well-defined borders; some things can be partly kitsch, apparently, and partly not. (A distinction that needs to be still further refined, because the Pet Shop Boys know what’s kitsch in their work, but Messiaen, if his work really is kitsch in any way, obviously didn’t.)

Heidi Lowe, a student at Unity College in Maine, can help us here with a smart observation I found on her Web site. She says kitsch is a “failed attempt at seriousness,” which lets Messiaen off the hook, at least for me, since I think Turangalila is successfully serious, no matter how silly its glitz might seem. The conductor I mentioned couldn’t take the work as seriously as I can; for him, it was just too kitschy, which shows that to some extent kitsch lies mainly in the eye of the beholder. (Lowe, to clarify some of these issues, says art that’s kitschy on purpose isn’t kitsch at all, but camp.)

And here are still more thoughts about kitsch, gleaned from a long search on the Web. (Since I looked only there, maybe my own investigation is nothing but kitsch scholarship). Kitsch is fake art, entertaining, easy to understand, reproduction of something else, easily accessible, full of quick and predictable effects, and built on a sentimental view of the past. Kitsch is also built with forms not appropriate to its content; it delivers predictable messages in stereotyped aesthetic packages (which sounds like my thoughts about Boyer’s music).

More precisely, Tomas Kulka, a much-quoted scholar of aesthetics, set forth three conditions for kitsch in his book Kitsch and Art. These are the most helpful calibration I’ve yet seen of the concept (at least as I’m trying to use it), and might help us decide just how much kitsch is in any piece of art we’re trying to understand:

1. Kitsch depicts objects or themes that are highly charged with stock emotions.

2. The objects or themes depicted by kitsch are instantly and effortlessly identifiable.

3. Kitsch does not substantially enrich our associations relating to the depicted objects or themes.

Boyer, pretty obviously, would pass (or is it fail?) this test, with flying day-glo colors. (Kulka states, far more concisely than I did, everything I said was going on, or not going on, in Boyer’s work.) Turangalila, at least on my scorecard, would emerge unkitsched – some of Messiaen’s musical material might sound kitschy, but the emotions are far too ecstatic to come from anybody’s stockroom, and I come away from a performance very substantially enriched. (But then who says they sound kitschy? I do, but maybe only because I have associations with them that Messiaen couldn’t have. He writes lots of added-sixth chords, which make me think of sloppy pop songs that end with one. But that wouldn’t have been Messiaen’s association. To put the matter much more graphically, I imagined, when I first heard Turangalila, that if Messiaen had lived in an American suburb, his house would have had the most outlandish Christmas lights. Cute, but not literally true, since when Messiaen did visit America, he hated our culture, and only liked the ravaged, noble landscapes of the southwest. He, unworldly as he was, might have said his music sounded like Bryce Canyon. And who’s to say he’s wrong? Here I might quote a lovely thought from an almost despairing study of modern kitsch by Roger Scruton: “The opposite of kitsch is not sophistication, but innocence.”

But now let’s look at why kitsch exists… It’s an exaggeration of romanticism, one standard explanation goes. Another says that it emerged together with the rise (in the 19th century) of an uncultured middle class, which demanded art, even if it wasn’t educated, wise or leisured enough to do the work real art demands. This shows how pop culture got lumped with kitsch – kitsch is art for the untutored masses – but what’s more interesting is to see how kitsch is entwined with modernity.

One condition of modern life (“modern,” in this sense, might mean everything from the start of the 20th century) is that things keep changing, faster than many people like. Thus kitsch emerged to provide an illusion of stability. It’s comforting, predictable, an “escape [as someone wrote] into the idyll of history where set conventions are still valid.” Or, to put that differently, it’s an escape into a vision of an ideal history that never quite existed, one in which familiar, but now obsolete artistic conventions still seem powerful. It’s shallow because it ignores reality.

Or,as Sam Binkley says in his essay “Kitsch as a Repetitive System: A Problem for the Theory of Tastes,” kitsch “strikes the posture of meaningful art without departing from a stockpile of tried and true devices.” Though Binkley shades his view by suggesting that kitsch has its own kind of honesty, because – rather than being crassly manufactured by people who don’t believe in it – it represents a genuine taste for “derivation, imitation and a faithfulness to the tried and true.” A taste, that is, for safe art. It “reduces all the complexity, desperation and paradox of human experience to simple sentiment, replacing the novelty of a revealed deeper meaning with a teary eye and a lump in the throat.”

And here we come to something I think is important, one reason why, in art, you c
an’t literally repeat the past, why you can’t write music in our day the way Rachmaninoff or Puccini did, why (at least in my view) you can’t write tonal music as if atonal music (and all the rest of modernity) never happened. Or at least it’s very hard to do it, in our age, with any kind of innocence. Suppose you love nature, as many of us do. So you write music in which you show how lovely nature is. Beethoven could do that without affectation, because nature, in his day, was still uncomplicated. He just walked outside Vienna and enjoyed it.

But in our time, nature can’t be simple in our art, because it isn’t simple in our thinking. For one thing, we’ve had centuries of music in which nature is depicted. How do we separate our spontaneous reaction to hills and fields from the musical languages in which we’ve heard them painted? And what is our spontaneous reaction? Nature might be disappearing. It’s polluted. It’s attacked by power lines and snowmobiles. A spontaneous reaction, if we’re thoughtful, includes all that. Our love of nature inevitably is tinged with anger, disappointment, nostalgia, a determination to make things better, or much else I haven’t thought of. We might evoke nature in its full complexity, with ugliness and blood and death. And even to depict nature as uncritically lovely is a complex stance, since it means denying, at least temporarily, that there are problems.

Writing tonal music is less complicated. Still, it’s hard to do with total innocence. You can’t help glancing sideways at other possibilities, watching yourself choose a style that isn’t “difficult” or “ugly.” Of course, in our age, you can’t use any style without knowing that you’ve chosen it, so many things that once seemed pure can be fraught with irony. (playing an electric guitar solo, or singing, in a country twang, about your favorite honky-tonk). But writing tonal, “emotional,” “expressive” music has special dangers, above all the chance of falling into feelings that everyone already knows about, and unconsciously congratulating yourself for doing that. (I’m afraid that I might do this on my website, where I praise myself for writing music directly from my heart.)

In a much-quoted passage from The Incredible Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera describes exactly how all this can happen:

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: how nice to see children running on the grass!

The second tear says: how nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!

It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

When modernity struck full force, with all its changes, that second tear emerged in art that wasn’t modern. That’s why abstraction (both in painting and, as atonality, in music) seemed so welcome – because it avoided all temptation to be sentimental. Not that abstraction can’t turn into kitsch. When I was a kid in the ’50s, the annual Washington Square art show was, as I now can understand, all kitsch, all landscapes and portraits, safely figurative, free from any ugliness or ambiguity. (The seascapes were the worst, if I remember rightly.) And then one year abstraction was apparently allowed – and the abstract paintings turned out to be mere decoration, as shallow and even gaudy as the landscapes.

In tonal music, we maybe should avoid that second tear.

III

And now a few test cases, so I can start applying all these principles. I won’t come to any grand conclusions, but at least I’ll show, if all goes well, what could be done.

Example 1: Strauss‘s Four Last Songs.

Here we’re clearly in a danger zone, with these pieces bathed in post-romantic twilight, written late in life, in 1948, by a composer who abandoned modernism early on, and who’s known for schmalz, glitz and sentiment. Someone dear to me who loves this music blanched when I said I’d put them in my kitschometer: “I know that they’re a guilty pleasure,” she said.

When I put them on as background music, as I might listen to a pop song in my car, with no attention to the words, they seemed to favor only one emotion: nostalgia. That might be the scat of kitsch, if this was music built on a sentimental view of the past, or highly charged with stock emotions.

Then I read the poetry the songs are based on (by Hesse and von Eichendorff), and thought nostalgia had been confirmed. Three of the titles sound nostalgic, or at any rate suggest a world of sunset, heading for the frost of night: “September,” “Going to Sleep,” “In Twilight.” “Summertime shudders quietly to its end,” says one line from the second of these. And the first song in the cycle, “Spring,” begins as if it’s all a dream.

But then I listened carefully and found a different view. It struck me, first, that nostalgia might have its own detailed geography and in fact the songs supported that. They explored nostalgia, testing territory that it shares with loss, regret and resignation. I can’t say then that the feeling here was stock emotion, or that the music didn’t “substantially enrich [my] associations relating to the depicted objects or themes.” It struck me, too, that Strauss had earned the right to be nostalgic (more, maybe, than he had in 1911, when from a modernist point of view he backtracked from the angst of Elektra to the sweetness of Der Rosenkavalier). He was 84, and his world had died, not just because atonality had swept his musical style away, but because it had literally been killed, by the Nazis and by two world wars.

And never in these songs do I feel him thinking that the past was perfect, or even necessarily much better. (Even Der Rosenkavalier is bittersweet.) Instead I feel a sense of loss, intense and purely personal. Nor is the music built with past materials. Strauss returned, as I hear his way of writing, to consonance, but not to traditional tonality. One sign of this in the Four Last Songs and elsewhere are shifts from key to key without any modulation, so that chord changes often feel like shifts of color, not steps in any orderly progression, even if they come home safely to the tonic in the end. The effect can be exhilarating, as if life were constantly renewed, which brings the music ecstasy, but doesn’t always make it comfortable.

Another less than obvious stroke is in the third song, which far more than the others has the kind of tune you might want to hum. But the melody is both modest and delayed. It’s not highlighted in the piece; there’s no second tear, of the kind that might say “Big tune coming!” It just quietly emerges. One oddity is that the contour of the orchestral music at the start of the song seems much like music in the third act of Wagner‘s Die Walk¸re, associated with Brünnhilde’s magic sleep. Clearly there’s a connection to this song, which is titled “Going to Sleep.”

The co
nnection might seem arbitrary, one of those fault lines (like Boyer’s memories of West Side Story) that betrays a composer’s lack of any depth. Brünnhilde, after all, is put to sleep by her father, to awaken whenever a hero appears who’s not frightened of the magic fire surrounding her. This sleep is temporary and is meant to have a happy ending. But the sleep in Strauss’s song is death, and even if death has its own happy ending in heaven, that should be grander than Brünnhilde’s awakening, which is merely to love and in fact turns out not happily at all. There might also be an almost random connection in the text, which would be even shallower. Hesse talks about sleeping inside “the magic circle of night”; Brünnhilde’s fire also forms a magic circle.

But so what? Strauss wasn’t exactly a deep intellect, and it’s the feelings here that count. It’s true (and we can hold this against Strauss, if we like) that the melodic contour that’s like Wagner (a rise of a seventh in the middle of a phrase) also gets embedded in the song’s main tune, but it matters more to me that the passage doesn’t feel at all like Wagner. The connection is interesting to think about, but doesn’t distract me from the piece. Strauss might even be quoting Wagner on purpose, much as, in the last song, he quotes a passage from his own Death and Transfiguration. If that’s the case, then he gets points for doing it so deftly.

There’s one last point to make, about the air of resignation in this work, which I think is touched with an unsteady fear at the approach of death. I hear that shiver in the final song, “At Twilight,” where a gorgeous landscape, growing dark, provokes the thought, “We must not go astray/In this solitude.” At “go astray” (“verinnen”), the music grows uncertain, changing color oddly, and moving softly through the kind of dissonance that, if it had been blasted out fortissimo, might have made everyone think Strauss had returned to the wilder harmony of Salome. Meanwhile, there’s a queasy little rising scale in an inner voice that’s almost like a touch of fearful nausea. The effect is very quiet, with no second tear, no “listen to me grow afraid of dying.” In fact, fear doesn’t seem to be what’s really happening. It’s more like somebody realizing, with full clarity, that no one knows what’s really coming.

Near the end of the song, where death at last is named, Strauss also makes no commentary. Instead, the harmony gets lost in one of his extended chord successions. At the very end it settles on a major chord, with distant high flourishes by two piccolos (or that’s who seems to play them; I haven’t looked at a score). These could be kitsch, heaven as depicted on a sentimental greeting card, but maybe not, because they’re so distant and restrained. They might be the promise of an afterlife, but seen only from afar, with no radiance strong enough to touch us now.

Example 2: John Williams, score for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace

Years ago I got annoyed at Williams’ music for The Empire Strikes Back, much as I got annoyed at Boyer now. I remember sneering at some passage that, I thought, was really the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto.

But this new score doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, I love it. Maybe I’ve changed; maybe Williams changed. Certainly I look at Star Wars more affectionately (though I wouldn’t call myself a fan; I haven’t seen The Phantom Menace). And I’ve developed a soft spot for Williams, because I interviewed him once and found him completely unassuming, a musician’s musician who didn’t glow with any cinematic self-importance. He kept dropping names, but not the Hollywood names you might expect. Instead, they were people I didn’t come close to recognizing. “You don’t know that guy?” Williams would say, in disbelief. “But he was the best bass player in New York in 1956!”

Obviously Williams borrows from 19th-century symphonic works. But what, exactly, does he borrow? I don’t sense that he’s taken much from any work, or any one composer. Strauss would be the most obvious suspect, but I’ve just been listening to Strauss, and I don’t hear any close relationship. (Granted, the Four Last Songs are a very late work, far from the world of Also Sprach Zarathustra, which might be a closer comparison to Star Wars, but there are things about Strauss’s style that don’t change.) What Williams might have done was borrowed only a general kind of composition, a kind of sound, a kind of musical material, and a way of using it.

What I hear most in this score is, first, the movies – all of them, then all the Star Wars films, then my conception, from the music, of what this one might be like. The score sounds spectacularly cinematic, so much so that I almost feel I’m seeing a movie as I listen. And when I hear Star Wars, I’m reminded that one of Williams’s great strengths is his ability to inhabit the world of each film he works on, and for Star Wars he’s developed a sound no one could mistake for anything else.

Three things, maybe, separate this score from an orthodox symphonic work. First is the use of a wordless chorus, a typically cinematic touch of extra personalization, voices that often feel like they’re saying, “Look, we’re here, seeing this with you.” Maybe that’s Kundera’s second tear, but maybe it’s also a kind of companionship. The question might be: Do the voices tell us what to feel, or do they simply join us in feeling it?

Secondly, the music somehow sounds backlit, like the extra-bright screen on my little Pocket PC, as if the instruments (especially high solo winds) were glowing. Maybe this is a recording effect, an extra halo of reverb around the sound, creating something (which is easy, with digital FX software) that couldn’t exist in a concert hall.

Finally, there’s at least one moment that couldn’t occur in standard symphonic harmony, three parallel triads at the end of the main Star Wars theme. For the usual reasons I can’t quote it here, but we all know how it goes:

dah dah, di di di dah dah, di di di dah dah, da da da dum

It’s that last “da da da dum” where the triads show up, a dazzling sequence of A flat, G minor, A flat, and F, all in the key of B flat. These just couldn’t occur in the kind of European music that might have had a melody like this. The triads serve as a genetic marker, placing the piece firmly in our own time and giving it some unmistakably contemporary glitz. I used to think they’d pass a DNA test for kitsch, but now I’m not so sure. Or maybe I like the kitsch they represent. All I can say, in the end, is that this clearly doesn’t have the dignity of any concert piece but maybe that’s why I like it.

Example 3: Vaughan Williams, Symphony No. 6

The liner notes for the recording I’ve been hearing (
a 1991 Teldec release with the BBC Symphony, conducted by Andrew Davis) gave me plausible reasons to respect this piece: The music, or so the notes insist, is full of a despair so intense that it verges on “ultimate nihilism.”

And yet what I mostly hear are the rhetorical sinews of a Symphony, with an imposing uppercase S. I’m especially struck by large and very muscular rhythmic gestures, the kind that suggest, to me, anything but despair. I hear the hammer of angry but restrained and always competent fists. And their language (if fists can have a language) is conventional. They’re boxing, with a referee in charge, not losing all control. This is the language any conservative composer might have used in 1948 (the year of this work, like Strauss’s Four Last Songs). It’s also the language of the 19th century.

I hear this even in the last movement, which might be the least orthodox (and has some fabulous pileups of dissonant harmony, though they’re treated, in effect, as a collection of neighbor notes that quickly resolve and have a nearly precise antecedent, in function though not at all in mood, in an ominous motif from Wagner‘s Gˆtterdämmerung).

So no matter how much I try to sympathize with this piece, I hear – or rather feel – its language, and almost never what the language might be trying to say. The language is too conventional, at least to my ear, for anything like despair. The world has ended (an echo, maybe, of World War II), the landscape is strewn with wreckage (an image directly from the liner notes), and yet the rhetoric of a symphony remains. That world still stands. So how bad could things really be?

The liner notes quote something Deryck Cooke, the British musicologist, wrote after this work’s premiere: “I remember my attention was distracted, near the end, by the unbelievable sight of a lady powdering her nose – one wondered whether it was incomprehension, imperviousness, or a defence-mechanism [sic].” But the language of the music really does suggest, to me, the continuity of everything conventional in life, including women’s makeup. The symphony, in its sturdy way, wears its own kind of makeup, especially compared with Mahler‘s Ninth, which did evolve a language of despair.

This makes me realize that Strauss’s rhythms, in the Four Last Songs, flow in a way we’d rarely find in older tonal music. Their bones don’t show, something not true in this Vaughan Williams symphony. The piece, bluff and honest as it is, meets one test of kitsch: It’s built with a rigid skeleton of older musical devices, inappropriate (at least to my ear) for its content.

Example 4: Jake Heggie, The Faces of Love (a collection of songs on a BMG CD)

Solid, highly competent tonal music, sung by a striking array of current divas who all support Heggie’s work: Renée Fleming, Jennifer Larmore, Sylvia McNair.

But there’s nothing original about these songs. That’s most true when Heggie wants to be colloquial, in, for instance, a song about a cat or one about the serpent tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden. Both songs use a vaguely jazzy Broadway idiom, in the manner of “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” or (maybe a more direct ancestor) “Whatever Lola Wants,” from Damn Yankees. I’m sure this comfortable and in its day delightful sound is one of many things that make Heggie so attractive for so many people, especially including singers. “Look, he’s no highbrow. He’s an artist, but he’s also one of us. He’s an up-to-date American.”

He also shows he’s up-to-date by using poetry with modern thoughts, like this passage from “Listen,” by Philip Littell in which Eve is speaking:

Do you want to be like God?

How do you mean?

Be old and have a penis?

I don’t think so. No.

But old Broadway musicals aren’t up-to-date, and the problem with the songs is that they fall into categories and within each category they tend to sound alike. All the jazzy songs might as well be identical – the cat, described affectionately, could just as well be the serpent, to judge from its musical speech. The serious emotional songs also seem too much the same, no matter what their poetry says they’re about.

So in the end the enterprise here seems merely to be writing songs, not rendering what the poems (or, more deeply, anything about life) might mean. I hate to say this, since Heggie seems utterly sincere, writes music very skillfully, and is fabulous at the purely musical business of setting words, something I complained about (in this space, a couple of months ago), because most current composers don’t do it well.

For this reason, Heggie might fill several requirements for kitsch, curiously updated because he doesn’t necessarily (thinking back to Kulka’s three conditions) depict subjects highly charged with stock emotions. The poetry he chooses is better than that. But his way of treating it is immediately identifiable (as something done before in many other songs, by many other people), and so his settings don’t enrich the poetry at all. One quick example. The first song on the CD sets a typically brief Emily Dickinson poem, “I Shall Not Live In Vain.” If Heggie simply used the words as Dickinson wrote them, his song would be, by conventional standards, uncomfortably short. Maybe that’s why – rather shockingly, at least to me – he repeats the poem. That makes the song as long as he evidently thought it ought to be but kills the poetry.

But I don’t feel like blaming Heggie for this. I’d rather blame the current state of classical music, which as an enterprise is shot through with kitsch because what it mostly does is repeat the comfortable past. Yet at the same time, there’s a longing for something new and for contact with the world outside. Heggie provides these things, but since he still repeats the past, his audience can have its cake, and eat it, too.

Example 5: David Del Tredici, Final Alice

This masterpiece from 1976 might sound like kitsch to many people, and certainly did when it was new and tonal music from academically respectable composers still was new and shocking. Its Alice in Wonderland subject could have seemed hackneyed and sentimental; its tonal melodies, especially the “Acrostic Song” at the end, could have seemed sugary sweet.

But to me the music isn’t kitsch at al
l. Perhaps it uses kitsch, because Del Tredici knows, just as well as any of his high-culture critics (and probably better), how tired the Alice stories now can be, and of course how sweet his tunes are. That’s one reason he loves them.

But this just makes him modern. He can’t be kitsch, at least for me, because of a word he uses in his own comments on the piece: “pandemonium.” There’s a lot of pandemonium in his music, which means that Final Alice isn’t only sweet; it’s wild and noisy. Wild, noisy and lots of fun, I might add, though I’m not sure Jake Heggie’s audience would agree. To them (I hope I’m wrong) it might sound too crazy to be fun, too undisciplined – though really Del Tredici’s compositional technique is stunning) – and too destructive. One thing that gets battered is the initial pretty melody, which serves as the basis for a set of variations. There’s a soprano, who narrates the story and plays all the characters; she has to almost shriek parts of the tune in her highest range, repeating phrases till they sound deranged.

This isn’t only fun; in some ways, it’s frightening. Instead of simply finding in his subject everything that everyone has found in it before, Del Tredici unearths his own vision of Lewis Carroll‘s long-ago craziness, not to mention the unavoidable fright of poor Alice. Maybe she’s a character in a fairytale, but at the climax of Lewis Caroll’s story (and this piece), she’s confronted with an angry Queen who wants to take her head off. That’s not completely funny.

But then we learn it’s all a dream, and when the lovely and serene “Acrostic Song” (so called because the first letters of each line spell out the name of the little girl Carroll wrote these stories for) brings the piece to a conclusion, Del Tredici has earned its serenity. He’s fought through to it from chaos. (The song, I might add, feels like a resolution in part because of one harmonic detail: before the end, the music always comes to rest not on any tonic, but on the dominant). In his final innocence, he does one of many things in the piece that couldn’t occur in any standard tonal work – the members of the orchestra whisper the initial letter of each line of verse, spelling out, by the end, the full acrostic. The sound of their massed whispering is like a benediction. Of course, it could be kitsch; it’s a standard trope in kitsch theory that kitsch steals things from the avant-garde (just as the old Washington Square art show stole abstraction). But here in Final Alice, it’s nothing less than magical.

And here I remember that the opposite of kitsch is innocence, and that even stubborn theorists of kitsch find representational art they like, especially Edward Hopper, who, says Roger Scruton, “worked to purify the figurative image and to see again with the innocent eye.” That’s what Del Tredici has done with Alice. He fought his way to innocence, the story’s, his music’s and, more importantly, his own, an achievement all the more impressive because he starts – in his cultural sophistication, his sense of camp and his mastery of compositional technique – with so much weighty knowledge. In this, I feel he speaks for me, and maybe all of us, by showing it’s precisely through modernity, and maybe only through modernity, that tonal writing can be fresh again.

(Further subjects for discussion: Arvo Pärt, Carlisle Floyd, Philip Glass, John Corigliano. And my own tonal music, which I was too abashed and too scrupulous – I don’t want to promote myself, and can’t pretend to be objective – to mention here.)</p

View from the West: New Music Ensembles, Composers, and Commissions

Posted on August 1, 2001 by NewMusicBox Staff - Articles, Commentary

Dean Suzuki
Photo by Ryan Suzuki

Commissions and residencies have been a way of life for composers since time immemorial. Just recently, on the twentieth anniversary of the premiere of Harmonium, the first commissioned work by then Composer-In-Residence John Adams, the San Francisco Symphony announced a long-term commissioning relationship with the composer. Over the next ten years Adams will write four pieces, beginning with a work to be written for the San Francisco Symphony’s 2002-03 European Tour and concluding in the 2011-12 season with a composition in celebration of the orchestra’s centenary. Adams’s relationship with the SFO has been a fruitful one that has already resulted in four commissions, performances of seventeen works and many world, U.S. and West Coast premieres.

Adams was appointed first as New Music Advisor to the SFS in 1979, then as the Orchestra’s Composer-In-Residence, a position he held until 1985. Along the way, he not only received commissions, but he directed a new music concert series that was quite successful and contributed tremendously to the local new music scene, adding vitality, strength and diversity.

While no one can deny that Adams deserves the new commissions from the SFS, such relationships are both difficult to come by and are few and far between. Adams’s high profile serves both the composer and the orchestra, but few composers are as well known, successful and popular.

What then, are some of the other possibilities? Clearly, there are hosts of new music ensembles with their own idiosyncrasies, biases and funding mechanisms. Some offer unique instrumentation, others are composer led and oriented, and then there is the old “uptown”/”downtown” orientation/polemic/conundrum.

The string quartet has enjoyed a tremendous renaissance over the past few decades, due in large part to the commissioning prowess of the Kronos Quartet and more recently, the Arditti String Quartet which has, in the past few years, come to great prominence, though they have been around for nearly as long as Kronos. Both ensembles have commissioned and premiered hundreds of works. The Kronos Quartet alone has commissioned well over 400 compositions, a remarkable track record and one which has yielded some masterpieces. Of course, there are many other ensembles ranging from Ensemble Modern to Speculum Musicae, from the California E.A.R. Unit to Zeitgeist, all of which commission and perform a wide range of contemporary music, working with academic, experimental and even cross-over composers whose work lies beyond the realm of the classical tradition.

And then there are composer led ensembles. It seems that after World War II, the notion of the composer as performer fell by the wayside. Composers became specialists, just as did performers. Much of this had to do with the virtuosic nature of so much modern music. It seemed not quite reasonable that a composer would be a virtuoso at both the art of composition and the art of performance. There were exceptions, of course. Cage performed throughout his career and realizing that a vital link between music maker and music receiver was retained via performance. Robert Ashley, Frederic Rzewski, Terry Riley and Charlemagne Palestine all performed their own music, though often in a solo context. And while Harry Partch did put together the Gate 5 Ensemble, it seems more as a means to and end: getting the music performed, rather than as a viable performing unit in and of itself. With the advent of Minimalism, the composer led ensemble began to emerge not only as a vehicle for presenting the music, but also as a part of the composers’ livelihood. Clearly, the Philip Glass Ensemble and Steve Reich and Musicians have been among the most successful, with a host of others following in their footsteps, including the Mikel Rouse Broken Consort, Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company, Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble, the Deep Listening Band, and many, many others. All of these ensembles devote themselves to the music of the namesake composer or in the case of the Deep Listening Band and Mother Mallard, the composers which make up the group.

In recent years, a new type of ensemble has emerged and one which seems to hold a great deal of promise and vitality: a group led by or including a composer or composers, yet one which looks outside of its membership for a portion of its repertoire. Two such ensembles spring immediately to mind: The Paul Dresher Ensemble Electro-Acoustic Band and the Bang On A Can All-Stars. Both groups feature musicians of the highest caliber and neither limits itself to its resident composers. Rather, both groups thrive on the notion that they will also commission and perform works by composers not directly affiliated with the ensemble.

In 1993, Dresher expanded his ensemble, usually a trio or quartet plus a sound designer/engineer, and formed the Electro-Acoustic Band with the intent of serving the needs of an array of composers. Since its inception, the Paul Dresher Ensemble Electro-Acoustic Band has commissioned and/or premiered works by composers such as John Adams, John Luther Adams, Mark Applebaum, Eve Beglarian, Martin Bresnick, Jay Cloidt, Cindy Cox, Alvin Curran, Richard Einhorn, Bun Ching Lam, David Lang, Ca
rl Stone, Ayuo Takahashi, Koji Ueno, and Lois V Vierk, among others, in addition to Dresher. Last season, the ensemble took on a new collaborative effort, commissioning three concertos with specific soloists in mind. Two cello concertos, one by Anthony Davis and the other by Dresher, were composed for former Kronos Quartet member, Joan Jeanrenaud. The third concerto was for piano and composed by Terry Riley who was also the featured soloist.

Dresher writes: “My philosophy has been to treat composers the way I want to be treated when I am commissioned: a respectable fee, ample rehearsal time and a presentation/performance that lets the composer’s intentions come through as strongly as possible. I would wager that we have paid out more to composers in that time than any

other composer-led ensemble, and I bet we would compete well with any other non-composer-led chamber ensembles as well.”

The situation with Paul Dresher goes beyond the work done with the Electro-Acoustic Band as a performing ensemble. Musical Traditions and the Paul Dresher Ensemble is a contemporary performing arts organization which commissions, produces/co-produces and tours works in the area of concert music, chamber opera, dance, and is branching out to include sound sculpture installations. In addition to Dresher’s own operas, including the very successful Slow Fire, his organization commissioned, produced and toured Ravenshead, a monodrama created by composer Steven Mackey and librettist, vocal soloist and actor Rinde Eckert with Dresher’s ensemble performing; co-produced Erling Wold‘s surrealist chamber opera, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, and the Electro-Acoustic Band premiered and toured the John Adams, Peter Sellars, June Jordan music theater piece, I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky. Additionally, Dresher has a long-standing association with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company as composer and performer. Currently, Dresher is working with Zeitgeist, the Minneapolis based ensemble, on Sound Stage, a piece which includes sound sculptures, newly invented instruments which were the result of a collaboration between Dresher, as instrument designer, and instrument builder Daniel Schmidt. Working with a tiny staff (essentially the composer and an office manager), Dresher has taken on projects of gargantuan, even heroic proportions and has contributed immeasurably to the new music community.

Bang On A Can began almost as a whim. Founded in 1987 by composers David Lang, Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon, the initial undertaking was a 12-hour Marathon concert which became the springboard for an ever growing array of events and projects. The Marathon (which continues to this day) was expanded to include festivals lasting several days, some with focused events highlighting the work of a few composers. The range of music presented was broad and diverse. In an interview with Deborah Artman, the board of directors of Bang On A Can states: “In 1987 we were fresh out of school and looking for action. As young composers, we were part of a new generation and we didn’t see any place to fit in. We looked around and noticed a bunch of other misfits — composers influenced equally by minimalism, classical music, Balinese gamelan, Indian raga, bottle-neck blues, Peruvian folk music and rock and roll. There was something different and important about our backgrounds. Bang On A Can grew out of our need to discover just where the music of our generation would fit in.” As Lang continues, “From the beginning, we’ve been interested in making a home for people whose music has no home.”

In addition to producing concerts, Bang On A Can commissioned new works, produced records, and designed and hosted residencies. The organization has grown to include not only a series of new music events, but, most visibly, a performing and touring ensemble, the Bang On A Can All-Stars, which includes composer and clarinetist Evan Ziporyn, as well as the SPIT Orchestra. Of these, however, it is the All-Stars that have helped to put Bang On A Can on the map outside of New York. Fortunate enough to score some impressive major label contracts with Nonesuch, Sony Classical and Point Music, as well as the intrepid indie, CRI, the All-Stars were thrust into the new music limelight and gathered steam. They made a brilliant, savvy and cross-over move when Bang On A Can members Wolfe, Gordon, Lang and Ziporyn arranged, recorded and toured Brian Eno‘s ambient music masterpiece, Music for Airports.

Bang On A Can has developed the People’s Commissioning Fund, a grass-roots program that relies on the contributions of supporters to fund the creation of new work. Rather like public broadcast, the fund takes in contributions, as little as five dollars, from member-commissioners, pooling these financial resources to make sizeable commissions. According to Bang On A Can, hundreds of people join as member-commissioners. As a result, over 300 people have commissioned eleven new pieces. This past spring, the People’s Commissioning Fund allowed them to commission works by Jeffrey Brooks, Sussan Deyhim, James Fei, and Keeril Makan this past spring. Their compositions were premiered by the Bang On A Can All-Stars during the People’s Commissioning Week at a free concert in Merkin Concert Hall. In addition to the free concert, there was an open invitation to sit in on the rehearsals and talk with the musicians who made the music.

In their quest to discover new and progressive music, Bang On A Can makes an annual call for tapes. In what must be a daunting task, they wade through piles of cassettes, CDs and CD-Rs to find works which they can include in their events, including some for the All-Stars to perform.

Such a visionary commitment to new music that is in the mission of the Paul Dresher Ensemble and Bang On A Can should serve as an inspiration and model for other composers, organizations and
ensembles. Their selfless work benefits composers, performers, presenters, the new music community and posterity.

How to preserve the legacy of important American composers after they die Cecile Bazelon, Widow of Irwin Bazelon (1922-1995)

Posted on August 1, 2001 by NewMusicBox Staff - Articles, Commentary

Cecile and Irwin Bazelon
Photo courtesy Cecile Bazelon

When an American composer dies, too often his music dies with him. I had heard Bud lament this fact many times. An unexpected inheritance from his Aunt Ethabelle in the late ’80s enabled him to continue recording his works. No matter how fast technology changes, with CDs it is possible to aurally preserve the music.

Buddy unexpectedly died in August 1995. I felt it was mandatory for me to continue recording CDs. However, without the invaluable help of Harold Farberman, long a champion of Bud’s music, as well as the continuing commitment of Albany Records, I could not have managed. Bud had already completed two CDs on the Albany label and had overseen a third with the Bournemouth Symphony, which he did not hear completed. Since his death, with Harold’s unfailing aid there has been a CD of chamber works, two orchestral CDs with the Rousse Symphony in Bulgaria, and a third to be released shortly with the Sofia Symphony; a fourth is in the works.

In addition, CRI recently brought out a second CD on their American Masters series.

Buddy had made no provisions for his archives, but only days after his death the Library of Congress called requesting them. With help from Richard Rodney Bennett, his musical legacy has been properly housed for posterity. Fortunately Bud’s scores are all available: five through Boosey & Hawkes, one at Novello, and more than 60 works through Theodore Presser.

Also, Professor David Harold Cox, chair of music at University College Cork, Ireland, another of Bud’s fans, wrote a bio-bibliography for Greenwood Press published this past fall.

I don’t want conductors or performers saying that the widow is pestering them, so largely I try to rely on publishers and recordings to be effective. Many musical colleagues feel that Irwin Bazelon was a major composer who did not get sufficient due in his lifetime. I am certain in the future he will!

How to preserve the legacy of important American composers after they die Roswell Rudd, Friend and Student of Herbie Nichols (1919-1963)

Posted on August 1, 2001 by NewMusicBox Staff - Articles, Commentary

Roswell Rudd
Photo by Verna Gillis

Herbie’s father, mother, brother and sister’s family were all alive when he died in 1963, but he died intestate.

In a Billie Holiday book, there was a very nice keyboard arrangement of “Lady Sings The Blues” which sounds a lot like Herbie. Only someone with his hands could play it.

This is the only thing I’ve ever seen that might be construed as sheet music publication of the composer. So, his “published” music is in the form of trio recordings he made for Blue Note and Bethlehem.

Herbie Nichols
Photo courtesy Jazz Composers Collective

Herbie was very generous to me, and we worked on some of his stuff together between 1960 and 1962. He was finding new directions in himself that were revolutionary. Some of these pieces are definitely in another place compared to the Blue Note/Bethlehem Trio recordings. There were 27 pieces that he wrote out for us which were unpublished and unrecorded.

Herbie, when he finally signed off on these things, told me to do whatever I wanted to with the music. So I feel that I lived up to my agreement with him. I’ve recorded 15 of those 27, as many as we could, in a rather unconventional way, with a guitarist and a drummer. And within the last year and a half, I put together a collection of all 27 unpublished pieces of music I had. Gerard and Sarzin put it out.

Allison, Kimbrough and Horton have gone down to the Library of Congress and have found more unpublished works and have performed and recorded some of them for their Herbie Nichols Project.

There are no big campaigns that I know of to put Herbie Nichols stage center. I wish there were. But all over the planet you’ll find people playing this music, people in Europe, people in Japan, people in Africa, as well as the Americas… There are more of us than ever before that know and love his music and play it and derive spiritual benefits from it.

The MP3 Phenomena and Innovative Music

Posted on August 1, 2001 by Judy Dunaway - Analysis, Articles

(The following paper was presented at the Institut für Neue Musik und Musikerziehung in Darmstadt, Germany on April 9, 2001. Since then, many of the topics discussed have undergone considerable changes (most notably the corporate assimilation of MP3.com and Napster), and certainly more changes will occur. Nevertheless, the important structures and movements revealed by this research will remain pertinent for years to come.)

How is quickly downloadable sound directly from the Internet changing the availability of innovative music? This article, intended for a general audience that may or may not be “net savvy,” opens with an overview of the MP3 compression format and how it works. Other sound compression formats are also discussed, including the free-proprietary player and encoder from Vorbis. An anonymous focus group of Napster participants reveal how file-sharing is expanding the audience for innovative music. A survey of artists on MP3.com gives insights into new international online communities of innovative artists that reach their audiences without reliance on traditional methods. Interviews with programmers of Internet radio programs show how webcasting allows innovative music to leave local boundaries. Three pieces of Internet sound-art are assessed concerning their effectiveness at using sound-compression and the Internet to redefine the roles of composers, performers and audiences. The final chapter explains obstacles for the distribution of innovative music on the Internet and how the new opportunities opened up by MP3 will quickly disappear if corporate music business practices are not regulated in the public interest and/or alternative approaches are not developed that bypass corporate control.

My title “The MP3 Phenomena and Innovative Music” requires a bit of clarification as to exactly what “innovative music” might be. I believe that any kind of music has the potential to be innovative. But, for the purposes of study and research, I narrowed the field to genres such as contemporary, minimalist, electro-acoustic, computer-music, sound art, free jazz, free improvisation and noise, as well as hybrids of these various styles.

File Compression…

MP3 is a way of compressing a sound file to approximately 1/10th of its normal size. Prior to MP3, it was difficult and time-consuming for the average computer-user to send sound files through the Internet. In 1993, the Fraunhofer Institute, a research institute in Germany, combined many different patented algorithms to come up with a way of reducing the size of audio files, while still maintaining listenable quality. They created MP3 in partnership with Thomson Multimedia SA of France, a company that is in the business of owning patents.

Since Fraunhofer is a non-profit institute with an ethic of supporting the rapid development of new innovations into products, they did not keep MP3 a secret. The Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) was impressed with MP3 and made it an Official Standard for sound compression. Anyone can obtain the source code from the International Standards Organization, use this source code to build their own MP3 player or encoder, and make improvements on the MP3 formula. However, if they distribute the players or encoders, they must pay substantial royalties to Fraunhofer/Thomson.

Fraunhofer/Thomson also expects royalty payments from entities that sell more than $100,000 worth of MP3 encoded songs or material. And they have also stated that they may begin charging fees to webcasts in the future. Currently, Fraunhofer/Thomson does not charge royalties on distribution of free MP3s, MP3 streaming and broadcasting, sales of MP3s that generate less than $100,000, distribution of free MP3 players and distribution of limited-use demo-version encoders.

To date (April 2001), Fraunhofer/Thomson is only interested in any party that makes substantial income from MP3. Fraunhofer’s commitment to encouraging technological development and the financial impracticality of pursuing small time users or developers seem to be mediating factors. The liberal attitude of Fraunhofer/Thomson and the open specifications of MP3 have been the pivotal factors in its widespread popularity.

MP3 is commonly referred to as a “codec,” which literally means “compressor/decompressor.” MP3 processes the sound through an algorithm to create a compressed file, and then this file, when played, is decompressed and made again into an audio signal. The MP3 codec works through two types of compression, known as “lossy” and “lossless.” (A technical explanation of how the MP3 codec works can be found on an inner page of the Fraunhofer site. A more extensive and easy-to-understand explanation can be found online in an excerpt from Scot Hacker‘s book MP3: The Definitive Guide, published by O’Reilly.)

“Lossy” compression permanently deletes certain sound material. “Lossless” compression does not cause the file to lose any content. The “lossy” compression techniques are based on psychoacoustic principals. “Lossy” compression takes out frequencies that the average human being supposedly cannot hear. It takes out very high and low frequencies that are above and below the average human threshold of hearing. It also removes frequencies that are so low in volume that they are covered by other frequencies. These are called “masked” tones, because they are masked by the louder frequencies. There are two types of “masking.” The first is “simultaneous masking,” which means that if a louder tone and a softer tone happen at the same time, you do not hear the softer one. The second is “temporal masking,” which means when you hear a soft tone that is only milliseconds away from a loud tone, then you do not hear the soft tone.

MP3 also offers the option of using “joint stereo” in the higher audible frequencies. “Joint stereo” combines the high frequencies from the left and right tracks into a single track. Again this uses a psychoacoustic principal – humans find it difficult to determine the physical location of very high and very low frequencies.

The person encoding the MP3 file can determine, to some degree, how much material the codec takes out when selecting the bit-rate, or kilobytes-per-second (commonly written as “kbps.”). Low bit rates give the smallest files sizes, but there is obvious deterioration of the sound quality. High bit rates give better sound quality, but the files are somewhat larger.

The “lossless” compression that MP3 uses is called “Huffman coding.” Huffman coding simply reorders the data so that blank spaces in the memory are filled. For instance, a sparse passage does not use much memory, so some data from denser passages can be stored in that section. Huffman coding can typically reduce the file size by as much as 20%.

A tradition has evolved during the past century for pop music to be created and produced to cover the imperfections of radio airplay. Ideally, popular music is thick with harmonies and absent of silences. Thus popular music can stand the psychoacoustic deletions made by MP3 very well. Inversely, contemporary music often emphasizes subtleties such as tone color, room acoustics, harmonic intricacies, extreme ranges, and sparse voicings – all which are affected by lossy compression.

The following is a comparison of a sound file at regular CD quality and an MP3 file at 128 kbps. You will hear the CD-quality passage first, then the MP3, and then it will repeat the process. This sound-byte is from Alfred Zimmerlin‘s “Quintett für Klarinette, 2 Violinen, Viola und Violoncello” (1989-90), available on Edition Wandelweiser Records (EWR 9605) (used with permission). (Please note: Your computer must be able to play AIFF soundfiles in order for you to hear these examples. These soundfiles are not compressed.)

Example 1

The following example features a sound-byte encoded at 32 kbps. Notice the deterioration of sound quality due to the lower bit rate.

Example 2

Here is a comparison of loud white noise. First you will hear the regular sound file, then the MP3 at 128kbps, and finally the MP3 at 32kpbs, and then the process repeats.

Example 3

If one subtracts an MP3 file from the original audio file, a considerable amount of audible material remains. Following is an example, again using the Zimmerlin sound-byte. Please note that there are probably some artifacts from the subtraction process, but this example should give a rough idea of what the remnants of an MP3 file at 128 kbps sound like. The volume of the subtraction was very low, probably because the sound is largely made up of “masked tones,” so I raised the volume of the example. Note the emphasis of extreme high and low frequencies, probably remnants of the filtering. (Special thanks to Scott Wilson for creating the following subtraction.)

Example 4

It is quite interesting that there is so much audible material left after the subtraction. This material, according to psychoacoustic experts, is what we are not supposed to be able to hear.

Other codecs have been developed that have better audio quality than MP3. Q-Design is probably one of the most impressive of these. The files are much smaller than MP3s and the sound is superior. The primary drawback of Q-Design is that it is proprietary and contains security features. In other words, you can’t obtain and use it for free.

Real Audio

RealAudio is one of the most frequently utilized alternative formats. It is primarily used for streaming audio and video at low bit-rates. The Real codec can reproduce sound at a quality similar to that of FM radio. In addition to its own format, Real technology has the ability to create and play back regular MP3s. RealAudio is the only popular format, other than MP3, that can support all major operating systems, including Windows, MacOS, Linux and BeOS.

Liquid Audio

Other codecs have been developed, not for better sound quality but for security reasons. For instance, Liquid Audio tracks can only be played on the computer of the person who downloaded them. With Liquid Audio, the listener can view album cover art, read lyrics and liner notes, and hear a sample track from the CD, all before deciding to make the actual (and legal) purchase. The security features also allow you to burn a single CD copy of the material you purchase.

I spoke to representatives from two new music record labels, innova and Tzadik, that offer their music on Liquid Audio. Both labels said that though they had made some sales via Liquid Audio, they still sell vastly more CDs than downloads. Nonetheless, both labels noted that Liquid Audio allowed them to reach a certain segment of users they may not reach otherwise. Philip Blackburn at innova said “innova’s music is not as visible as that of major labels and shelf space is largely at the whim of the store buyer for our kind of music, thus a service such as Liquid Audio is an attractive addition to our distribution system.” He also noted, “Another advantage is that innova artists can point their fans directly to any of over 1000 sites that offer the Liquid Audio service, or indeed register their own site as an affiliate, thus vastly increasing their work’s accessibility.”

Ogg Vorbis

A format that bypasses many of the aforementioned issues is the newly developed Ogg Vorbis. It was created by the Xiph.org Foundation, a non-profit organization based in the U.S., whose stated goal is to “promote the creation of free, unencumbered, and interoperable multimedia standards.” Ogg Vorbis is an audio compression format that is comparable to MP3, but does not use any of the Fraunhofer/Thomson patents.

Like MP3 and RealAudio, Ogg Vorbis offers full encoding and decoding capability for Windows, Linux, MacOS and BeOS. Ogg Vorbis uses a “lossy” format, but claims to have better sound quality and smaller file sizes than MP3.

Because of the Xiph.org Foundation’s interest in public service and its freedom from obligations to Fraunhofer/Thomson, Ogg Vorbis does not require any sorts of licensing fees from artists, webcasts or developers. Artists may sell any amount of music, developers can use the source code to create and sell an unlimited amount of encoders and decoders, and webcasts can use it for webcasting music, all with no restrictions, royalty payments, or limits on distribution, because the OggVorbis specification is in the public domain. It is completely free for commercial or noncommercial use.

The creators of Ogg Vorbis feel that it is important to continue to have a free and open format for sound on the Internet. They fear that Fraunhofer/Thomson’s corporate alliances could result in more control and regulation of MP3. Thomson became a private company in late 2000, and its shareholders include Microsoft, NEC, DirectTV and Alcatel. Additionally, Fraunhofer and Thomson are currently participants in the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), which some feel is an effort by the international recording industry to regain total control of music distribution.

OggVorbis is still very new and only available in a limited number of players and encoders. They do not yet have the capability for real-time streaming. Nevertheless, future actions by Fraunhofer/Thomson or the recording industry could push a format such as OggVorbis to become the preferred format worldwide. (Listen to Angry Coffee Artists Encoded with Vorbis.)

For now though, MP3 remains the preferred format, not because of its sound quality or even its size (Q-Design is the smallest), but because MP3s are free, provide adequate sound at higher bitrates, and they can be used on almost any operating system. MP3 is the most commonly used format and it is available worldwide. The appeal of MP3 is its convenience and availability, not its high-quality sound. Obviously, MP3 is mainly a sociological issue, not a technological one.

The U.S.-based Napster file-sharing service has recently been the focus of much of the record industry’s wrath. Napster provides a central server for millions of users worldwide to post their soundfiles and offer these soundfiles for free download to other users. Until recently, Napster did not monitor what was traded, thus, according to the opinions of the industry, massive copyright infringement was occurring. In 1999, the International Federation of Phonographic Industries claimed that around three million tracks were downloaded from the Internet every day, most of them without the permission of their copyright holders.

In March 2001, as part of the fall-out from a lawsuit by four of the five major corporate recording conglomerates in the U.S., Napster was ordered to block trading of songs that were property of those corporations. Notably, only the property of the major corporations was affected by this move. Independent labels and independent artists still have no protection. But is this really a bad thing?

Two weeks before the court order was enforced, I searched for Napster users that were trading contemporary music. While searches for lesser-known composers’ works yielded few or no results, I found that there were multitudes of downloads available for many established innovative artists. Over the course of three days I logged in the names of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, and my own composition teacher, Alvin Lucier. Each day I found in excess of 100 downloads available for Stockhausen and Zorn, around 100 available of Braxton’s music and an average of about 15 downloads available for the music of Lucier. I thought this was pretty shocking, considering that Napster participants were supposed to be lazy listeners to mindless popular music who were just interested in getting the latest Britney Spears tune for free.

I convened a focus group of seventeen Napster participants, via the “chat” services provided on Napster. I interviewed people who were sharing free downloads of one or more of the following artists:

Anthony Braxton
John Cage
Fred Frith
Mauricio Kagel
Alvin Lucier
Roscoe Mitchell
Meredith Monk
Ikue Mori
Pauline Oliveros
Karlheinz Stockhausen
John Zorn

I felt that this group of composers and improvisers gave a broad representation of various tastes in contemporary and experimental music.

I interviewed my focus group on the guarantee of anonymity. The members of the group came from around the world: six from Europe, seven from North America, two from Central and South America, one from Asia and one from Australia. Though all the respondents seemed to have some familiarity with the genre, and indicated an interest in innovative music as a whole, four respondents had listened to the music of these particular composers for the first time through Napster. The respondents had located these composers through looking at the shared-files of users who had other works they liked.

Twelve of the respondents said that it was difficult or impossible to obtain this kind of contemporary music in record stores in their geographic area. Price was also a problem. Five respondents claimed that since most contemporary music was imported in their area, it caused significant price increases, and another nine respondents claimed that the prices of contemporary music CDs in general were too expensive. Two respondents said that while affordability was not a problem for them, the music they were seeking was simply unavailable commercially. (This would make sense in light of the many contemporary works that languish out-of-print for years, the original labels now defunct or unwilling to invest in products they see as low-profit.)

Several respondents indicated that participation in Napster had opened up opportunities to hear artists that they would have never have heard otherwise. When asked about other contemporary artists that file sharing had led them to, the lists included Gyorgy Ligeti, Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Luc Ferrari, Henri Pousseur, Brian Ferneyhough, Charles Ives, Morton Feldman, Derek Bailey, Harry Partch, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, Hamiet Bluiett, Bob Ostertag, Iva Bittova, La Monte Young and many more.

Twelve respondents said they would purchase more recordings by these or other contemporary artists because of hearing the music through Napster. Most of the respondents said that exposure to contemporary music on Napster had led them to buy more CDs by contemporary artists in general. They also indicated that they would prefer a CD to the MP3 file, because of better sound quality and the availability of liner notes.

One of my Napster focus group members, a student located in the Saskatchewan province of Canada, gave the following comments concerning file sharing of contemporary music on Napster:

“One of the main things here is cost and geographical location. This music is expensive to order where I am. I spend lots of money on it already so I feel okay about downloading what I can through Napster. It can also remove various cultural and social barriers that can prevent one from being exposed to certain music. The sharing of music online has greatly assisted me in maintaining my ever expanding curiosity. It (Napster) also keeps me informed of what’s happening all around the world in music.”

It is not my desire to argue whether file sharing is moral or immoral. My research indicates that file sharing is exposing more people to contemporary and experimental music, and it has also probably increased CD sales. File sharing could possibly improve, rather than destroy, the distribution of music by innovative artists.

Unknown composers and improvisers have also benefited from the MP3 phenomena. One of the most obvious, locatable and centralized resources for this new Internet “scene” of innovative music is MP3.com.

MP3.com has over one million listeners visiting their site daily. Since 1998, it has offered artists free web pages and disk space for uploading MP3s of their music. It does not require artists to relinquish the rights to their work in any way or pay any fees to MP3.com, though the artist does agree to offer the downloads for free. In the future, artists may receive payments from their respective performing rights organizations as compensation for their free participation on MP3.com. MP3.com does not censor music for content, and it allows all styles and genres. The only sort of music not allowed is that which is in violation of copyright, such as cover songs and works using obvious sampling from copyrighted sources.

There are all sorts of promotional schemes and advertising schemes that currently define the larger structure of the MP3.com site, all which seem to change rather frequently. More and more, MP3.com is focusing on the mainstream popular acts. You will not find innovative music in the Top 10 listings of MP3.com. In fact, there are no official categories for genres such as contemporary, minimalist, electro-acoustic, computer music, sound art, free jazz, free improvisation, experimental noise, and so on. This type of music is not particularly easy to locate on MP3.com. However, this certainly does not mean innovative music is not there.

I located innovative artists on MP3.com by entering the name of a not-too-well-known contemporary composer or improvisor into the “artists we sound like” meta-tags search engine. Names like “Morton Feldman,” “Annea Lockwood” and “Harry Partch” helped me to find music I considered to be non-commercial and risk-taking. Email discussions with the artists led me to additional innovative artists on MP3.com.

I surveyed twelve composers and/or improvisors from North America and four from Europe. Two respondents were music teachers, one was a part-time professional musician and two were music students. The other respondents supported themselves in non-music professions. None of the respondents made any significant income from the sales of recordings and downloads on MP3.com or otherwise. Respondents had offered their music on MP3.com anywhere from a few months to two years. Some respondents had many downloads of their music available, while others offered only one or two pieces. All respondents self-produced their music using home equipment.

The number of downloads and plays that the artists received monthly varied widely, from only two or three, to hundreds, depending on the popularity of the artist and whether the artist had participated in various internal and external promotions of their sites. Almost all of the artists said that their music had reached a worldwide audience because of their web presence, which was indicated to them by the emails they had received in response to their site. A few artists had received record-deal offers and/or offers to perform as the result of their participation in MP3.com. Most did not sell regular CDs of their work, and sold relatively few MP3.com “DAM” (Digital Automatic Music) CDs (a promotion whereby MP3.com burns requested MP3s to a CD for a fee).

Most artists felt that the opportunities generated by the availability of their music on the Internet far outweighed any problems with sound quality. However, two respondents, a solo instrumentalist and an artist working with psychoacoustic concepts, did state that they were disappointed at subtleties that had been lost due to the filtering processes.

The majority of the artists interviewed enthusiastically described internal networking as the primary benefit of their presence on MP3.com. Connections with other artists had led to collaborations, tour partners, organization of live concerts and exchanges of helpful information. Some said that exposure to the works of other artists on MP3.com had spurred their artistic growth. Supportive emails from fans and other artists had given several respondents the inspiration to continue or resume composing. Artists also supported each other through organizing collaborative MP3.com promotions and reviewing each other’s works online. While MP3.com had not provided significant financial gain for any artist I interviewed, it had provided a positive sense of community and inspiration. These musicians and composers have found free rent and a community of artists, not in a big city, but in cyber-space.

Doug Kolmar, a composer from New York City, summed it up best by saying:

“It (MP3.com) has helped me regain a connection to the community of artists that I had pretty much lost touc
h with and rejuvenated my activity as a composer. Once you know there’s someone out there listening, you have a much more compelling reason to turn those ideas that have been kicking around your head into reality.”

Highly significant is the independence with which these artists work. They had not received commissions, they had not paid a recording studio, they did not have a record label, and many did not even organize a performance of their work. They worked other jobs to pay the bills, they wrote the compositions in their free time, they often performed the compositions themselves, they recorded the work themselves, and they released the recording without the assistance of a label. Their overhead was relatively low, a large audience heard their work, and many liked it. In the case of MP3.com, as the old saying goes, Mohammed did not go to the mountain, the mountain came to Mohammed.

Artists maintaining independent sites do not have the same level of networking opportunities that a central service such as MP3.com provides. Pamela Z, a San-Francisco based composer of electro-acoustic music, has featured audio on her website since 1997. Like the MP3.com composers, she has received emails from around the world commenting on her music and has established new contacts with fans and other artists. She was even contacted by a small label purely on the strength of hearing her music on the site. But her independent site does not enjoy the advantages of MP3.com’s structure, such as the central search engine, the easy-to-maintain websites, the internal promotions and the statistical information concerning site visitors. One MP3.com artist, who has maintained a web presence since 1994, noted that his MP3.com site received far more hits than his independent sites.

MP3.com features sites called “radio stations” as a promotional mechanism for their artists. These “radio stations ” usually present a group of 10 to 20 soundfiles by various artists. The MP3.com stations I listened to (which included noise from a rebel moon, David’s Eclectic Listening, Brax-Tone, and PIANOCOMPOSERS) were actually more like compilation CDs than radio stations. Any MP3.com artist can set up a “radio station” for free, and there are several experimental samplers available.

Internet radio is different than downloading in that it allows you to hear the music but does not allow you to save it to your hard disk. This is called “streaming.” There are two main types of streaming Internet radio stations, “MP3-on-Demand” and “MP3 broadcasting” or “real streaming”.

“MP3 broadcasting” or “real streaming” means that the show is happening in real-time and cannot be altered in any way by the listener. It is similar to a regular radio or TV broadcast. In fact, the real-streaming format is often used for radio shows that are already being broadcast in real time. I interviewed DJs from eight webcasts in the United States featuring contemporary, experimental, electro-acoustic, improvised and other avant-garde styles. The shows I spoke to all indicated increases in their listenership due to the real-streaming format, though some noted that this listenership was limited by available bandwidth. For instance, the Kalvos & Damian radio show at Goddard College in Vermont, which specializes in works by new contemporary and experimental composers, said their statistics indicated that every week during their Saturday afternoon webcast their server was filled to its maximum of 60 listeners.

WFMU is a free-format station in New Jersey that intermingles contemporary and experimental music with many other genres. It webcasts its signal 24 hours a day, and has a large bandwidth and several servers available. They estimate their average online real-time listenership worldwide is about 2,500 per day. Ken Freedman, program director at WFMU, noted that even though Internet usage was leveling off in some sectors, it was increasing in the area of webcasting. He said, “Last year, 10% of our listeners were listening to us online. I expect that a month from now when I will be able to see the new stats, that percentage will have doubled.”

“MP3-on-Demand” is a group of files which one can play continuously. The number and length of files varies greatly depending on the station. With MP3-on-Demand you have control over the music playback. You can play through the files continuously, or you can skip ahead to a certain selection and start from there. You can play a certain selection over again, or scroll forward or backward. The files are there in a stationary fashion. Any time you access the site, unless the webmaster has made changes, you will get the same data (the same set of songs). MP3-on-Demand is comparable to listening to a long tape or CD.

The Antenna Radio site produces its shows radio-style, but has no actual radio broadcast and presents them only in the MP3-on-demand format. Herb Levy, of the “Mappings” show on Antenna Radio, which features contemporary composers and improvised music, estimates that he has 500-750 listeners every week. Antenna Radio only leaves the current week and previous week’s shows on the server at any given time.

Many of the radio shows now provide MP3-on-Demand archives where a listener can access the desired show at any time of day or night. Larger archives can logically receive a greater numbers of hits. The Kalvos & Damian show’s statistics indicate that the total archive of their show dating back to 1995 gets well over one thousand listeners each week. WFMU’s archives of their entire 24 hours of broadcasting dating back to mid-2000, receive about 3,500 hits per week.

No doubt this numerically and geographically expanded listenership has had an affect on various aspects of innovative music.

Of the eight shows I explored, some webcasts featured new artists and others featured more established artists. Some webcasts mixed the new music with other genres, and some had a specific theme. The DJs said that emails from listeners and reports from composers indicated increased interest in innovative music due to the webcasts. Curiosity, combined with availability, apparently forms the prime motivation for this new group of listeners. Many seem to come to these webcasts through the free-associative approach that defines the web. They may stumble across a station when searching for an artist that has interested them, they may read about it in a new music listing, they may come to it via links on other sites, they may read a posting in an email group, and so on.

(A good listing of webcasts of new and experimental music can be found on the Canadian site Earsay.)

There is no doubt that webcasts give artists worldwide, rather than local, exposure. Several DJs recounted instances of composers who had received offers to perform from organizations in other countries, due to the webcasts.
International collaborations and commissions resulting from webcast connections were also noted. Webcasts allow unknown artists to be heard by large international audiences.

Websites associated with webcasts can also provide educational opportunities for new listeners. The Kalvos & Damian Show site is not only the starting point for listening to their show and its back-issues, but they also feature web pages for composers that have been featured on the show, a section with essays by composers and contemporary music authors and a directory of composer resources. Currently, they are organizing a cyber-cast music festival for August of 2001.

Other internet DJs interviewed for this section were Steve Bradley of Steve Bradley’s “art@radio” on WBMC, Carl Stone of “Ears Wide Open” on KPFA, Christopher DeLaurenti’ of “The Sonic Stratosphere” on KSER, Davey Schmitt of “Le Vide” on Antenna Radio and Kenny G of “Unpopular Music with Kenny G” on WFMU.

The potential of Internet sound art is immense. It is allowing composers to have direct interaction with audiences. It usually necessitates that composers collaborate with artists of other disciplines. It breaks down geographic boundaries. It redefines the roles of composer, performer and audience.

Currently though, Internet sound art is plagued with a variety of problems. The net is still not good for live interaction due to time delays. The low bit rates required for streaming deteriorate sound quality. Interactive instruments only allow multiple-choice-type mouse-clicking by the audience, with no opportunities for creative subtlety. The audience is limited by their amount of computer memory, Internet connection speed, and availability of programs needed to participate in the piece.

For many of these reasons, German composer Michael Iber chose not to use streamed-audio for his work Internet Generated Radio, but instead used a combination of interactive clicking and a normal radio broadcast of the results. Iber states:

“My basic concept was to use the Internet for controlling only and use the radio for high quality and REAL time audio transmission. The RealAudio-stream actually was a compromise I had to take imposed by the SWR, who wanted a more international output due to their extensive advertising campaign. It finally showed that the Internet stream had a delay of 20 seconds to the live-performance: obviously too much to realize the effect ones click on a button would have to the sound processing.”

While Iber believes the total amount of participants numbered around 500 people, only about 50 of them listened to the webcast via RealAudio, probably due to bandwidth limitations.

American composer William Duckworth‘s Cathedral is one of the first large-scale works of music and art created specifically for the World Wide Web, first going on-line in June, 1997. The extensive “Cathedral” site, created by a team of designers overseen by Duckworth, incorporates interactive sound and graphics, creative text and streamed audio. Periodically, live acoustic performances, which incorporate contributions by Internet audience participants playing virtual instruments, are broadcast via RealAudio streaming. Audience participants may also contribute their own Midi files to the piece.

In live performance, the audience contributions are blended into the piece via filters created by the composer. The contributions do not arrive exactly as the audience may have intended them, or with any individual identity, but rather are manipulated and homogenized. Ultimately, Duckworth appropriates the audience’s contributions and retains control of the piece.

Rather than trying to overcome or marginalize obstacles presented by the current limitations of Internet sound, Atau Tanaka‘s “MP3q” incorporates these limitations into the work. It accepts the current state of affairs and mirrors the social and time dynamic of the Internet. Tanaka calls his piece a “shared online sound space.” The site itself avoids use of any graphics or other memory-hogging devices.

When a visitor enters the “MP3q” site he or she sees a track list. Each track is a series of URLs that link to MP3 files on other sites. The visitor selects a track and then sees the list of URLs inside a frame surrounded by images of stationary arrows. The visitor may click on one or more tracks at any time to begin streaming an MP3. The visitor glides the mouse around the screen to make the group of files move around the screen and become larger or smaller. These variants in the placement and size affect the gain (loudness or softness) of the files. Tanaka’s concept allows participants to realize the mix in real-time on their own computers.

Anyone can contribute an MP3 link to the site by following simple prompts on the site. The contributed file must be low bitrate and available on a web server somewhere on the Internet.

The implications of Tanaka’s piece are many. The actual sound files do not exist on Tanaka’s website, but rather are located on servers around the world, emphasizing the Internet’s sociological connections, and also reducing the draw on any one server and keeping the site’s hard-drive from becoming quickly jammed with too many soundfiles. Tanaka’s piece does not require the audience to participate at a certain time, but rather they may participate at whatever time they choose. Interaction with Tanaka’s own compositions is not necessary, unless the visitor chooses to mix one of Tanaka’s pieces into his own mix. The sound material may be collaged into an original work created by the site visitor. The requirement of low bit-rate sound files gives the work a cohesive sound quality, and yet serves the double purpose of making the file extremely small and easier for computers to handle without crashing. The piece functions simply with a browser and a Shockwave plug-in, no MP3 player is needed. The fact that the site is programmed with Linux, an open-source free operating system, also makes a political statement.

Tanaka does not dictate or manipulate the data that is entered into his structure, and in fact, even the structure has flexibility. He does not seek to appropriate the material for his own creation but rather leaves his creation as a frame to be filled in by contributing artists, and mixed and played back by site visitors. Tanaka does well in redefining, and even bringing into question the necessity of, the individual composer.

Interestingly, when I visited the site I found that a contributor had linked a copyrighted popular song to the “MP3q” site, thus immediately drawing Tanaka’s work into the raging international controversy over intellectual property. The International Federation of Phonographic Industries has stated that linking to illegal MP3 files constitutes contributory copyright infringement.

Approximately
4/5 of the record labels in the U.S. are owned by one of five large international conglomerates, commonly referred to as “the big five.” These corporations are: Sony Music Entertainment, EMI, Universal Music Group/Vivendi, BMG Entertainment, and Warner Music Group. These conglomerates retain control of the maximum amount of profits from their sales of recordings by owning all aspects of the record industry including music publishing, record labels, CD and cassette manufacturers, record distributors, record clubs, and most retail stores. Record distribution through “the big five” is imperative for availability in the major retail record outlets.

In recent years independent labels have been completely shut out of normal distribution channels. Corporations drove most small independent shops out of business by coming into local markets and opening mega-stores that offered a wide selection of titles at prices below what the independent stores could compete with. Then, over-confident with their new oligopoly, the corporate labels began flooding the market with too many titles, which led to a collapse in the retail industry. In the wake of the collapse, innovative music titles were the first to be cut from the distribution system. The CRI and New Albion contemporary classical labels state that now their primary income is no longer from retail store sales, but rather from other sources such as mail-order, Internet sales (including sales through the new maverick online distributor of innovative music, CDeMUSIC) and sales to libraries. (This would seem to agree with the statements by the Napster focus group that innovative music was simply unavailable to them through stores in their area.)

Not only do these conglomerates control the distribution channels, but they control most artistic output as well. Typically, most corporate record labels require artists to sign contracts stating that the artist will pay for the recording, production, manufacturing, marketing and administration costs out of the artist’s own profits. The record label also usually requires the artist to sign over the rights to the actual recording and sometimes even the rights to the composition itself. Most record contracts force artists to give up control of their work. Yet, it is estimated that only 5% of artists signed to labels make money from record sales. Publicity is the only reward most artists will reap from the release of a recording through a record label.

For corporations, this total ownership and control of intellectual property is essential. It gives them the power to manipulate, promote, recycle or censor this material to their maximum profitability. And current copyright laws in the U.S. allow for this ownership to extend for seventy years.

However, the MP3 phenomenon has the corporate record industry running scared. As is evidenced by the Napster controversy and other lawsuits, they are afraid of injuries to CD sales due to digital copying and file sharing. But the record companies’ greatest fear is that the new system could bar them from appropriating and exploiting new artists, and thus new intellectual property and copyrights. If artists can self-produce, market and distribute their material through the Internet, the record industry becomes obsolete and the intellectual property empires could crumble.

In the copyright problems of the last 20 years with cassette tapes, videotapes, DVDs and so on, the industry has always dealt with the problem through a combination of legal and marketing strategies. If the recent past gives any indication of the near future, corporate industry will adapt and thrive through the MP3 phenomena, and current trends in corporate assimilation and commodification of artistic creativity will continue. One example of the industry’s new efforts to maintain control through legal means is SDMI.

SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative) is an organized effort by the international recording industry purportedly to stop copyright infringement through technological means. The system is based on the use of digital “watermarks.” A digital watermark is an inaudible, secret code that is hidden in an audio file.

SDMI will happen in two phases. First, through the threat of lawsuits for complicity in copyright infringement, they will force all manufacturers of home stereos, portable devices, personal computers, and any other such equipment, to make their equipment recognize this watermark. Then, in the second phase, all newly released CDs will contain watermarks. When the playback or recording equipment encounters the digital watermark, certain information is communicated, telling the equipment the conditions under which this material can be played or recorded.

The primary members of SDMI are the recording industries “big five” corporations. The cost for membership in the organization is $20,000, a price that excludes small labels, artists and many other organizations from having a voice in this group. Subject to the approval of the paying members of SDMI, certain artists rights organizations may attend some meetings free of charge, but these organizations have no say in the ultimate decisions concerning SDMI.

SDMI claims that their technology will not affect the distribution of non-watermarked material. In other words, they assert that SDMI compliant equipment will play non-watermarked material. But many critics argue that SDMI’s control over playback and recording equipment leaves too much room for abuse, since SDMI is an organization created and run by the corporate industry.

SDMI also claims that the watermarking feature will be available to independent artists and labels that want to use it, but currently refuses to provide details of the price, availability or conditions of such a scheme until their own private SDMI members have agreed on an acceptable method. Paul Marotta of New World Records, a label that includes American jazz and contemporary classical artists, states, “The companies involved in the SDMI may create an industry standard that will be very expensive for a small label to adopt. It will be less of an issue on new titles but going back to remaster an entire catalogue of master tapes to add digital codes may end up being prohibitive financially.”

In the United States, laws have already begun to be put into place for defending such a system. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act gives further power to SDMI by making it a federal offense to create and distribute programs that circumvent security mechanisms. The DMCA also makes it possible for the government to compel Internet Service Providers to monitor their subscribers and take actions to prevent exchange of copyrighted material.

Corporate marketing strategies may pose an even greater threat to innovative music than legal obstacles. Already, corporations and large businesses are establishing control of centralized systems. Many search engines now favor paid or popularity-based placements to actual search results. Concerning Internet listings of the
Kalvos & Damian webcasts Dennis Bathory-Kitsz says, “We had come up first in most search engines (and still do in most), at least until some of them went “popularity based” rather than using contents and <META> information. In fact, as more searchers have become commercialized, their click-throughs are important to them, so quantity matters rather than accuracy of results.” As corporations gain control of the filters through which information on the Internet passes, more regulation and censorship will occur.

Of course, the recording industry does not care at all about contemporary and experimental music. The sales figures on such CDs are miniscule compared to popular music. In the words of Foster Reed at the New Albion label, “The corporate recording industry lives in a completely different world, of commodity and markets, than the independents do, who make and publish work that is near and dear to them.” But accessibility to innovative music on the Internet may be blocked by the record industry’s rush to protect and maintain total control of its own high-profit intellectual property.

(Editor’s Note: A wide array of opinions on Internet distribution models for music can be found on: The Electronic Frontier Foundation Homepage, an inner-page of the National Music Publishers Association, an inner-page from the Web site of the experimental rock band Negativland, an in-depth interview with “The Artist Once Again Known as Prince” on ZDNet, and on Prince’s own website.)

Judy Dunaway

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