Category: Articles

In The Absence of Money

Posted on April 15, 2016 by Shaya Lyon - Analysis, Articles

Affinity clustering research for this article. Colors reflect estimated % household income from music as reported by interviewees.

Why else would you come together for hours at a time for free if the goal isn’t to walk away feeling like you made something beautiful and did the best you possibly could? Why have I given years of my life to something that doesn’t pay money in a capitalist state, in which value is directly equated with money? Because the highest quality art I’ve ever made has been with some of those people. ~ Violist, NYC

When does an artist, trying to make a living, not care about being compensated? If they do stop caring, have they also stopped valuing their art’s worth?Creating art is, of course, not about making money. But one must make—or have—money to live a somewhat traditional lifestyle. ~ Cellist, Seattle

This article is about what it means to perform without pay. It’s not a discussion of when it is acceptable to make art for free; that rubric has already been discussed eloquently and exhaustively.

(To explain why artists can’t do their thing for free all the time, I’ll borrow from Annie Dillard: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” Artists who make their living from art make their living from art. Art is their only source of income. String together enough days of free performance, and you are looking back on a life without a livelihood.)

I spend much of my time observing and working with community orchestras in Seattle as director of the Live Music Project (an egalitarian platform for orchestral/chamber performance promotion and discovery), so I thought I’d explore the not-money side of the money story.

There are more than 50 orchestras in the region, many of which are made up of unpaid players. Some of these are new professional-level volunteer ensembles that are in the early stages of a growth plan that moves toward paying performers at scale; others are community orchestras made up of performers with varying levels of experience and with full-time, non-music careers as engineers, data analysts, doctors, attorneys, computer scientists, and so on.

Usually, the pros play exclusively with the pro groups, and the enthusiasts play exclusively with the community orchestras—but there’s some crossover. I’ve heard professional musicians say they practice more for paid performances, while others said they felt more committed to the community projects—not that they necessarily practiced more, but that they were more passionate about them. And so I wondered: When compensation takes the form of passion and satisfaction, instead of monetary remuneration, what is the impact on performance quality, commitment, and artistic freedom?

To find out, I interviewed 30 composers and performers—professionals and part-timers—in my home city of Seattle and across the US. Among these are artists who rely on music for their entire household income, artists who have partial non-music income, and artists whose income is completely independent of music. Their answers vary, but not along those income lines.

Money, Quality, Time

Curious about priorities, I asked: When compensation takes the form of passion and satisfaction, does quality suffer? And does it always suffer, or only if there are competing (paid) efforts to prioritize at the same time?

For most, money is not the determining factor for investment. Standards are standards, reputations are on the line, and there are other key inspiring motives for working hard: shared commitment to great artistry; rising to the level of your colleagues; opportunity for growth, satisfaction, and fulfillment; passion for a project, a charity, or fulfilling a personal favor; interest in new/difficult repertoire; need for a creative outlet; investment in future employment; chemistry/energy/connection with collaborators—these are the reasons to perform.

You can create a complete turkey on mega-resources, and pull off an instant classic on a shoestring budget. In the end, it’s all about personalities intersecting and the capacity to inspire and lead people into believing in a singular creative idea. The collective will is a mighty force and can make the seemingly impossible a memorable reality. ~ Composer/conductor, Seattle

So what does impact quality?

Time.

If I don’t have time to do everything to the very best of my preparative abilities, I prioritize whichever gig is most important to my long-term career—and that is usually also the best paying. ~ Composer/musician, Seattle

When there’s a crunch, musicians dedicate their available time to paid gigs—and that can be a paid music gig or a full-time non-music job. Preparation for other musical projects is diminished (or eliminated entirely) as a result.

Even dilemmas couched in terms of money boil down to time:

Money plays a bigger role in competing with large organizations. A smaller organization like ours [a new music focused ensemble] is hard-pressed to tell a musician to not go for the gig that pays $1500 a week. I think it’s part of the deal…it doesn’t mean that the musician doesn’t love to play new music, but they’ve got to live, and an organization like ours has to be flexible. It’s about creating a community of musicians that enjoy playing the repertoire and with one another, and supporting one another toward this artistic lifestyle. ~ Composer/conductor, Seattle

What is time but an opportunity to do work and put food on the table?

Finally, a few performers whose entire personal income comes from making music expressed a deep connection between compensation and self-worth—and, by extension, quality of performance:

I feel better about myself when I’m working for money—more successful. I take greater pride in it. I think I compose harder when there is pay. ~ Composer/musician, Seattle

The more I’m getting paid, the better I feel, the better I play. I always feel more valued when I’m getting paid. I have a better attitude about it, practice harder, and feel happier overall. ~ Violinist, Seattle

Part-time performers with non-music careers may have the luxury of measuring the value of their work in other contexts (and, as we’ll see later, they enjoy other luxuries as well).

***Money and Artistic Freedom

Boundless funding can open doors for creative exploration. A hip-hop producer once told me that when he worked with Kanye West, part of the creative process was bringing in as many interesting collaborators as possible, deciding later which tracks to use. “When you know you’re going to make $50 million, you can afford to figure it out afterwards like that. But if you might make $50,000, it changes things.”

Understandably so! Risk is difficult to navigate, even/especially between close friends and colleagues.

I wondered, again, about the flip side. What if there is no money involved? Does freedom from financial obligation result in great artistic freedom?

I wished I’d asked the interviewees that question, but instead I phrased it like this, fallacy and all:

When there is no money involved, and therefore no financial risk, is there more room for artistic freedom? Do great works emerge?

I was trying to get at the idea of “playing for fun” (goofing off, jamming, the musical version of doodling—what I, a casual musician, do at my keyboard while waiting for the kettle to boil). But folks took it in a more serious direction, and they took it down two very different paths.

Funding = Rules; Money is Icky

For some, not having funding means having the freedom to collaborate more openly and explore creative limits.

For new pieces, the weirdo techniques and sounds we were making were exactly what the composer wanted because he/she came and hung out with us and players in the [community] orchestra, and the orchestra [members], having no job security and less competition to worry about, often ask questions of our collaborators and composers freely, thereby contributing to the musical and social culture of the organization. Sometimes in paid gigs, asking a question exposes a vulnerability, and I feel many orchestral musicians equate vulnerability to threatened job security, which can definitely have an adverse impact on artistry. ~ Violist, NYC

And then there’s this bit of negotiation genius:

When there is no money involved, I do get to call the shots more. When working with directors, I remind them that if I’m working for free, I’m an investor in their film or video game and get to do what I want. This generally prods them to find the money unless they are looking for true collaboration. ~ Composer/musician, Seattle

In certain cases, money can be downright harmful to the creative process:

Every time I’ve been paid an actual commission fee, I feel like it really messed with my head. I feel like those pieces were not as good as others, and many of them I’m less proud of. It’s a big part of the reason I’ve slowly stopped composing. ~ Composer, Seattle

…and even losing money can be worthwhile:

I’ve bankrolled a few workshops of my pieces, and it’s been fun, and freeing, and people got paid a bit, and I knew I was gonna lose money, but I learned a lot about the piece, which is what I wanted. I was definitely in a position of financial risk, but that intentional willingness to lose money helped me have the artistic freedom to really research the piece. It was great. ~ Composer, Seattle

And yet, whether it’s the performer, presenter, venue, patron, or audience, someone always has money in the game.

There is Always Risk

There are almost always financial obligations around making music, even if the performer does not shoulder them first-hand.

Money is like the oil that allows the old fashioned “machine” to run: for musicians, we need money first of all to get an education, and to buy and maintain an adequate instrument, and then to pay for some kind of transportation to wherever we’re called; orchestras need halls and stands and lights and chairs; conductors need musicians, who need to be paid if not in money then with some kind of prize (such as Krispy Kremes at break time or Starbucks cards or just flowers); and if we don’t play traditional classical music with free parts from IMSLP, we have to pay royalties to modern composers and rent the parts from self-promoting companies. ~ Violist, Seattle

For those making a living from music, there just isn’t a lot of time to goof off, and playing without pay can have a huge opportunity cost.

When you’re not being paid, you’re risking your finances/income/livelihood for, one hopes, some other benefit (guaranteed or unguaranteed). Once you take that free gig, a paid gig might come up, and then you’re in a difficult professional position: either you back out of your commitment to the free gig and rightly earn something for your time/talent, or you honor the commitment and basically lose money (because you COULD HAVE been playing for money). ~ Cellist, Seattle

There is certainly financial risk when no money is involved, because doing the [unpaid] work can hurt your interpersonal relationships, cause you to not seek real work, and send you into a dark artistic hole where nothing gets finished. ~ Composer/musician, Seattle

Full-time performers drove home the fact that even with money off the table, there are other risks at play, especially when commissioning new works. Unpaid ensembles without deep-pocketed (and potentially controlling) backers are still concerned about getting people in seats, and need to program around that. Performers worried about playing a difficult, exposed concert where they’d “look like an idiot on stage” won’t take the gig, even if it is paid.

And finally, we come back to time:

The financial stress associated with being in the arts is so great that it’s hard to free up space for creativity, or any “extra” projects. The reality of being a working artist is that you are most likely juggling several things such as teaching lessons, maybe a part-time but steady gig, and freelancing. And, maybe you have a side job to supplement that. So that means there are so many moving parts that it’s hard to find the right energy to really create new things. ~ Flutist, Seattle

If a project is generously funded—enough to give the musicians time enough to take a hiatus from other projects—then you will have the MOST artistically-free possible greatness of an outcome. ~ Composer/performer, Seattle

What might that look like?

Financial Stability = Freedom to Choose

Money is only one of five factors that I consider when taking a gig. The other four are time commitment, people (other players, conductor), repertoire, and potential growth as a musician. If a gig meets at least three out of the five, I’ll usually do it. ~ Flutist, Seattle

I decided it was a matter of my life, and my life’s creativity, to live in a creative space in my music work, and that meant ditching the freelance mentality and adopting the generative artist mentality. What can I make? What creative artists can I support by collaborating with them? So I do all kinds of amazing stuff that is really at the forefront of goodness in my city. I am proud of my stuff and my collaborations. But the money is small to non-existent. ~ Violist, Seattle

It’s probably time to address what one performer called “duh obvious elephant”: the privilege of choice afforded those with alternate (non-music) income, or a financially supportive spouse/family, or savings from a previous job.

This sentiment figures prominently across all income groups except the entirely volunteer bracket:

Income from teaching lets me be a patron and opportunity-maker in my field. ~ Singer, Chicago
I have invested many thousands of dollars and many more unpaid hours in my gig. Having other paying jobs is the way to feed the passion. Learning how to prioritize time and energy is the name of the game in this field, especially if you are interested in a genre that may not pay well. ~ Conductor, Seattle
A lifelong day job can allow you the freedom to do what you like outside of the job. ~ Composer, Michigan
Charles Ives was an insurance man, and he could write whatever he wanted (way out-there stuff!) ~ Performer/conductor, Seattle
I subsidize my creative music habit by borrowing from my freelancing/teaching to give myself a “grant.” ~ Composer/performer, Seattle
I like to work other jobs so that I can have more artistic autonomy and freedom. ~ Violist, NYC
My [day job] income is higher now, so I have a choice in whether or not to take a gig based on whether I think I’d enjoy it, not because I need the money, which is absolutely freeing! ~ Bassist, Seattle

Contrast the above with the sentiments of those who depend more on music for their income:

Half our household income comes from music. It can be scary, because there is no security in it. ~ Composer, Chicago
There are occasions where the music is quite inane, and I’m only there because I’m paid. ~ Violist, Seattle
All of my income comes from conducting and teaching. I make a decent wage from my five to six jobs. ~ Conductor/performer, Seattle

From this, a tricky challenge with music-independent income rears its head:

The abundance of community orchestras in Seattle creates a challenge for those of us who play for a living; people in the position to hire musicians become accustomed to getting something for free, and are less concerned with how the quality may suffer. It’s great that community orchestra players have that opportunity, but it saturates the market in a challenging way. ~ Flutist, Seattle

If this is indeed the case, what does one do about it? Is there a solution that supports both communities?

As I ponder the strangeness of a competitive field shared by artists who are all deeply rewarded by the process of making music, yet divided on the subject of volunteerism, I can’t help but think: if we could remove money from the equation by making sure artists get paid enough to do better than get by, what would that look like?

***The Ideal

To be paid for expressing yourself as you see fit would be an amazing life for any creative. ~ Composer, Chicago

“I don’t care if the audience is paying or not. If I can make a living playing music, I’m happy.” ~ Violinist, Seattle

As I made my way through these interviews, I realized I’d been conflating two aspects of free performance: performing without pay, and attending without cost. For musicians whose livelihoods depend on getting paid for their performances, performing too often without pay would lead to starvation. What about providing music at no cost to the listener?

I turned back to the group with a hypothetical proposal that removed the main stressors of musical life (money, lack of autonomy) and emphasized the joys they had mentioned when talking about which gigs they do choose to play for free (playing compelling repertoire, working with inspiring creative partners, reaching for the height of one’s own creative artistry, having a chance to take risks and grow).

I asked:

Envision a scenario in which you were paid a comfortable living wage to perform (or compose) for a fixed number of hours per week. You would have the freedom to choose your schedule, the performance venues, the repertoire—you could be busking Steve Reich or playing Brahms with an orchestra, and everything in between. Between rehearsing and performing, this would be a full-time job. All of your costs would be covered, and the performances would be free to all audiences. (For composers: the scores you produce would be available to all ensembles at no cost.)

Would you do it? Why/why not?

Hell yeah.

The response was extremely positive. Performers called it “a dream come true,” “the ultimate ideal,” “the outline of reaching pinnacle of my career.” One asked for a job. Another said he’d leave his current career and take a pay cut to be employed in this way. For all types of artists, at all income levels, this sentiment rang true: “I’m not committed to paying audiences—I’m committed to getting paid.”

And then they really dug in.

Not Too Much Creative Freedom, Please

Musicians were thrilled with the prospect of full artistic control. In contrast, composers were quick to note that their creativity thrives in an environment of limitations (creative, temporal), and that having too much artistic freedom can be problematic.

Setting specific limitations helps us use our creative minds to their absolute extremes. If you have no limitations, then what are you conveying to the audience? A story cannot keep its listeners if it branches off in numerous and endless directions. The same can be said about music. I have recently worked on an opera that had specific limitations as to the ensemble’s regular audience and instrumentation, but instead of thinking of how “caged” I was in those limitations, I let my imagination take over as to how I could meld stylistic genres, and how to let certain timbres of the instrumentation mix and match so that they could help create the story, develop it, and move it forward. ~ Composer, Chicago

If I were paid just to produce music, I think that would be rather grand if I were forced to do specific things. I would really like to compose for a TV show because of those requirements. It’s hard to get work like that…Being a staff recording engineer or orchestrator would be great too, because assignments can be quite inspiring. ~ Composer/musician, Seattle

I’d likely still want to pair with specific ensembles and performers for each project, even if it wasn’t required contractually. I’m a very strong opponent of people writing pieces of their own volition and not for a specific group… I know so many composers who try to write big pieces (symphonies, operas, choral masses) and then attract ensembles to premiere them. It sometimes works, but often, the ensemble understandably wants to be part of the inception of the piece, so coming to them with an already-written piece is not as exciting for them. ~ Composer, Michigan

Intellectual Property

One composer, citing a parallel with Vivaldi, said he’d jump at the opportunity to be salaried and share his works at no cost; another said he could pass up licensing for his scores as long as he was happy with his income. But a third was more hesitant to give up the rights:

Intellectual property ownership is important. Control of my own music for the future is immensely important. If someone else wanted my IP, even if I was getting paid full-time, I’d be disinclined to do it. It would make me think there was a market opportunity I was missing, and that I’d be better off keeping control of the royalties. ~ Composer, Seattle

Value, Audience, and Choice

In a world where all performances are free, what might the impact be on the value of music—and the demonstration of that value?

I’d take this job as long as I don’t have to demonstrate effectiveness by the number of seats filled. ~ Composer/musician, Seattle
This model seems to jettison any sort of a market… how long would I be working before people stopped coming to see what I was up to? If it were free, would people still want to go? Would they value it? In a utopian world where people would just play my pieces and I could choose venues as I like: What choices would they have to either play my music or play the better music of some more worthy composer? Eventually, the market starts to creep in when more people come to some concerts than others, and people want to figure out how to attract the largest crowd so as to have the most cultural salience. ~ Composer/musician, Seattle
I think there would be an uptick in the work one has to do to communicate “value” around classical music performance. But, I would welcome that situation. ~ Singer, Chicago
Just writing the music doesn’t mean that anyone would actually play it or embrace it, even if it is available for free. And in the end that begins to take me back down the road to where I am now, which is to say that it’s really hard to write music, and feel good about it, when nobody is playing it or embracing it. ~ Composer, Seattle

They are not alone in these concerns. One music director—an exception among interviewees—explained that he doesn’t believe in free tickets. The community orchestra he leads has enough funding to perform their concerts at no cost to the audience, but the organization decided that doing so would lead audiences to take them less seriously.

Exceptions aside, most expressed an ecstatic enthusiasm for having a dependable living wage, and glee at the idea of having full creative control. Familiar themes of time, control of one’s own schedule (and geographical location), opportunities for growth, and freedom to take artistic risks emerged as well:

The thing I don’t have anymore is time, and being able to be a full-time composer and write what I want, when I want, would be amazing (mostly because there’s so much more that you need than just simply writing the notes: you need time to think, listen, revise, think, ponder, write, think, listen…) ~ Composer, Seattle

This is the scenario where you would have the opportunity to find a niche that could be innovative: new music, women composers, music with ethnic diversity, collaborations with other art forms… ~ Conductor, Seattle

Oh my gosh, talk about a dream job! Comfortable living wage and freedom to choose schedule and repertoire? To just perform all week??? That is basically the outline of reaching the pinnacle in my career. I would totally do it. ~ Singer, Chicago

The Reality

Something people always say to me when I tell them I’m a musician is “oh, that’s so great you get to do what you love for a living.” To me, that illuminates two separate but related problems: one, that statement implies someone in a more traditional profession doesn’t love what they do. Two, just because I happen to love my job, does that automatically mean I don’t deserve to get paid for it? ~ Flutist, Seattle

Trouble comes when commitment to a passion supersedes self-preservation. ~ Composer, Michigan

As I write this, I am surrounded by walls draped in big sheets of craft paper dotted with clusters of Post-Its containing quotes from interviews. There’s a sheet for the question of quality, a sheet for financial risk, and a sheet for our lovely utopian world. There’s also a sparse, unlabeled sheet with a small collection of tangential comments that caught my attention as I read through interviews—little mentions that, each on its own, might sting a little.

Late the other night, coming down from the utopia of the autonomous artist, I put those final quotes together on a single page and heard their weighty, heart-rending chorus:

I lose 10K a year on my creative music habit.
I make almost as much from composing as I do from my minimum-wage job.
I could decide to accept a few more gigs if I decided that I was comfortable with under-performing.
Passion ≠ career.
Eight of my all-in musician friends got evicted this year.
Pioneering a new project that will sustain itself and the musicians is rough for me and my family. Besides the financial strain of committing all that time and practice—that’s rough for me and my family, because I am sacrificing, I’m tired—I’m also doing other paid gigs to make up for it.
I’m embarrassed to advertise that we don’t pay. I’d be blacklisted in NYC. We have a weak union here—I guess that means certain projects can get off the ground without fear of blacklisting. But if everyone’s doing the work for free anyway, where’s the incentive for anyone to raise or give money?
Most people simply want to consume Passion rather than pay Passion’s rent or help Passion repay its student loans.

The collective weight of these thoughts brought me to the floor.

***

All of my music-making is done out of the love and passion for doing so. ~ Violist, Seattle

Read more new music and money coverage all this week on NewMusicBox.

Money plays a role in our lives, our priorities, our decisions. The absence of money may allow (in the case of those who are part-time) or force (in the case of full-timers) musicians to prioritize along particular axes. Part-time musicians, salaried but short on time (and, perhaps, artistic outlets), put their disposable energy toward meaningful growth collaborations. Full-time artists, short on money and time to make more, ultimately choose gigs that pay.

But when I added money to the equation with the hypothetical scenario above, I found that most performers and composers from all walks of life wanted the same thing: to perform/compose as much as possible, with as much creative control as possible, for as many people as possible, and for free—as long as they can put food on the table.

Roundtable: Facing the Hard Questions

Posted on April 14, 2016 by Lisa Bielawa - Articles, Commentary

[Ed. Note: In the spirit of conversation and story sharing, we reached out to music makers and asked them to let us know what was on their minds when it came to cash and creativity and what lessons from their own careers they might share. Some answered questions we posed directly, others were inspired to take the topic somewhere else. Each provided something illuminating, and we hope you’ll jump in and share your own experiences in the comments. –MS]

Lisa Bielawa
Photo by Phil Mansfield

Is commissioning the best way for you to make new work? Are other models “better”? In what ways?

For me, because I tend to concoct musical scenarios, presentations, and experiences that are—for one reason or another—not within the parameters of existing organizations’ initiatives, I would not say that commissioning is the best way to make this kind of work. The large-scale projects I have launched in the last few years—especially Airfield Broadcasts, involving 250 musicians in Berlin and 800 musicians in San Francisco, both spatially mapped on historic airfields that are now public parks; or Vireo, the opera that is being created in 12 episodes for broadcast and streaming media—have required me to build a kind of institutional structure expressly for the project, and then seek partners that can participate in various aspects of the creation of the project. These kinds of projects are more like entrepreneurial ventures, and as such, they require financial risk-taking and the willingness to take on fiscal as well as artistic accountability.

When creating large-scale projects, we are also creating communities around the work. In order for these communities to function as viable systems—and that includes financial viability—we need to know what each participant hopes to gain through their involvement. It is rare that true entrepreneurial partnerships—in artistic endeavors or otherwise—will draw partners to it that have merely mercenary interests. Each partner needs to have its/his/her own relationship to risk and investment within the project. I am always seeking partners (collaborators, musicians, organizations) who see a meaningful benefit beyond just money in the project itself. That benefit can include longer-term financial stability (through increased visibility, connections with the other partners involved, etc.) as well as other less quantifiable value.

Read more new music and money coverage all this week on NewMusicBox.

And lastly, I always make sure I honor all collaborators and partners as professionals. We all need to be paid—it can be a special arrangement, perhaps, and all agreements can contain other elements besides money. But I do not generally feel comfortable with favors and trades. I have had to design a life that is self-sustaining, and I treat others as if this is also true for them. We must do what we can to make our field as sustainable as possible for each other!

What is the most difficult piece of the financial side of your career, eg. applying for grants, negotiating commissions, budgeting, balancing non-related work, etc.?

There are two major challenges to making work in this way. One of them is that fundraising and partnership building do require some of the same kinds of creativity and vitality that creative work requires. So it is incredibly important for me to be good at managing my own time, staying well physically and mentally so that I can handle the stress of greater responsibility, including responsibility to many, many others involved in the project. I’ve gotten better and better at managing all of this, but it is still sometimes overwhelming. The other big challenge is simple scheduling. In order to make a living, while also sustaining projects whose budgets are many times the size of my own income, it sometimes feels like I need to clone myself. But I just plan my travel and my expenditures—personal and project-related—very carefully. It takes great organizational skills.

Do you worry about the stability of your income in the short term/long term?

Not really 🙂

I probably should! But life is short. And the risk is worth it. I don’t recommend the entrepreneurial approach for those who are happiest with more of a work-life balance. It is an entire lifestyle. I have no family, no regular schedule, no fixed place of work. I am on the road over 30 weeks a year, sometimes earning income as a performer or lecturer or conductor or panelist, and sometimes in connection with my own compositional work. This lifestyle works for me, but this is because of my temperament. I would not be happier with a steady, fixed income, or with a more traditional domestic life. But I absolutely respect that these are needs that many have, and I don’t think any one lifestyle is superior for creative work than another. I’m just so glad I’ve found the right one for me!

***Composer-vocalist Lisa Bielawa is a 2009 Rome Prize winner in musical composition. She takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. In 1997 she co-founded the MATA Festival, which celebrates the work of young composers. Bielawa was appointed artistic director of the acclaimed San Francisco Girls Chorus in 2013 and is an artist-in-residence at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, California.

Bielawa’s music is frequently performed throughout the US and Europe by top ensembles such as The Knights, American Composers Orchestra, Akademen, Brooklyn Rider, BMOP, and more at venues such as Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, and the Whitney Museum. Bielawa’s latest work for performance in public places is Airfield Broadcasts, a work for hundreds of musicians that premiered on the tarmac of the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin in May 2013 and at Crissy Field in San Francisco in October 2013. Bielawa is currently at work on Vireo, a new opera created for episodic release. Her latest album, The Lay of the Love, was released on Innova in June 2015.

Roundtable: Let’s Make a List

Posted on April 14, 2016 by Alex Shapiro - Articles, Commentary

Alex Shapiro

Okay, fellow note aligners: let’s talk about the nitty and the gritty when it comes to creating income from the music we compose.

I’ll begin with this important, tone-setting manifesto:

Our worth as composers is meaningful, whether or not our music generates income.

Too often when reading frank discussions about money, some composers who either by choice or circumstance do not garner much revenue from their music are left feeling as though their pieces don’t really…count. Bah, humbug (or maybe in this case, Bach, Hamburg). Money has nothing to do with the quality of anyone’s music.

That said, for those who choose to put together a living from composing, there are myriad avenues for monetizing one’s output—which can offer both exciting opportunities and an overwhelming career equation to solve. Thus, I’m asking fellow music creators to build an ever-growing master list of income sources derived solely from their work. We’ll start with my list, simply because it’s the example with which I’m most familiar, and because what it lacks, others will chime in to add. By doing so, we all can benefit from contemplating the broad landscape of possibility that is seeded by our copyrights.

Ancillary work

Before we launch The Big List, let’s have a look at other income sources in our field. There are many terrific ways to earn a living in the music world through ancillary careers. Performing and teaching are probably the most obvious ones, in addition to working:

as an arranger and orchestrator
as a conductor
in music administration
as a music librarian
as a music preparation professional
in publishing
as a manager or agent
as a composer’s assistant
as a music video producer
as a recording engineer
as a consultant to peers
as a judge on panels
as a studio assistant
for honorariums from service organizations
giving private lessons online and in person
giving workshops and seminars…

…and these are only a few.

There is also a gray area that includes writing articles and book chapters, or allowing one’s music to be used for free in videos, for which one is not often paid, but which offers a level of professional exposure that has the potential to become financially rewarding, one step removed. A few years back, I penned an article for NewMusicBox exploring this, titled “The Economy of Exposure: Publicity as Payment?”.

But in this instance, let’s enumerate the many ways by which the original music that pours out of our hearts and brains can be turned directly into the food that feeds us, the roof that houses us, and the prompt internet bill payment that keeps us connected so that we can deliver our work and watch the next episode of House of Cards. In other words, let’s limit the scope of this list to ways that our music can earn us money. Not our instrument-playing gigs or our conducting, but solely our copyrights.

Round One

Here’s an initial pass at some of the ways in which composers like me earn income. These aren’t listed in any particular order, and some consistently generate larger amounts than others. I invite you to add to this incomplete list in the comments section below.

Commissions

This includes your composing fee, plus an additional fee for the music preparation, if relevant. If you are also doing the score and parts copying for your own work, then that counts as a source of income directly related to your original music.

Score sales, directly from you

If you are the publisher of the music, you receive 100 percent of these proceeds.

Score sales, through a distributor

If you are the publisher of the music, you receive a designated percentage of these proceeds, after the dealer discount.

Score sales, through a publisher

If you have assigned a copyright to a publisher, then you will receive a designated percentage of their proceeds.

Performance royalties

Money that comes from your performing rights organization for small rights, and from your own negotiations for grand rights.

Publishing royalties

Money that comes from your performing rights organization and possibly your co-publishers.

Digital streaming royalties

Money that comes from collection services like Sound Exchange, if you own copyrights in sound recordings.

Mechanical royalties

Money that comes from record labels and their distributors. You may need to invest in a high-powered microscope to see the amount you are paid.

Residencies

Fees that conferences, symposiums, festivals, and schools pay us to come and lecture about our music, coach rehearsals of our pieces, and drink boxed wine with a side of fried mozzarella sticks at Applebee’s after concerts of our works.

Sync licenses

Money paid to you, if you own the copyright, for the use of your music with visual media.

Arrangement licenses

Money paid to you for the right for someone else to create an arrangement of an existing work in your catalog.

Ad revenue

Money paid to you through programs like Google AdSense, Amazon Associates, YouTube Partner Program, etc. when your online content includes ads that generate click-throughs.

Online coaching

A fee paid to you to attend and coach a rehearsal of your work via Skype or a Google Hangout.

Skypehearsals, as I’ve dubbed them, are a newly created market, and especially useful for composers working with large ensembles. I was among the early adopters who incorporated these sessions as an ongoing income source, and they’re a significant part of my creative and business approach in the wind band world. For a moderate fee, I’m brought right into the interpretive process, resulting in a meaningful connection with the musicians, plus some oblique, tangible advantages. By forming a virtual, yet personal relationship between me and the ensemble, the director is more likely to purchase my other scores (sales income), perform those pieces (royalty income) and commission me in the future (as long as I remember to comb my hair and avoid drooling). In other words, a relatively small Skypehearsal fee often turns not only into a long-lasting collegial friendship, but into three additional sources of income as well.

Be in the flow

Income for an independent composer is all about the flow. Sure, it’s wonderful when larger checks show up in your mailbox or direct deposit. But more often than not, getting a viable career up to speed means creating an ongoing succession of projects and uses of your material that together generate a constant stream of cash that usually arrives in modest amounts.

For instance, a commission fee from an individual or small ensemble might be spread over four payments, as opposed to the traditional two. Perhaps you have three such contracts in a given year, in addition to others that pay you larger amounts in one or two segments. The result of this “3 clients x 4 payments each” is that you have a check coming in virtually every month from one piece or another (and sometimes from several at once, depending on your composing schedule). Those, along with your income stream throughout the year from the categories listed above, complete the recipe for being able to pay your bills.

Account for yourself

Read more new music and money coverage all this week on NewMusicBox.

Like most working composers, I receive income each month in varying amounts from a wide variety of sources, rather than from just one or two places. It can actually be a bit dizzying to keep track of it all. I’m frighteningly organized (yup, one of those obnoxious “neat desk” people), and yet when it comes to accounting and staying on top of things in my business, I’m embarrassingly-but-charmingly simple in my record-keeping. Okay, probably more on the embarrassing side, but hey, it works for me.

To wit: I create a simple spreadsheet each year, featuring columns for the “who/what/when due/when paid” information, with a psyche-soothing color code for each fee category. I list and enter every payment chronologically so I can see the rundown clearly, gathering and summing the categories at tax time. Many of you reading this are highly sophisticated and use great software that does far more (other colorful spreadsheet strategies of possible interest are outlined here). But admittedly, for as über-high tech as I am in my project studio, I’m very old school when it comes to accounting. I’m sharing my process here so that composers daunted by the prospect of managing all their information can see how utterly straightforward it can be.

In addition to the spreadsheet, I keep a tally in an even simpler text file, listing what my anticipated income is for each month of the year, as well as my monthly expenses. Assuming your clients pay in a timely manner, you will know that the second of three payments for Such A Brilliant Piece is due in February, and that the first of two payments for Another Brilliant Piece is due in May, as is the final, fourth payment for This Utterly Brilliant Piece. You’ll know that if you served on a panel in late March, your honorarium will arrive sometime in April, and those residency fees from symposiums and universities will make your mailbox smile in, say, July, October, and December. Your PRO payments come at pre-determined times, while your score sales and Skype fees probably go up and down each month. As I noted above, it’s dizzying, and you can see why it’s wise to write all of this down. Each of these items combines to create a cascade of cash flow, borne from the riverhead of your biggest asset: your copyright.

Live modestly

To achieve the elegant simplicity of the road map above, there is one very significant rule of thumb which cannot be stressed enough: live within your means, and avoid using credit whenever possible. (The tragedy of student loans is an evil that for some is unavoidable, and is a separate discussion.) Pay as you go. Money is artistic freedom: the less stress you’re under to meet monthly financial responsibilities, the less you will need to rely on other non-composing sources of income and the more choice you will have as a composer as to what projects to accept.

Think creatively

If you happen to be a non-performing composer as I am, that means that you can choose to live anywhere you wish. You may decide to trade in the expense of a big city for the affordability of a small town. Or even a small rock, like where I live on Washington’s San Juan Island. Or… a boat! I had a live-aboard permit years ago for my sailboat in Santa Barbara. I still consider the future possibility of forgoing a house, buying a decent sized older vessel, and setting up my studio in it. Thanks to cell and internet connectivity, music creators have many economic options that would never before have been realistic.

Find a balance

For composers who choose to earn money from their art, the pride of being paid cold hard cash in exchange for the sonic chaos inside our heads cannot be overrated. But even for those with established careers, it’s common to toggle between different kinds of projects: some naturally destined to be more obscure, and others predicted to garner many sales and performances. A contrabassoon sonata probably won’t move nearly as many copies off the shelf as a wind band or choral piece. In both cases, they can equally represent the excellent art of the same composer, but do so through different compositional voices for different audiences. One helps to subsidize the other, resulting in a very fulfilling artistic life. No one would criticize a friend for cooking an Italian meal on Tuesday, doing Szechuan take-out on Wednesday, enjoying a North Indian buffet lunch on Friday, and making French onion soup on Sunday. Writing varied types of music is no different, and it is a wise approach to staying in the flow both musically and financially.

Be kind

I’m a firm believer that there’s a beautiful correlation between being a decent, positive person and attracting opportunity. Kindness, graciousness, an interest in what’s meaningful to other people, and a sense of humor about oneself are traits that not only enhance your life, but also your career. Because you’re not just in the music-making business, you’re in the relationship-making business.

Additional resources

Chamber Music America has a long-running series about the music business called the First Tuesday Sessions, for which I was a guest speaker a few years ago. Recently the organization began posting videos of these valuable conversations. The newest one is a must-see for any composer wishing to be paid for their work: composer Martin Bresnick gave a terrific, very specific, one-hour tutorial on the details involved in negotiating fees for one’s work:

Be sure to click here, as well, for more excellent advice.

Another wonderful resource is composer Garrett Hope’s podcast “Composer on Fire.” You can hear me address some of what’s in this essay in my two-part March 2016 podcast, and the site is filled with inspiring conversations that will make you even more excited than you may already be about having a viable career doing what you love.

Never forget

After all of this discussion of the many ways to earn money from your art, it’s important that I wrap up with the very same credo with which I began:

Our worth as composers is meaningful, whether or not our music generates income.

Everyone knows that developing the ability to support oneself in the arts is a challenging mission. Not every artist is naturally suited to the requisite demands placed upon our left cerebral hemisphere, as well as upon our people skills. No one is “better than” or “less than” anyone else, whether or not they possess these traits. We each compose because we are unstoppably drawn to do so. Our work, whether commissioned or not, is simultaneously exhausting and exhilarating. For those who find a way to make their passion their vocation as well, exhilaration should ideally become the overriding adjective for a very busy life that’s filled with magic.

***Composer Alex Shapiro aligns note after note with the hope that at least a few of them might actually sound good next to each other. Her persistence at this activity, as well as at non-fiction writing, public speaking, arts advocacy, wildlife photography, and the shameless instigation of insufferable puns on Facebook, has led to a happy life. Created from a broad musical palette that defies genre, Shapiro’s acoustic and electroacoustic works are performed and broadcast daily across the U.S. and internationally. Her pieces are published by Activist Music, and can be found on over twenty commercially released recordings from around the world. She is the Symphonic and Concert writer representative on the ASCAP Board of Directors.

Roundtable: The Bonnie Jones Grant

Posted on April 14, 2016 by Bonnie Jones - Articles, Commentary

Bonnie Jones

A few months back, my friend and fellow Baltimore composer Alex Gardner invited me to sit on a panel she was moderating, “Artists Outside Academia,” which was part of the 2016 New Music Gathering at the Peabody Institute. The artists included were those of us in Baltimore who did not primarily make their living as fulltime professors and were therefore outside of the typical presentation opportunities, support networks, and technical resources that university faculty often enjoy—not to mention the full time salaries.

The discussion centered on the various activities, priorities, and lives of the local artists on the panel and how we each, in our own ways, have gone off script in creating personal lives that sustain our creative work. Certainly for me, choosing to live and work in Baltimore was already a conscious choice made for my art practice—relying on the freedom afforded by relatively lower housing costs compared to cities like Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, etc. Other negotiations of time, space, and finances that came up included taking on the role of primary childcare provider, taking on additional training and classes for skills used to piece together side jobs, working seasonally, or making sacrifices in healthcare or housing to balance paying bills with insecure incomes.

For those of us working for our art practice without significant financial support other than what our own bodies and minds can generate, all these negotiations are probably familiar. We always have to consider FOOD/SHELTER against how ambitious a project we can undertake, how quickly we’ll be able to complete that project, and how much energy and self we can pour into that project. All these things change the rhythm of our creative minds and shape what our ART (not the work per se, but the practice), situated inside of our very real LIVES, will have.

My own path for making a living while making art was something that during the panel I referred to as the Bonnie Jones Grant. This “grant” was all the various web-related freelance and fulltime jobs I’ve held during my 17 years in Baltimore, which directly funded my volunteer non-profit, curatorial work, and art practice. In other words, I had a lot of regular jobs, but I thought of them as very much a part of my creative practice because they sustained that practice. I came to music later than most, having in my twenties focused on poetry and performance. Once my focus turned to music, the stuff I was interested in making was often challenging and abstract, produced with cracked and circuit bent electronic instruments. While the international community of noise and improvisation is incredibly stimulating intellectually and aesthetically, the financial sustainability is tenuous at best. So I realized early on that the music and writing I was drawn to might never be able to generate enough income to support my FOOD/SHELTER needs. So I got a job, a job job as artists sometimes call it, or job jobs in my case.

So the other day while working on this blog post, I took a break and watched a documentary called The Wrecking Crew about a prolific group of studio musicians who were responsible for thousands of Top 10 recorded hits from the 1960s and 1970s. You may have never heard their names, but you’ve certainly heard their music. This crew recorded The Beach Boys’s “Good Vibrations,” the Mamas and Papas’s “California Dreamin,’” the Righteous Brothers’s “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” and Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. The discography is mind-blowing.

Money was on my mind, so it was refreshing to hear these musicians talk about their art WORK. They spoke honestly about their modest or sometimes impoverished childhoods, the hustle of their early years when they were making their names, the sacrifices in parenting they made to support their families (studio gigs would sometimes keep musicians out for 20-hour days), their struggles with addiction and mental health issues as a result of the demands of their jobs and the insecurity of their incomes. They had no pretensions about how their art and their jobs were, by necessity, collaborative and entwined.

Percussionist Earl Palmer (who played on recordings of Richie Valens’s “La Bamba” and Jan and Dean’s “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena”) freely admitted that he didn’t care much for rock and roll, his heart was in jazz, but that to make a living off of rock and roll, he needed to play it like it was his favorite music. There was a general acknowledgement from the musicians that ALL the work you did was the REAL work of being an artist. Palmer’s judicious comment about playing music he wasn’t all that into: “It’s not beneath you if it’s supporting you.”

So why then, does it still seem novel when artists talk transparently about the money they make from art or other jobs? I wonder if talking about the very unsexy ways we make a living threatens some myth of the serious artist? The serious artist doesn’t sell out. The serious artist only cares about the art and everything else is false. The serious artist never compromises their authenticity for money. The serious artist never considers themselves part of the nasty capitalist game where many fight for what few resources are available. The serious artist’s success is based on a meritocracy. Who can actually live like this? Where did this myth come from? Did capitalism create the myth and ultimately make fools of us all?

Read more new music and money coverage all this week on NewMusicBox.

These days funding and jobs for working musicians are fewer and further between—the recording industry is collapsing, arts funding is choked off so orchestras are folding and commissions are disappearing. Even within the world of artists making objects, painters and sculptors are constantly working for free—their work appearing in major cultural institutions with no compensation unless they become one of the few who enter into the art economy as commodity. I think most of us agree that solely making money off your art is becoming a very rare condition.

The WORK part of a working artist’s career has expanded into a variety of industries and jobs that don’t utilize our artistic skills directly. The education industry has probably become the leading source of jobs for artists, while of course generating significant income off of those same folks in the form of MFA, DMA, and Ph.D. programs. This in theory sounds great, until the jobs are all taken and the universities keep creating masters and doctors of art who have student debt but no job prospects. So most artists are still spending lots of time stringing together a lot of different sources of income. Though I think it’s important to note, a lot of them really aren’t at all. A lot of highly visible and successful artists are such because they have financial support from family, partners, or other places not directly related to their art practice and in many cases they’ve always had that. And I think it’s fair to say that that does make an enormous difference in the shape of an artist’s life.

Which brings me to my current fear about the future of art in America. What happens if young artists starting out, with little or no financial support outside themselves, just stop making art and trying to put it out there because they need to take care of FOOD/SHELTER. What if only rich folks can make a successful living off of making art? What if we’re deprived of the benefits of having access to art made from a huge range of human experiences and backgrounds? Or maybe this kind of fear is completely out of touch with how art will be made and distributed in the future? Maybe we’re just witnessing a transition phase?

A side note about my own privileges. I was adopted from Korea and raised in a modest but middle class Caucasian farm family. I had all my basics covered as a child and, with family support, attended a great (cheap) public university that led to some solid job prospects, which led to a secure income working for an internet company, which I was able to parlay into a subcontracting position, which allowed me to go to and pay for my MFA, and which today allows me to work and make money on projects and then take off for months at a time to work on art and touring. Some years I make well above the poverty line and others not as much, but the work is fairly reliable and if the worst were to happen—cancer, psychiatric crisis, car accident, house fire, etc.—I have a stable relationship with my family that I know I could rely on. All of these things I recognize as enormous privileges.

OK, so for those of us who decide to keep producing anyways, because we just can’t stop, because it’s an essential part of who we are, because we’d lose our minds if we didn’t: Sometimes I wonder, is it all on us to just get our shit together and make it work? Does the working artist these days just need to become a better administrative assistant, giving themselves over to the business of art? Or is there a collective issue here that we can examine?

Raise your hand: who has been asked by an institution (typically a large one—university, museum, etc.) to present your work for little or no money for the “prestige”? For “the love of the work”? To build your resume? Who has agreed to $250 honorariums for two days of studio visits and presentations? Who has decided not to apply for a grant because the application or requirements are labyrinthine and exhausting and you just can’t fit the work into your schedule? Who has noticed that funding is often reliant on having gotten funding in the past, on proving yourself in a certain way—often outside of art itself—which means that grants often go to folks who already are receiving the large majority of available grants?

In 1973, avant-garde filmmaker, photographer, writer/theoretician Hollis Frampton wrote this letter to the Museum of Modern Art on the invitation to present a retrospective of his work. MoMA was hoping to circumvent the rental fees from the distribution company by having Frampton bring his prints and appear for free. The question this letter so succinctly articulates is: why do museums and major institutions prioritize their incomes for everything but the art and artists? This question becomes even more pressing for time-based artists (filmmakers, poets, musicians, performers) who don’t produce objects or straightforward commodities. The NYC-based organization W.A.G.E., which hosts the copy of this letter that I linked to above, takes up that issue by placing the responsibility on institutions to sustain artists and their work by—well, paying them.

On that note, I’ll leave off with a mini manifesto, because writing this post made me realize that I have a lot on my mind these days about art and money and privilege and power…and I could probably keep on writing, but this after all is a blog post likely being read on a phone, so I’m going to leave it at this:

We must question the value system of capital “A” art and how it designates what is important to the market and therefore to artists and institutions.

For sure we must place institutions that profit from artists at the center of the critique and put our minds towards creating more institutions that don’t profit from artists but still believe in what art accomplishes socially and culturally and who are willing to take some risks in supporting work that might question capital “A” art values.

Without a doubt, we must be honest with young artists and students about what the life of the working artist (bills, jobs, tenuous housing, lack of healthcare, lack of access to materials) looks like, vs. the life of the artist who has more financial freedom from the start (plenty of access to materials, ability to present and create work for free, stable housing and quicker financial recovery from health problems).

I consider myself an artist. I’ve been working to make art for the majority of my 38 years. To be sure I’ve had many successes and recognitions of my work over the years, but few of those have paid the bills. And I’m OK with this, for now. But to a certain extent, I have no idea what the next 38 years will look like, and whether the sacrifices one makes for a life of making art might actually have to be the art itself.

***Bonnie Jones is a Korean-American writer, improvising musician, and performer working primarily with electronic music and text. Born in 1977 in South Korea, she was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey and currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland. Bonnie creates improvised and composed text-sound performances that explore the fluidity and function of electronic noise (field recordings, circuit bending) and text (poetry, found, spoken, visual). She is interested in how people perceive, “read,” and interact with these sounds and texts given our current technological moment. Jones has received commissions from the London ICA and has presented her work in the US, Europe, and Asia and collaborates frequently with writers and musicians. She received her MFA at the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.

William G. Baumol and You: (Broader Economic) Context Is Everything

Posted on April 13, 2016 by Kevin Clark - Analysis, Articles

This is the first publication of a line of research I’ve been working on for more than a year. I’d like to thank the New Music Gathering, the San Francisco Conservatory, Peabody Conservatory, and most recently Seattle Pacific University for giving me opportunities to speak about this research. Video of my talk at Seattle Pacific is embedded below. I’d also like to thank the more than a dozen artists, administrators, and economists who’ve shared their experiences with me and helped me make sure this work isn’t only theoretically sound, but also of practical use for working artists. Last but not least, I’d like to thank NewMusicBox for helping me reach out to some of those working artists last year, as I was preparing this material for January’s New Music Gathering. I’m still at the beginning phases of this work, so if you’re curious about it, have a use for it, or want to participate, please get in touch: [email protected].

The music industry is changing really fast. Nobody knows what’s going on, or what’s going to happen next. Nobody’s career is like anyone else’s, and we’re all making it up out on our own. But there’s this one piece of economics that can help make sense of what’s going on, help us make better decisions as artists, and even help us make long-term plans.

That piece of economics? Baumol’s Cost Disease. In the 1960s Baumol noticed that some kinds of work get more productive because of technical advances. These are things like manufacturing, calculation, and robotic factories: anything where new technology makes things faster and cheaper. For Baumol, this is the “productive sector.” Then there are categories of work where technology doesn’t make it faster. No new iPhone app is going to make it take less than four worker-hours to perform a one-hour string quartet. The usual grouping of such industries is healthcare, education, and the performing arts (us). We’re the “stagnant sector”.

As things in the productive sector get cheaper and cheaper, stuff in the stagnant sector gets more and more expensive (by comparison) to produce. So it gets harder and harder to keep paying artists, teachers, and doctors well for producing, by comparison, less and less. That’s cost disease.

In the popular arts press, cost disease usually gets invoked to justify shrinking the orchestra or firing the dancers. It’s presented as a bogeyman, a bad thing that happens to our field. But it’s actually an observation about relative productivity that touches the entire economy and has implications for everyone, both good and bad. If you’re interested, Baumol wrote a second book during the debate over Obamacare. He talks about what people have gotten wrong about his work over the years (quite a lot), and he talks about how the problem isn’t just with things getting too expensive. There’s a problem when things like guns and fossil fuels are getting cheaper, too.

He makes one brilliant argument about how the forces moving these prices all exist within the context of a single economy — the rate of inflation governing all of this is an average of all the prices. No matter how high the costs of healthcare, education, and the performing arts grow, we can afford them as a society. Maybe we can’t afford them as individual businesses, but with enough political will, we can have the things we want.

There’s one thing Baumol doesn’t do–and I haven’t seen any other economists do it either–and that’s extend this work into the realm of the individual artist. Honestly, we’re too small a segment of the economy to get that much attention.

It’s well established how cost disease forced us out of the institution and into working on our own. But once we got here, Baumol kept being useful. Because suddenly, we were like big orchestras with mixed staffs of productive office workers and stagnant musicians. As independent working artists, we’ve got our artistic practice (stagnant and not being made faster by technology), and all the extra administrative work that we didn’t have to do before, like marketing, finances, taxes, business incorporation, etc., etc. (productive and being made faster by technology).

Baumol does provide a good account of businesses like this, with mixed inputs, including orchestras and individual artists: we’re called “asymptotically stagnant.” That is, as the productive stuff gets faster and faster over time, it will shrink to practically nothing as part of our cost of doing business, and we’ll eventually become mostly about the stagnant side: in our case, the actual art.

Publishers are a great example to show how this works. Originally, publishers were important because they had the means to print paper. They owned the machine. That made them important and powerful. They also had a bit of a distribution network and a promotional system, but that was less important than the engraving and printing. Over time, the cost of printing has dropped. Now most of us can make professional-level scores ourselves, and we can play with PDFs off of tablets. But publishers are still important, although more for their distribution networks and marketing capacity than for the actual means of production. The cost of the physical printing has dropped so low that it’s a negligible fraction of the cost of running the business, or of the value publishers add; the only thing left is the human labor part: that network. It’s taken a long time, and the process isn’t finished, but it is inevitable: the part of the work that can’t be automated will be all that’s left.

Sample coverage from the Wall Street Journal

It’s not just publishers, either. Most of the businesses that artists encounter as counterparties in our lives are being strongly influenced by the relative productivity changes that Baumol describes. Record labels, venues, agents, merchandise makers, PROs, orchestras: everyone’s getting their business models messed with by the same economic forces, and when one of these institutions starts to implode, as happens all too frequently, we can use cost disease to tell a quick and dirty (but very useful) story about what’s going on.

All you have to do is sort the things that institution does into two piles: stagnant and productive. Once you’ve done that, you know what’s getting cheaper and what’s getting more expensive. This can explain very dramatic changes, largely because of how powerful compound interest is. The difference between a 1% growth rate (below inflation, so getting cheaper in real dollars) and a 3% growth rate (above inflation, so getting more expensive in real dollars) can get very big in just a few years and lead to dramatic consequences. This is possibly my favorite feature of cost disease analysis: you don’t need to know what something costs, or even in most cases how fast its price is changing. You just need to know whether it’s automatable or not, and that tells you whether the price is going up or going down. That’s really all you need to know. Then you can usually tell where the pressure is coming from, and what someone’s trying to do about it. This can help you read the news, and it can help you figure out when the person you’re negotiating with has a weaker position than they’re letting on.

Individual artists are like that, too. Our artistic practice will never get more productive, but everything else can get faster and faster and faster over time thanks to technological advances. This leads to one of the first lessons of cost disease for individual artists: expect the way you do office work to change rapidly. You’re not going to find the right tool for travel booking or promotion early in your career and have it be the best tool for your whole life. We can keep our art-making habits the same, but our business habits should change.

We even know something about how they’ll change: they’ll get cheaper. Instead of buying an ad and printing signs, we can send emails and host a website on a cheap server. Instead of paying a travel agent, we can use an interlocking set of search sites and calendar applications to organize tours. And while we still might need to pay an accountant with experience in the arts to do our taxes, we can make that job faster and shorter by documenting our accounts with metadata in something like mint.com. And we can expect those things to keep getting cheaper and faster over time.

There is a part of our marketing work that won’t get faster, though. In truth, marketing and communications have components in both the “stagnant” and “productive” sectors. We still have to write the email, even though we can inexpensively send it to thousands of people. There’s a core of communication that isn’t going to get faster, even though new telecommunications technology has changed pretty much everything in the last few decades.

When we look at those non-art making tasks and see their financial costs going to zero, we can start to see what’s really important in deciding how to do these things: time. You’re not investing dollars in that new ad campaign, but the time you’re committing to it is more important, and increasingly expensive. So when you’re picking a platform to promote yourself, think about how easy it is for you emotionally to use Twitter or Tumblr or Pinterest or whatever comes next, because if you commit to a platform you hate, you’ll be wasting all that time psyching yourself up to post, instead of naturally taking an Instagram photo of your lunch without giving it a second thought.

As artists we have very unpredictable financial lives. But we know that our weeks will have the same number of hours in them for the rest of our lives. So when we make long-term plans, it’s a lot more effective to base them on the time we have than the money we hope to earn.

Most people go through their careers at regular jobs earning an average of 4% more per year over the course of their lives. That’s how our economy prices labor. That’s how much more valuable our time gets year by year, and that’s how much our pay should be growing: significantly faster than the 2% inflation target set by the Federal Reserve.

For me, that’s a strong way to advocate for the arts. I don’t like to base my arguments on increasing test scores, economic development, or personal enrichment–although those things are awesome and do come from the arts. When I’m forced to justify the arts in a narrow outcomes-based context I feel like I’ve already lost, because the reason art is so interesting is how hard it is to pin down to just one dimension.

I like to argue like this: we need to make a commitment as a society to paying health care workers, educators, and artists enough to support them as well as any typical worker in our society. Baumol’s analysis shows that we can have as much of these things as we want. We just need the will to commit to paying for them.

Spreadsheets and Skeptics: a philosophical tale of data and music

Posted on April 12, 2016 by Matthew Guerrieri - Analysis, Articles

Image via TrekCore

On argumente mal l’honnesteté et la beauté d’une action par son utilité
A man but ill proves the honour and beauty of an action by its utility

—Michel de Montaigne, “De l’Utile et de l’Honneste”

What do you do?

How many answers are there to that question? An occupation. A pastime. A technique. A course of action. Or maybe the question itself is a concession: a rhetorical shrug of the shoulders against the possibility of an answer.

Last August, The New York Times Magazine ran an article by Steven Johnson. “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t” painted, amidst some judicious caveats, a hopeful, even rosy picture of the prospects for a musical career post-Napster, post-internet, post-streaming services. It was, in a way, an exemplar of 21st-century explanatory journalism: technologically optimistic, pleasantly contrarian—and data-driven. Very data-driven.

Both the data and the drive were concerned with that same question: what do you do? One of Johnson’s main exhibits was occupational data—that is, counting up the number of people who said that their occupation was “musician” or some equivalent. In Johnson’s analysis, that number was going up, even as digital forms of consumption seemed to be anecdotally squeezing musicians out of the marketplace. Which led to the second “what do you do?”: don’t worry (or, at least, worry less), be happy (or, at least happier).

There were problems with the article. Johnson’s data was selective and, in at least one case (which I’ll get to below), didn’t quite say what he thought it said. And his own conception of what musicians do was somewhat disconnected from the huge variety and combinations of ways musicians make a living. I certainly raised an eyebrow (as did, I would imagine, Frank) when Johnson noted that

The growth of live music isn’t great news for the Brian Wilsons of the world, artists who would prefer to cloister themselves in the studio, endlessly tinkering with the recording process in pursuit of a masterpiece

—seemingly oblivious not only to exactly how many babies he was tossing out with that achingly lovely California-sun-dappled bathwater, but how many other cloisters (schools, practice rooms, composing tables) are crucial to even the most prolifically disposable musical styles.

Plenty of critiques followed Johnson’s article—most of them negative. The Future of Music Coalition led the way, leading to a back-and-forth that mainly shored up the respective trenches. Other observers weighed in. The National Endowment for the Arts Office of Research and Analysis mined some more data, some of it provocative. (The final graph in that report, showing, via Bureau of Economic Analysis data on capital investments, the decline in real investment in new music, is like a flash-card summary of the tyranny of the back catalog.)

I don’t feel the need to sift through all that data again. But I did start thinking about the data itself, the fact of it. Maybe Johnson’s article wasn’t the bellwether for the coming of Big Data to music, but it certainly was part of the flock. Data-driven analysis has seeped into every corner of the musical ecosystem, beyond arguments for (or against) increased opportunities for individual musicians. Streaming services, online retailers, social media communities—all are crunching reams of data and creating reams more, all the time. Our relationship with data has changed profoundly. Even the word itself hints at how much: it turned from plural to singular. (As a linguistic descriptivist, I find meaning in that.) Maybe we should step back, and figure out how to deal with that going forward.

So this will be a philosophical tale about data. As befits a philosophical tale, it will also be a cautionary tale. As befits a cautionary tale, it will include visits from three ghosts. There is, unfortunately, no neat moral at the end. But there will be the start of a framework for answering the question: what do you do?

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). Engraved by C.E.Wagstaff and published in The Gallery Of Portraits With Memoirs encyclopedia, United Kingdom, 1833.

Two ghosts to start: first, Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century nobleman and bureaucrat who, in his spare time and a long retirement, pretty much invented the essay, assembling his everyday observations and close-read experiences into a volume that, upon publication, was nearly immediately recognized as a classic of humanist thought. And then, from the succeeding generation, René Descartes, the father of Western philosophy, who retreated into his own mind (cogito ergo sum, after all) to search for fundamental truths—and who thought that Montaigne’s way of thinking was intellectually irresponsible to a positively diabolical extent.

The source of Descartes’s discomfiture was Montaigne’s cheerful espousals of a very old philosophy: skepticism, in a version that went well beyond mere Devil’s advocacy (Descartes’s suspicions notwithstanding). In Montaigne’s lifetime, French intellectual life had been marked by a fashion for schools of ancient philosophy that, beyond pursuing insight, offered designs for living—Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism. The latter cultivated a habit of questioning everything, admitting nothing, subjecting even the most seemingly obvious statement to a barrage of sabotaging logic and rhetoric. Its most famous exponent, the 2nd-century thinker Sextus Empiricus, worked his way through the liberal and scientific arts, demonstrating how none of them (music included) could even be proven to exist.

It sounds like a game, a mental exercise. It is. Epokhē, the Skeptics called it, a suspension of judgement, a constant refusal to succumb to certainty. Get good enough at it, the Skeptics thought, and you could will yourself into a state of ataraxia, tranquility, mindfulness, open to experience rather than trying to frustratingly box it into categorical truths.

In Montaigne, Skepticism inspired a radical if puckish empathy. One of his more tangential but revealing enthusiasms is for stories about animals behaving in clever or vaguely human ways. Another classical Skeptic, Aenesidemus, formulated a defense of epokhē in the form of a chain of ten tropes; Montaigne seems to have especially taken to heart the first: “Different animals manifest different modes of perception.” If animals have a way of experiencing the world, an inner life, that we have so little access to, how can we possibly say that our way of experiencing the world is the only valid one? In Montaigne’s famous formulation: “When I play with my cat who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?”

Rene Descartes (1596-1650). Engraved by W.Holl and published The Gallery Of Portraits With Memoirs encyclopedia, United Kingdom, 1833.

Skepticism drove Montaigne’s perception outward; it drove Descartes’s inward. “I think, therefore I am” was Descartes’s implicit shot across Montaigne’s ruminative bow, fencing off human reason as exceptional. He started with the same sally as Montaigne—question everything—but, where Montaigne and his classical forebears took that as an everyday attitude, Descartes took it as as a prompt to, as he was determined to do, answer everything as well. (In her excellent biography of Montaigne, How to Live, Sarah Bakewell puts it like this: “Trying to get away from Skepticism, [Descartes] stretched it to a hitherto unimaginable length, as one might pull a strand of gum stuck to one’s shoe.”)

That first answer, about thinking and being, was Descartes’s base camp. And he immediately questioned it: how do I know this to be true? Well, there was nothing inherent to I think, therefore I am that demonstrated its truth, except for the fact that it was so clearly true to Descartes. And, with that, he began climbing into thinner and thinner air:

I concluded that I could perhaps take, as a general rule, that all the things which we very clearly and distinctly conceive are true.

All the things which we very clearly and distinctly conceive are true.

Whatever happened to “show your work”?

In turning back to the data, one might well adopt Montaigne’s motto: Que sais-je? What do I know? And it doesn’t take much effort to reach a Montaigne-like conclusion, a feeling that the cat is playing with us as much as we are playing with the cat. But that’s a trap, too.

For me, the most interesting hole poked in Johnson’s article had to do with some figures Johnson gleaned from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s Occupational Employment Statistics (OES), which derive from a yearly survey of some 800 occupational categories. Johnson:

According to the O.E.S., in 1999 there were nearly 53,000 Americans who considered their primary occupation to be that of a musician, a music director or a composer; in 2014, more than 60,000 people were employed writing, singing or playing music. That’s a rise of 15 percent, compared with overall job-market growth during that period of about 6 percent.

That’s a pretty clear trend, no? But the BLS cautions against such year-to-year comparisons of OES data, and with good reason. A New Zealand statistician named Thomas Lumley poked into those figures and found that the 15 percent increase could almost entirely be attributed to an increase in the “Music Directors and Composers” category; beginning sometime around 2009, approximately 15,000 primary and secondary schoolteachers that weren’t previously being counted as music directors suddenly were. Take out that influx, and Johnson’s upswing turns into a decline.

I got curious about that tweak, so I emailed the Bureau of Labor Statistics about it. I was hoping that it was some straightforward change in methodology, one that might say something about how, at least from the standpoint of the state, the dominant idea of a “musician” was evolving. Nope—in their message back, the OES Information Desk chalked it up to the law of unintended consequences:

In particular, in 2010 and 2011, the OES program implemented the revised 2010 version of the federal Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system. As part of the 2010 SOC revision, the word “band” was added to the occupational description for music directors and composers. This revision was not intended to change the occupation’s content, since “band” was implied to be part of the previous definition for this occupation also. However, the addition of the word “band” and the inclusion of this occupation on the OES survey form sent to elementary and secondary schools may have caused a shift in the number of workers reported as music directors and composers rather than as teachers.

I love this. The addition of one innocuous word to the description managed to extend the fog forward and backward in time. There’s no way to tell how many band directors did get added, didn’t get added, should have been added, should have been in the category already. It brings us, full circle, back to Montaigne: the more you know, the less you know.

At this point, we might respond with a common trope: the data, we would say, is unreliable. But, really, the data is just the data. The BLS asked a question and got an answer; they asked a slightly different question and got a slightly different answer. They’re not pretending that it’s anything other than that; it’s why they specifically warn against making the kind of comparisons that Johnson made. But we, Cartesian children all, can’t resist. Johnson saw the pattern and judged it true. The Future of Music Coalition and Thomas Lumley saw a different pattern, and they did the same thing. Certainly, you can think that one interpretation is more plausible than the other, that one is closer to the truth. I know what I think. (I think it’s the latter.) And yet, at the same time, there’s Montaigne in my head saying, sure, that’s what you think—but what, exactly, do you know?

It’s not the data that’s unreliable; it’s the clarity. And when it comes to trying to figure out music, that’s a bit of a problem.

The problem was neatly framed by a third ghost: Louis Althusser (1918-1990), the Marxist philosopher and theorist. Althusser was a troublesome character, philosophically and otherwise. For all his insistence that he was a classical Marxist, his interpretation of Marx was rather unorthodox—and, to other scholars in the field, highly suspicious. He was unstable, going through periods of mental distress; in 1980, he killed his wife, strangling her in their apartment at the École normale supérieure in Paris, escaping prosecution by being judged to have been temporarily insane. (He described the incident with sophistic frankness in a posthumously published memoir, in which he also admitted that he hadn’t actually read all that much Marx.) His writing is pervaded by a kind of brittlely incisive gloom.

His most famous theoretical contribution—his analysis of ideology, from his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” first published in 1970—is a good example of how grim his philosophy could be. Althusser presents ideology as so omnipresent in society and time, without history, pinning people into identities even before birth, as to make one wonder how any ideology could ever be subverted, or superseded, or even simply adjusted. It is almost helplessly deterministic, to the point that its relationship to actually lived life starts to seem not just counterintuitive, but disconnected.

So why bring him up? Because Althusser had a real skill, almost a sixth sense, for identifying points of tension. And the point of tension at which he builds his theory of ideology is exactly the point at which the competing priorities of data-driven analysis and music collide.

One of the big ideas in Althusser’s essay is interpellation: how ideologies call out individuals as subject to those ideologies, and how individuals respond.

[I]deology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it “recruits” subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or “transforms” the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!”
Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was “really” addressed to him, and that “it was really him who was hailed” (and not someone else).

Althusser presents his example as a sequence of events, but actually, “these things happen without any succession,” he writes. “The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing.” So this thicket of scare quotes marks off another of Althusser’s inescapable prisons: if an ideology exists, not only will it interpellate you as subject to it, it already has.

Setting aside the turtles-all-the-way-down aspect of Althusser’s idea of ideology, interpellation is a useful way to think about the way we talk about jobs and occupations. The OES data, for instance, interpellates you, the musician, as a musician, but subject to the terms of the ideology behind the collection of OES data. The various ideologies that pervade society—free market ideologies, hangover-Calvinist ideologies, up-by-your-bootstraps-self-sufficient ideologies—are interpellating you all the time. Artists and musicians, especially in less-dominant stylistic modes, run into this all the time: think about a phrase like “doing what you love,” which so often interpellates artists. Yes, we do what we love, which, as subjects of free-market ideology, calls us out as people who shouldn’t expect to make as much money as other people who do what the free market loves. (It’s no wonder that there’s a movement in radical labor circles dedicated to “counter-interpellation,” essentially re-framing and re-naming worker-subjects in terms suited to more worker-friendly ideologies.)

But Althusser goes further. He wants to know why and how interpellation happens. So he takes a look at one of the bigger ideologies out there: Christianity. The Christian religious ideology calls out an individual, “in order to tell you that God exists and that you are answerable to Him.” The ideology is the voice by which God addresses you (through scripture and its interpretation). The ideology tells you who you are, your place in the world, your duties. Do what the ideology tells you and you will be saved. And so on.

“Now this is quite a familiar and banal discourse,” Althusser writes, “but at the same time quite a surprising one.” Why? Because the ideology is addressing individuals, interpellating individual subjects, but only “on the absolute condition that there is a Unique, Absolute, Other Subject, i.e. God.” There are big-S Subjects (ideologies) and little-s subjects (individuals), and it’s the gap between them that makes interpellation work. The big-S Subject interpellates the little-s subject such that, not only is the little-s subject inescapably linked to that identity, but the little-s subject can contemplate the big-S Subject in his or her own image, such that the ideology doesn’t seem imposed, or constructed, but just “the way things are.” Ideology ensures that, in Althusser’s words, “everything really is so, and that on condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right: Amen— ‘So be it’.”

Responding to the Future of Music Coalition’s first round of objections, Johnson left a long comment that included both of these statements:

We made a decision to focus the piece on the artists, not the ecosystem around the artists

and

[W]e wanted to stick with our principle of not relying on individual anecdotes, and report only broader, industry-wide data

—to which one might say, “well, which is it?” But it’s not either-or; it’s Althusser’s little-s subject and big-S Subject working in quintessential lockstep. Johnson wants to make you, the reader, feel better about the plight of individual artists in an era of technological optimism, and he wants to do it by analyzing large-scale, collective statistics. Does that work? Sure—as long as you’re convinced that the statistics reflect back the image of the individual artist. The artist is the subject. Data is the ideology.

So what do you do? Ignore the data? That seems extreme. Data-driven analysis might be an ideology, but it’s a rationally based one. And I, for one, like rational belief systems. They tend to be more useful than the alternatives. They tend to discredit a lot of opinions and behaviors that I find offensive, or unfair, or damaging. But even a rational belief system is still a belief, a faith—something the rationality of the system tends to obfuscate. Not only does that make it easy to fall into Descartes’s clarity-equals-truth trap, it’s easy for that seeming truth to subtly shift from one category to another, to jump the tracks.

Take economics, for instance, the most data-driven of social sciences. If you ask exactly what it is economists do, the best answer might be: they try and design mathematical models that return data matching that generated by real-world situations involving money and material goods and decisions and consumer behavior. But that is not quite the same thing as describing the behavior itself—a distinction that a lot of people (economists included) fail to make a lot of the time. And the models assume a level of coherence (rational actors, rational decisions, market efficiency) only sometimes (if ever) found in the actual world.

Descartes might have thought twice about that clarity thing: after all, his first book was a survey of music theory—Musicae compendium, written in 1618, published (posthumously) in 1650. And, on the very first page, Descartes wrote this (as translated by Thomas Harper in 1653):

For songs may bee made dolefull and delightfull at once; nor is it strange that two divers effects should result from this one cause, since thus Elegiographers and Tragoedians please their Auditors so much the more, by how much the more griefe they excite in them.

Music, at its core, is not a rational art. And yet its creation now necessarily happens within systems and societal frameworks evermore marked off, framed, and otherwise governed by the self-proclaimed rationality of Big Data. Sometimes the meeting will be useful; sometimes it will not. But it will always be a meeting of two fundamentally divergent belief systems. It’s not a matter of collecting more data, or better data, or finding a more sophisticated analysis of that data. The best you can hope for is ecumenical cooperation.

Montaigne would have responded to that uncertainty the way he responded to all uncertainties:

Every one is well or ill at ease, according as he so finds himself; not he whom the world believes, but he who believes himself to be so, is content; and in this alone belief gives itself being and reality. Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter and the seed, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies as she best pleases

That sort of attitude is easier said than done, even with a knack for epokhē. But it’s the start of a corrective against the anxiety of data, the illusion of and need for exact, singular answers to big questions. Data requires interpretation; so do notes. Analysis is performance; performance is analysis. The application of a musical soul can make as much sense of fortune as the sort of a spreadsheet. Sure, that’s just a belief. But that, it turns out, is what we do.

Commissioning Fees Calculator

Posted on April 12, 2016 by New Music USA - Articles

Ensembles come and go. Venues come and go. Styles and trends, too. And how about that recording industry? The business and technology surrounding new music bear little resemblance to what was standard fifty years ago. But commissions continue, forming an important pillar that supports many composers’ careers.

And so our Commissioning Music: A Basic Guide continues. It’s a modest document, really. A few key ideas and a few numbers delivered in a terse, to-the-point style. It is perhaps this directness and simplicity that has allowed it to last longer than many other things. Even the organization that originally created it has become part of something different. Yet this little guide-that-could is still here, giving composers and commissioners a shared baseline at which to begin their negotiation. It endures as a testament to the vision of Meet The Composer: composing is a profession deserving adequate compensation.

In the spirit of this week of music and money conversation, we present it here in interactive fashion, an offering to set out just what “adequate” means. (If you prefer a document, that’s also still available here.)

For decades, New Music USA’s (formerly Meet The Composer’s) Commissioning Music: A Basic Guide has been an essential and frequently cited reference for commissioning fees. This page is designed to bring you that resource in easy-to-use form. It presents you with typical commissioning ranges for different kinds of projects, from concert music and jazz to dance and video games.

Lessons from the Outside: A Venture Capital Firm for New Music

Posted on April 11, 2016 by Gahlord Dewald - Analysis, Articles

One of the sessions I attended at the New Music Gathering in Baltimore this year covered commissioning new works. It was an engaging session to an overflow audience, and many interesting thoughts came out of it. But I want to focus on just one of them.

Among the attendees were new music champions Arlene and Larry Dunn. At one point, Arlene asked how audience members—not the performers or the show organizers or composers, etc., but the people who listen—can participate in the commissioning of new works.

This is a question that I think is worthy of deeper and ongoing consideration and exploration by anyone involved in building an audience or a scene. Many of the ways in which music is produced separate audiences from the opportunity to directly support the creation of new works. This is the case in popular music as well as other genres. There are organizations that collect money from audiences in order to produce and package music experiences, but few paths for direct participation by fans in the music’s invention.

Thinking about Arlene’s question, there are some popular platforms such as Kickstarter and Patreon. But anyone who has run a Kickstarter campaign can tell you that the work involved in successfully funding in this way can be exhausting. Moreover, there are questions about how sustainable Kickstarter might be. After all, how many times can an audience be tapped in this way each year, and how many times can the organizers expend the effort required?

Patreon sort of handles the sustainability side by being built with the idea of ongoing payments vs. Kickstarter’s one-time cash infusion model. But the Patreon subscription model doesn’t easily align with the commissioning of a single work. A work is more like a product, while Patreon is built to fund a process.

What if, in an effort to make a better answer for Arlene’s question, we examine potential futures that don’t exist right now but could? My Bonnie Jones Grant, which funds my music-making activity, involves helping organizations handle challenges strategically. Why not use some of the techniques from the business and finance world to see if we can come up with something?

Scenario Planning

One tool that is used by people who think deeply about business and the future is called scenario planning. It’s mostly just a serious term invented so that the guys and gals in suits don’t feel silly saying, “We’re doing some daydreaming over here during our corporate retreat.” While a little more rigorous than plain old daydreaming, it’s not terribly daunting either.

Ultimately, it’s a game that goes more or less like this: Identify some variables that you suspect are important, get some understanding of what influences those variables, outline several possibilities for what the future might look like based on what you understand of the variables, build a set of plans so that your organization is prepared to deal with this potential future reality. Bonus points are awarded for any data or existing models/behaviors from other fields that can be applied to any of these steps.

Also, it’s one of those hippie games that doesn’t have a winner. It’s either fun and productive or it isn’t. (I suppose some people do win if the future they identify comes to pass and, because they’ve played this game, they are prepared for it.)

Most importantly, this is a game anyone can play and there are no single right answers. We could all play this game and come up with a wide variety of very creative answers to Arlene’s question. And it’s a question that anyone who makes music should be happy to answer: how can audiences directly support the creation of new work?

An Example

I’ll run through my own short version of scenario planning on this so long as you all agree to remember that this will be just one potential solution. You may come up with something equally or more viable if you play this game as well.

Variables that I suspect are important in examining the future of funding new works are: Desire of audiences to participate at all, desire of audiences to participate directly, desire of audiences to feel a part of the process/some ownership. There are other variables as well that, for the sake of not boring people, I’m not going to get into in this piece.

Is there anything we can observe that points at these variables? Well, there’s the existence of Kickstarter and Patreon, two platforms with active users facilitating the creation of new work through direct participation. There are also commissioning clubs, which serve as an example of audience members self-organizing to fund the production of new work.

We also have Arlene’s question, a sign that there is someone who is interested in these things but wants to be closer to the generative side of the equation. She doesn’t necessarily want to wait for a composer, performer, or presenter to start the process.

Other things we can observe are that there are many boards for arts organizations which contain people who may have similar motives and desires to those expressed by Arlene.

In terms of trends, many pixels have been darkened in an effort to inform us that millennials are particularly interested in social action and direct participation. Perhaps the Kickstarters and Patreons of today are really just the tip of an iceberg for activating this generation as they move into positions of greater authority and influence.

But Kickstarter and Patreon rely on producers to initiate the commissioning activity. And commissioning clubs may lack some of the formalized structure necessary for larger scale and longevity. Are there other existing models where non-producers fund people/organizations to produce something?

Yes, of course. This is how many businesses are created. A group of investors pool some money together and provide it to a business so the business can make something (more money, usually). There are several different ways this happens. There are models where lots of people put in money and don’t think about it while a manager invests it (i.e. low/non-existent participation from the people putting up the money). And there are models where the people who put money in are very, very involved, sometimes selecting and altering the management of a company for example.

What’s useful about examining how business funds creation is that it provides a currently functioning model in which money is already flowing for the development of new things. It also shows that there are several ways this can be done for low-involvement and high-involvement.

Perhaps there’s a future in which someone like Arlene becomes an investor in a fund that is actively pursuing the creation of new works. It could likely work in a way similar to existing venture capital funds. Perhaps there are a handful of managers that seek out and vet potential projects.

We could go further with this analogy, I suppose. Venture capital isn’t a grant. The investment is expected to return something to the investors. So there’s ownership. Perhaps there is some exchange of ownership of the musical product that is funded which is transferred to the investors. Just as in business today, this sort of arrangement would not be acceptable for everyone. But for some, it might.

I discussed this idea, just as a thought exercise, with a composer friend of mine: considering that many startups receive significant investment and aren’t actually expected to profit for some time, what if music had that same luxury? What if our hypothetical venture capital for new music was putting up a million bucks for the creation of a new work with the idea that creators would make something worth more than a million bucks over the next few years?

Thinking in this way broadens the scope of what we’re doing as music makers beyond a single premiere presented to a handful of friends, or even a large audience. It asks us to consider greater potential for what we’re doing, which is good.

I’ll call this my potential future for Arlene’s question: Groups of audience members who collectively organize to fund the creation of new music. Each group has an agreement amongst itself regarding the kinds of things it funds and the kind of ownership stake it asks in the resulting work. There would likely be an ecosystem of groups like this catering to different audience members’ interests and skills.

There are benefits in this approach beyond money. For example, since the people participating in our potential music venture capital fund have a stake in the success of the work, they may be more willing or able to provide non-tangible assets: making crucial introductions, facilitating access to rehearsal/launch/performance spaces, and media connections. (The breathless coverage of technology startups is largely a function of the venture funding mechanism in common use in that industry.)

There is also benefit to the participants in the venture fund. Meeting and working together for vetting and successful launch of music projects allows for a deeper and richer interaction among capable people. There can also be value in gaining skill at identifying and incubating emerging projects.

For the greater new music scene there are benefits as well. Any new music venture firm that becomes capable of supporting the launch of several projects will likely come to the conclusion that they can improve the chances of success by providing physical space for the development of multiple projects, much like co-working spaces in business. There are probably several things like this which would benefit from the pooled resources of the fund. In addition, increased interaction between music makers on several different projects may also improve chances of success.

A successful venture firm of this sort could alter the geography of the new music scene as well. Silicon Valley is the site of the startup economy because that is where the venture capital resides. Originally, it was less expensive than existing business centers like New York. Put several new music venture organizations with rehearsal/development spaces in a place outside the traditional centers of operation, and the geography of innovation within the field will tilt as well.

It is these larger issues, like geography of innovation, which will likely attract a new audience to the concept and to the music. It is common for smaller second- and third-tier cities to try to develop innovation centers or business incubators. The ability to influence the generation of a new industry would be attractive to individuals who are looking for the benefits of an increase in the number of innovative thinkers and creators in their town.

Certainly the whole “innovative music makers are going to make your town awesome” line of thinking isn’t completely obvious to everyone. But it’s obvious to enough. The success of Austin as both a music city and a technology city is well known and studied in civic policy circles, for example. There is a conference called Music Cities that is focused on precisely these kinds of issues.

What sort of things would need to be in place for this kind of thing to occur in new music? First up would likely be a collection of investors in a position to invest without significant anxiety over losing their investment. These people already exist, it’s just that they are captured more by business venture capital at the moment.

Creators would have to develop broader visions for their work, which includes functional revenue streams. The stereotype is that musicians only care about “The Art,” but I know enough musicians to know the stereotype is not entirely true. Even beyond that, in business it is extremely common to have a partnership in which one of the partners is the product/creative person and the other is the operations/business person. Some venture capitalists won’t invest unless there are at least two people for this very reason.

In other words, creative teams and projects may need to expand their individual capabilities or take on additional team members to fill this need. So perhaps another sign of the potential future outlined above would be noticeable leadership positions in ensembles and composer teams that consider deeply issues of revenue stream generation. I’ve read at least one recent article promoting retiring the myth of the solitary genius composer, so perhaps there is movement in this direction already.

Just One Potential Future

The idea of a venture capital model for the creation of new works is just one possible answer for Arlene’s question at the New Music Gathering. Hopefully enough readers are now so outraged by this idea that some will take up the task of creating a different potential future and sharing it with us. Or perhaps some people will get to work assembling the first version of this new way to create new music.

***

Gahlord Dewald
Photo by Mira Steinzor

Gahlord Dewald is a musician specializing in acoustic, electric, and synthetic bass frequencies. He is currently commissioning new works for solo double bass with or without electronics. He delights in sharing new music with small audiences in Burlington, Vermont, where he lives. You can learn more about his work at gahlorddewald.com.

Stay Tuned: Celebrating Ben Johnston’s 90th Birthday with his 10 String Quartets

Posted on March 15, 2016 by Eric Segnitz - Analysis, Articles

[Ed. Note: Today, March 15, 2016, is the 90th birthday of maverick American composer Ben Johnston. To celebrate this major milestone, the Kepler Quartet—which has spent the last 14 years working closely with Johnston to learn and record his music—has finally completed their third and final installment of the world premiere recordings of his entire oeuvre for string quartet on New World Records which will be released on April 15, 2016. Though Johnston’s ten string quartets are thoroughly idiomatic and often extremely beautiful, his music offers some unprecedented challenges to would-be interpreters. For more than half a century, Johnston has eschewed today’s common practice tuning of equal temperament in his music and has instead explored just intonation (intervals tuned to precise numerical ratios) which derives from the overtone series. Most of the quartets use intervals as complex as those derived from the 13th harmonic in the overtone series, but one quartet goes as high as the 31st harmonic. Another quartet, the Seventh—christened “the Mount Everest of String Quartets” by Kyle Gann and a work which has never been previously performed let alone recorded—contains more than 1200 distinct pitches. This is a hundred times the amount of tones that most string players are ever asked to play. So how did the Kepler Quartet tackle this music? We asked the quartet’s second violinist, Eric Segnitz, who was also the producer of the recordings, to offer his personal perspective on the process. We’ve also included some short video clips featuring Ben Johnston and the members of the quartet as well as a brand new video clip that was recorded during the final recording session.—FJO]

Video by Ross Monagle

Ben Johnston has been called a genius, a hero, a visionary. And by the standard criteria, that is all true. New advances in a domain of knowledge? Check. Sacrificing or not compromising for personal concerns, achieving feats of ingenuity for the greater good? Check. Able to envision past, present, and future in a parallel universe that recognizes beauty as it already exists? Check. He even dares you to go on that journey with him.

This year marks composer Ben Johnston’s 90th birthday, and the passage of fourteen years since the Kepler Quartet (in which I play second violin) began to record the entire cycle of Johnston’s ten string quartets. Much has been written about Johnston’s music, so I will concentrate here on the history of these recordings.

By virtue of our recording project, the Kepler Quartet has had a privileged window into the essentially spiritual quest in Johnston’s music. At age 90, a full fifteen years after he stopped writing music, Johnston has come to a place in his life where his main goal is to have a positive impact on his environment. He has come to embrace a philosophy that there are two ways to live. He has forsaken the so-called “hero’s journey”—a linear approach to life that mirrors melodic values, in favor of another, richer way of being: to work towards pure, honest relationships with others by using a vertical, harmonic approach concentrating on perfect intervals, the advantage being that it produces less discord, increased resonance, and maximum clarity—to borrow the title of the 2006 book of Johnston’s collected writings.

This harmonic approach cannot be achieved at our society’s breakneck pace. It requires deeper consideration, more serious engagement, and—above all—slowing down. I remember when I was coached by Rudolf Kolisch and Zoltan Szekely, the respective founders of the Kolisch and Hungarian string quartets, the groups that first brought the Schoenberg and Bartók quartets to the public. Besides being awestruck, I remember thinking at that time, “Man, are these guys slow!” They were ultra-methodical, and could spend three days on the opening of a Mozart string quartet, or two months staring at a Bartók score before picking up an instrument. Those were memorable experiences, but also ones that could drive a headstrong, career-anxious youth nuts.

Now I understand.

As St. Thomas Aquinas put it: “It is better to enlighten than merely to shine.”

By necessity, the Kepler Quartet is not currently a performing quartet. We have been a stealth unit, secluded in a remote church in the middle of a cornfield, rehearsing with the composer to make recordings. We’ve needed to approach these works much as they were written: contemplated intuitively, at a distance from society, with the belief that what is “normal” does not apply—not with this music.

Ben Johnston and the members of the Kepler Quartet

Ben Johnston (bottom left) with the members of the Kepler Quartet. Brek Renzelman and Karl Lavine (top row), Sharan Leventhal (middle row). and Eric Segnitz (bottom right). Photo by Kae Hubred.

St. Tom again: “It is better to give the fruits of one’s contemplation than merely to contemplate.”

The cover of the Kepler Quartet's first CD devoted to the music of Ben Johnston (New World Records 80637-2).

An excerpt from String Quartet No. 4 “Amazing Grace” (1973) as performed by the Kepler Quartet: Sharan Leventhal and Eric Segnitz (violins), Brek Renzelman (viola), and Karl Lavine (cello). From the first disc in the series, Ben Johnston: String Quartets Nos. 2, 3, 4 and 9 (New World Records 80637-2) released in January 2006. Streamed with permission.

Whatever possessed us undertake a task of such Brobdingnagian proportions? We premiered the Tenth Quartet in 2002, working with Johnston on a concert series for the Milwaukee-based new music group Present Music. The collective gasp of the audience after each movement sent a clear message. Similarly, anyone who has played his Fourth Quartet (“Amazing Grace”) will tell you, as the final variation begins, a life-affirming catharsis occurs–one of the special moments in music, like the end of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony when all hell breaks loose. What is behind that? How can that possibly happen? What musician wouldn’t want to know more about that? When you discover that Johnston’s Fourth Quartet was conceived entirely (harmony, rhythm, structure) based on a specific set of organic ratios, it’s even more mind-boggling. And when you learn that the work was written in response to a personal crisis, it takes on a universal quality. Our collective and individual relationships with Ben were very natural from the beginning; he had so much to give, and we had so much to learn.

Did we know it would take fourteen years? Obviously not. The project started as an impulse to record the work we premiered. We talked to ten record labels. Seven were interested, and a few suggested that we do the entire cycle. The consensus was that somebody had to do it, but that early in the project no one really had any idea what they were talking about. (Our code name was Project Rabbit Hole.)

Kepler Quartet: Ben Johnston’s String Quartets 1, 5, and 10 from Jon Roy on Vimeo.

This project could never be done again, certainly not with the direct guidance and mentorship of the composer. Three of the members of the quartet live in Wisconsin; Brek Renzelman and I both live in Milwaukee and Karl Lavine lives in Madison. Early in the project, Johnston and his wife Betty relocated to a suburb of Madison, Wisconsin, to be closer to their son Ross. Ever since then we’ve had constant access to Ben’s intellect and generosity—a resource that can never be replaced.

Other groups, however, now have these recordings made under his guidance as a resource. We’ve already begun to see the effects. Someone once told me that if something can be measured, it can be made. The recordings provide information—and encouragement—for other groups to explore these compositions. An incredible oeuvre of music, once largely inaccessible, is now available to the world, an open secret. Judging from breakthroughs in the past thirty years, we can anticipate rapid advances in technology, education and performance standards—it all goes hand-in-hand.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the La Salle, Concord, Fine Arts, Walden, New World, Stanford, Composers, and Kronos quartets for the tremendous work they’ve done on Johnston’s music. They are our heroes! We’ll be another link in that chain now, and feel honored to be part of the continuum.

St. Francis of Assisi wrote: “Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”

The cover for volume 3 of the Kepler Quartet's recordings of the complete string quartets of Ben Johnston (New World Records 80730-2).

A sneak preview from the first movement of the world premiere recording of “the Mount Everest of String Quartets”—String Quartet No. 7 (1984)—performed by the Kepler Quartet. From the final volume of the series, Ben Johnston: String Quartets Nos. 6, 7, and 8 (New World Records 80730-2), which will be released on April 15, 2016. Streamed with permission.

A good starting point is to explain our process, and why it has taken four people fourteen years to do this. Kyle Gann half-jokingly referred to the Seventh Quartet as “the Mount Everest of string quartets.” We understand his analogy; each quartet is a steep and rocky climb, often exhilarating, and the more we learned (the higher we climbed), the slower we got.

First, we do the math.

That is, we translate pitches from the score into numerical cent values. I’d always heard about the correlation between music and arithmetic; I understand it better now. Johnston devised an ingenious notation system for Just Intonation which is practical yet defiant. It always reminded me of a quote by William Blake: “I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Man’s; / I will not Reason or Compare: my business is to Create.” Johnston’s notational symbols tell the harmonic function of the note as well as the exact number of cents, which can be measured with a standard electronic tuner. But the performer needs to decipher as many as seven different pitch qualifiers per note, in an assortment of configurations, depending on how high Johnston has composed in the overtone (or undertone) series (as opposed to the usual single half-step, sharp # or flat b). Understanding exact pitch relationships is essential, which meant preparing from scores only—we never read from individual parts.

Then we listen.

This required commissioning MIDI realizations of these scores. Luckily, we’ve connected with Andy Stefik and Tim Johnson, who have vast expertise working with digital synthesis. The materials they created for us never served as a guide in rehearsal or recording, but were used individually by each member. In general, MIDI is nasty to listen to, but in this case it functioned as a can-opener for the brain. When we would hear one, we would realize the extent to which we had to unlearn all those years of tempered-scale indoctrination, and open up the mind to new possibilities. After all, we named our group after Johannes Kepler, the astronomer and mystic who intuited the leap from Pythagorean musical intervals to predicting the elliptical orbit of the planets.

Johnston SQ8 rehearsal snippet from Jon Roy on Vimeo.

Of course we rehearse.

Not as easy as it sounds, especially when the players and composer live in different cities around the country and have to coordinate busy freelance schedules, not to mention personal lives. The rehearsals generally are a lot of slow tuning and hard listening, more balancing of chords than I’d ever dreamt possible. Each new quartet presented its own unique and intricate Gordian Knot. At times we became entangled ourselves, but eventually, the solution would emerge. We consulted with Johnston constantly, which entailed many philosophical discussions, because the pitches are only byproducts of the emotional nuances Johnston sought. Always, there was philosophical underpinning to those emotions, and always, Johnston helped us to find it.

Johnston’s critiques were always leavened with large doses of humor—which is an integral part of his music and personality—and social commentary. In one breath, he talks about world events, and in the next, about what is happening on the working farm where he lives with his wonderful caregiver and her large, bustling family.

Then we start recording, but in our own way.

We’ve had a no-holds-barred approach to making these recordings. We would tackle a phrase in multiple ways, to satiate any self-doubt. We have what we call a “three-drink-minimum,” always recording three times as much material as we need. There were so many things to remember at these sessions and a few things to forget. Our earliest recording sessions at an indie rock venue featured a rat rustling in a paper bag, a beer keg completely emptying onto a carpet, and noisy snowblower repairs in July!

The CD cover for the Kepler Quartet's second volume of string quartets by Ben Johnston (New World Records 80693-2).

An excerpt from Ben Johnston’s only quartet in 12-tone equal temperament, Nine Variations a.k.a. String Quartet No. 1 (1959) performed by the Kepler Quartet. From the 2011 CD Ben Johnston: String Quartets 1, 5, and 10 (New World Records 80693-2). Streamed with permission.

Intonation has always been the highest priority in these recordings because that’s what defines Johnston’s masterpieces. But everything else had to be right to create a cohesive artistic statement.We’ve taken seriously our mission of accurately documenting these works the way Johnston conceived them. I remember when we began the First Quartet, I asked if Johnston wanted a Webernian crystalline approach or a more full-throated romanticism. He raised his eyebrows and said, “Both. I want it all!” When asked about production values, Johnston replied that he sees these recordings as reinventing the art of chamber music. It’s “more like a film than a stage play.” There is some hyperbole in his words, but also some truth—no Pixar magic, just a lot of hard work to make the best recordings we can. We’ve come to view in a positive light the fact that Johnston’s quartets demand scrupulous attention to detail. There’s more to consider about this music on many different levels, and it’s all good.

Engineering is critical.

I brought some studio experience to the project, though it mostly falls into the category of “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” We’ve been extremely lucky to have had another genius as a full partner in this endeavor. Ric Probst is a brilliant engineer, cajoler-in-chief, and something of a psychologist as well, managing all our quirks, keeping things moving, bringing perspective to the table. Throughout the project, he cheekily skewered the digital editing process, and our classical pretensions, using his unusual and lengthy background to do so—a reminder of where this stuff fits on the spectrum. Once, when we were caught up in some frustrating minutiae and badly needed perspective, he said, “I remember editing Bootsy Collins hits in Cincinnati, and having bits of reel-to-reel tape spread on the floor in front of me.” Then, nodding at a computer running ProTools, “This is [expletive deleted]!” The man’s great ears, great skill, and wry wit saved the day many times. No one deserves more credit or thanks than Ric.

At this point, I’ll take a moment to thumb through my Kepler flip book and introduce the three indomitable spirits whose sacrifice and devotion have made this possible. I met our first violinist, Sharan Leventhal, when we were in high school youth orchestra together. I remember my first impression: “She’s such a brilliant player; she doesn’t even seem to play the same instrument as the rest of us!” I met the violist Brek Renzelman just after he graduated from Indiana University, when he won a titled position with the Milwaukee Symphony. He’s been the glue for the quartet, in both a musical and administrative sense; the most conscientious “inner voice.” For ten years, cellist Karl Lavine was my comrade in the trenches for Kevin Stalheim’s Present Music; we played 60 different programs of new music together. During Karl’s tenure with Present Music, Brek was also a regular, and Sharan guested frequently. As a foursome, we performed a lot under the Present Music banner, and even recorded the Kamran Ince quartet Curve for Innova during that period.

And then came the Big Bang for our project: the premiere of Johnston’s Tenth Quartet in 2002.

While scouring a music library looking for something else, I found the score to Johnston’s Tenth Quartet. Research revealed that not only had the piece never been played, but that it hadn’t even been commissioned! A very good omen if you believe that real art is “what you are compelled to do.”

I timidly phoned Johnston, who was newly retired from the University of Illinois and living in North Carolina, and I invited him to Milwaukee. He graciously accepted even though he’d only previously worked with more established quartets. It still strikes me as an act of blind faith for him to have entrusted a nascent, unknown group with an important premiere, much less the recording of his entire quartet cycle.

Fast-forward fourteen years.

St. Augustine: “The reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”

The final step: going public.

When we are done with recording and engineering, the record label finishes the process: mastering the disc, preparing the notes and packaging, and distributing. Once again, we’ve had the very best of luck to end up on New World Records working with the visionary Paul Tai. He understood the importance of this project way before we did, and steered us clear of obstacles many times, with unwavering patience. The future of this music is in good hands.

St. Gregory: “The proof of love is in the works. Where love exists, it works great things.”

The composition of these ten quartets spanned a 36-year period in Johnston’s life. Modest man that he is, he would never claim saintly status—or genius/hero/visionary status for that matter. But it’s hard not to notice the constant evolution and steady growth through all ten quartets, moving ever closer to his altruistic ideal of the harmonic way of living.

The very first quartet was written before he composed exclusively in Just Intonation and shows him to be a masterful composer already, one who kept adding tools to his toolbox. About that constant evolution—whoever commissioned a piece thinking it would be like his previous work was in for a surprise. Johnston seems to have spent his whole life asking the big questions, seeking answers anywhere and everywhere. And yet that rock-solid Johnston DNA is found in every note that he wrote from the first quartet onward.

If our project had indeed been a film, it would have had a large ensemble cast, each member with a significant role to play. It took a whole network of idealistic people to make this happen: the composer, the quartet, the engineer, recording studio and venues, fiscal agent, record label, publisher, MIDI mavens, arts organizations, funders and fundraisers, media specialists, advocates, caregivers, family members, and especially, our spouses—those with us and those departed. They have been most generous, patient, and constant, the true saints of this project.

We fervently hope listeners will take the time to delve into Johnston’s music. It’s a wonderland waiting to be explored—a new way of hearing that will never leave you. Not a rehearsal passed without a moment when four seasoned professional musicians had to lay down their instruments, and just say, “Wow!”

Pondering the completion of this recording project, stray thoughts led me to a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

One great poem should be born of
the sum of all your poems, recording
more than the surface reality, more than
“what’s passing by the window.”
Find the further reality, if there is one.

It’s not up to Johnston, or the Kepler Quartet, to say what that further reality might be. We’ve shared our particular window. Now we all get to sit back and be astonished by whatever happens next.

I once asked Johnston how he had gravitated towards studying with people of such disparate aesthetics as Harry Partch, Darius Milhaud, and John Cage and managed to incorporate influences from jazz and folk music to serialism, from Gurdjieff to Catholicism, from Renaissance music to rock opera, to achieve something so intensely personal. His reply was very telling. “Well,” he said, “I just wanted to invite everybody to the party!”

From all of us, happy 90th birthday, Ben! Thank you for inviting us to the party.

Ben Johnston and Eric Segnitz. Photo by Kae Hubred.

A note of thanks to the Wisconsin Alliance for Composers for acting as our fiscal agent throughout the project. And thank you to all the wonderful supporters of this project—foundations, our Kickstarter family of contributors, private donors—and special thanks to two angels who have asked to remain anonymous for now.

Additional links worth exploring

There’s some essential information on Just Intonation in “An Introduction to the String Quartets of Ben Johnston” by Sharan Leventhal, originally published in American String Teacher (Volume 64, Number 3, August 2014).

Perhaps the best overall introduction to Ben Johnson is to watch him present his own 101-minute autobiographical lecture “Who am I? Why am I here?” on April 15, 2006 at Scripps College in Claremont, California, during the 2006 Microfest, an annual festival of microtonal music in Southern California.

More details about Ben Johnston’s book of collected essays, Maximum Clarity, is available in Frank J. Oteri’s 2007 conversation with Ben Johnston on NewMusicBox.

The Kepler Quartet’s website includes more detailed biographies of individual quartet members.

Booklet notes by Bob Gilmore for the previous two New World CD releases are reproduced here and here. And here is a link to Kyle Gann’s notes for the upcoming third release.

Finally, Jon Roy has maintained a fascinating blog about Ben Johnston called A New Dissonance which documents the preparation, rehearsal, and recording of these string quartets and also collects other online Johnston resources.

What to Ware? A Guide to Today’s Technological Wardrobe

Posted on March 9, 2016 by Nicolas Collins - Analysis, Articles

Circuitry for Salvage (Guiyu Blues), 2007. First version of design, housed in VHS tape box. 12 probes for linking to dead circuit board to be re-animated. Rotary switches select frequency range of each of six oscillator voices. Photo by Simon Lonergan.

At some point in the late 1980s the composer Ron Kuivila told me, “we have to make computer music that sounds like electronic music.” This might appear a mere semantic distinction. At that time the average listener would dismiss any music produced with electronic technology—be it a Moog or Macintosh—as “boops and beeps.” But Kuivila presciently drew attention to a looming fork in the musical road: boops and beeps were splitting into boops and bits. Over the coming decades, as the computer evolved into an unimaginably powerful and versatile musical tool, this distinction would exert a subtle but significant influence on music.

Kuivila and I had met in 1973 at Wesleyan University, where we both were undergraduates studying with Alvin Lucier. Under the guidance of mentors such as David Tudor and David Behrman, we began building circuits in the early 1970s, and finished out the decade programming pre-Apple microcomputers like the Kim 1. The music that emerged from our shambolic arrays of unreliable homemade circuits fit well into the experimental aesthetic that pervaded the times. (The fact that we were bad engineers probably made our music better by the standards of our community.) Nonetheless we saw great potential in those crude early personal computers, and many of us welcomed the chance to hang up the soldering iron and start programming.[1]

The Ataris, Amigas, and Apples that we adopted in the course of the 1980s were vastly easier to program than our first machines, but they still lacked the speed and processor power needed to generate complex sound directly. Most “computer music” composers of the day hitched their machines to MIDI synthesizers, but even the vaunted Yamaha DX7 was no match for the irrational weirdness of a table strewn with Tudor’s idiosyncratic circuits arrayed in unstable feedback matrices. One bottleneck lay in MIDI’s crudely quantized data format, which had been optimized for triggering equal-tempered notes and was ill suited for complex, continuous changes in sound textures. On a more profound level, MIDI “exploded” the musical instrument, separating sound (synthesizer) from gesture (keyboard, drum pads, or other controller)—we gained a Lego-like flexibility to build novel instruments, but we severed the tight feedback between body and sound that existed in most traditional, pre-MIDI instruments and we lost a certain degree of touch and nuance[2].

MIDI no longer stands between code and sound: any laptop now has the power to generate directly a reasonable simulation of almost any electronic sound—or at least to play back a sample of it. Computer music should sound like electronic music. But I’m not sure that Kuivila’s goal has yet been met. I still find myself moving back and forth between different technologies for different musical projects. And I can still hear a difference between hardware and software. Why?

Most music today that employs any kind of electronic technology depends on a combination of hardware and software resources. Although crafted and/or recorded in code, digital music reaches our ears through a chain of transistors, mechanical devices, speakers, and earphones. “Circuit Benders” who open and modify electronic toys in pursuit of new sounds often espouse a distinctly anti-computer aesthetic, but the vast majority of the toys they hack in fact consist of embedded microcontrollers playing back audio samples—one gizmo is distinguished from another not by its visible hardware but by the program hidden inside a memory chip on the circuit board. Still, whereas a strict hardware/software dialectic can’t hold water for very long, arrays of semiconductors and lines of code are imbued with various distinctive traits that combine to determine the essential “hardware-ness” or “software-ness” of any particular chunk of modern technology.

Some of these traits are reflected directly in sound—with sufficient attention or guidance, one can often hear the difference between sounds produced by a hardware-dominated system versus those crafted largely in software. Others influence working habits—how we compose with a certain technology, or how we interact with it in performance; sometimes this influence is obvious, but at other times it can be so subtle as to verge on unconscious suggestion. Many of these domain-specific characteristics can be ignored or repressed to some degree—just like a short person can devote himself to basketball—but they nonetheless affect the likelihood of one choosing a particular device for a specific application, and they inevitably exert an influence on the resulting music.

I want to draw attention to some distinctive differences between hardware and software tools as applied to music composition and performance. I am not particularly interested in any absolute qualities inherent in the technology, but in the ways certain technological characteristics influence how we think and work, and the ways in which the historic persistence of those influences can predispose an artist to favor specific tools for specific tasks or even specific styles of music. My observations are based on several decades of personal experience: in my own activity as a composer and performer, and in my familiarity with the music of my mentors and peers, as observed and discussed with them since my student days. I acknowledge that my perspective comes from a fringe of musical culture and I contribute these remarks in the interest of fostering discussion, rather than to prove a specific thesis.

I should qualify some of the terms I will be using. When I speak of “hardware” I mean not only electronic circuitry, but also mechanical and electromechanical devices from traditional acoustic instruments to electric guitars. By “software” I’m designating computer code as we know it today, whether running on a personal computer or embedded in a dedicated microcontroller or Digital Signal Processor (DSP). I use the words “infinite” and “random” not in their scientific sense, but rather as one might in casual conversation, to mean “a hell of a lot” (the former) and “really unpredictable” (the latter).

The Traits

Here are what I see as the most significant features distinguishing software from hardware in terms of their apparent (or at least perceived) suitability for specific musical tasks, and their often-unremarked influence on musical processes:

- Traditional acoustic instruments are three-dimensional objects, radiating sound in every direction, filling the volume of architectural space like syrup spreading over a waffle. Electronic circuits are much flatter, essentially two-dimensional. Software is inherently linear, every program a one-dimensional string of code. In an outtake from his 1976 interview with Robert Ashley for Ashley’s Music With Roots in the Aether, Alvin Lucier justified his lack of interest in the hardware of electronic music with the statement, “sound is three-dimensional, but circuits are flat.” At the time Lucier was deeply engaged with sound’s behavior in acoustic space, and he regarded the “flatness” of circuitry as a fundamental weakness in the work of composers in thrall to homemade circuitry, as was quite prevalent at the time. As a playing field for sounds a circuit may never be able to embody the topographic richness of standing waves in a room, but at least a two-dimensional array of electronic components on a fiberglass board allows for the simultaneous, parallel activity of multiple strands of electron flow, and the resulting sounds often approach the polyphonic density of traditional music in three-dimensional space. In software most action is sequential, and all sounds queue up through a linear pipeline for digital to analog conversion. With sufficient processor speed and the right programming environment one can create the impression of simultaneity, but this is usually an illusion—much like a Bach flute sonata weaving a monophonic line of melody into contrapuntal chords. Given the ludicrous speed of modern computers this distinction might seem academic—modern software does an excellent job of simulating simultaneity. Moreover, “processor farms” and certain DSP systems do allow true simultaneous execution of multiple software routines. But these latter technologies are far from commonplace in music circles and, like writing prose, the act of writing code (even for parallel processors) invariably nudges the programmer in the direction of sequential thinking. This linear methodology can affect the essential character of work produced in software.
- Hardware occupies the physical world and is appropriately constrained in its behavior by various natural and universal mechanical and electrical laws and limits. Software is ethereal—its constraints are artificial, different for every programming language, the result of intentional design rather than pre-existing physical laws. When selecting a potentiometer for inclusion in a circuit, a designer has a finite number of options in terms of maximum resistance, curve of resistive change (i.e., linear or logarithmic), number of degrees of rotation, length of its slider, etc.—and these characteristics are fixed at the point of manufacture. When implementing a potentiometer in software, all these parameters are infinitely variable, and can be replaced with the click of a mouse. Hardware has real edges; software presents an ever-receding horizon.
- As a result of its physicality, hardware—especially mechanical devices—
  often displays non-linear adjacencies similar to state-changes in the natural world (think of the transition of water to ice or vapor). Pick a note on a guitar and then slowly raise your fretting finger until the smooth decay is abruptly choked off by a burst of enharmonic buzzing as the string clatters against the fret. In the physical domain of the guitar these two sounds—the familiar plucked string and its noisy dying skronk—are immediately adjacent to one another, separated by the slightest movement of a finger. Either sound can be simulated in software, but each requires a wholly different block of code: no single variable in the venerable Karplus-Strong “plucked string algorithm”[3] can be nudged by a single bit to produce a similar death rattle; this kind of adjacency must be programmed at a higher level and does not typically exist in the natural order of a programming language. Generally speaking, adjacency in software remains very linear, while the world of hardware abounds with abrupt transitions. A break point in a hardware instrument—fret buzz on a guitar, the unpredictable squeal of the STEIM Cracklebox—can be painstakingly avoided or joyously exploited, but is always lurking in the background, a risk, an essential property of the instrument.
- Most software is inherently binary: it either works correctly or fails catastrophically, and when corrupted code crashes the result is usually silence. Hardware performs along on a continuum that stretches from the “correct” behavior intended by its designers to irreversible, smoky failure; circuitry—especially analog circuitry—usually produces sound even as it veers toward breakdown. Overdriving an amplifier to distort a guitar (or even setting the guitar on fire), feeding back between a microphone and a speaker to play a room’s resonant frequencies, “starving” the power supply voltage in an electronic toy to produce erratic behavior. These “misuses” of circuitry generate sonic artifacts that can be analyzed and modeled in software, but the risky processes themselves (saturation, burning, feedback, under-voltage) are very difficult to transfer intact from the domain of hardware to that of software while preserving functionality in the code. Writing software favors Boolean thinking—self-destructive code remains the purview of hackers who craft worms and Trojan Horses for the specific purpose of crashing or corrupting computers.
- Software is deterministic, while all hardware is indeterminate to some degree. Once debugged, code runs the same almost all the time. Hardware is notoriously unrepeatable: consider recreating a patch on an analog synthesizer, restoring mixdown settings on a pre-automation mixer, or even tuning a guitar. The British computer scientist John Bowers once observed that he had never managed write a “random” computer program that would run, but was delighted when he discovered that he could make “random” component substitutions and connections in a circuit with a high certainty of a sonic outcome (a classic technique of circuit bending).
- Hardware is unique, software is a multiple. Hardware is constrained in its “thinginess” by number: whether handcrafted or mass-produced, each iteration of a hardware device requires a measurable investment of time and materials. Software’s lack of physical constraint gives it tremendous powers of duplication and dissemination. Lines of code can be cloned with a simple cmd-C/cmd-V: building 76 oscillators into a software instrument takes barely more time than one, and no more resources beyond the computer platform and development software needed for the first (unlike trombones, say). In software there is no distinction between an original and a copy: MP3 audio files, PDFs of scores, and runtime versions of music programs can be downloaded and shared thousands of times without any deterioration or loss of the matrix—any copy is as good as the master. If a piano is a typical example of traditional musical hardware, the pre-digital equivalent of the software multiple would lie somewhere between a printed score (easily and accurately reproduced and distributed, but at a quantifiable—if modest—unit cost) and the folk song (freely shared by oral tradition, but more likely to be transformed in its transmission). Way too many words have already been written on the significance of this trait of software—of its impact on the character and profitability of publishing as it was understood before the advent of the World Wide Web; I will simply point out that if all information wants to be free, that freedom has been attained by software, but is still beyond the reach of hardware. (I should add that software’s multiplicity is accompanied by virtual weightlessness, while hardware is still heavy, as every touring musician knows too well.)
- Software accepts infinite undo’s, is eminently tweakable. But once the solder cools, hardware resists change. I have long maintained that the young circuit-building composers of the 1970s switched to programming by the end of that decade because, for all the headaches induced by writing lines of machine language on calculator-sized keypads, it was still easier to debug code than to de-solder chips. Software invites endless updates, where hardware begs you to close the box and never open it again. Software is good for composing and editing, for keeping things in a state of flux. Hardware is good for making stable, playable instruments that you can return to with a sense of familiarity (even if they have to be tuned)—think of bongos or Minimoogs. The natural outcome of software’s malleability has been the extension of the programming process from the private and invisible pre-concert preparation of a composition, to an active element of the actual performance—as witnessed in the rise of “live coding” culture practiced by devotees of SuperCollider and Chuck programming languages, for example. Live circuit building has been a fringe activity at best: David Tudor finishing circuits in the pit while Merce Cunningham danced overhead; the group Loud Objects soldering PICs on top of an overhead projector; live coding vs. live circuit building in ongoing competition between the younger Nick Collins (UK) and myself for the Nic(k) Collins Cup.

On the other hand, once a program is burned into ROM and its source code is no longer accessible, software flips into an inviolable state. At this point re-soldering, for all it unpleasantness, remains the only option for effecting change. Circuit Benders hack digital toys not by rewriting the code (typically sealed under a malevolent beauty-mark of black epoxy) but by messing about with traces and components on the circuit board. A hardware hack is always lurking as a last resort, like a shim bar when you lock your keys in the car.
Thanks to computer memory, software can work with time. The transition from analog circuitry to programmable microcomputers gave composers a new tool that combined characteristics of instrument, score, and performer: memory allows software to play back prerecorded sounds (an instrument), script a sequence of events in time (a score), and make decisions built on past experience (a performer). Before computers, electronic circuitry was used primarily in an instrumental capacity—to produce sounds immediately[4]. It took software-driven microcomputers to fuse this trio of traits into a powerful new resource for music creation.
Given the sheer speed of modern personal computers and software’s quasi-infinite power of duplication (as mentioned earlier), software has a distinct edge over hardware in the density of musical texture it can produce: a circuit is to code as a solo violin is to the full orchestra. But at extremes of its behavior hardware can exhibit a degree of complexity that remains one tiny but audible step beyond the power of software to simulate effectively: initial tug of rosined bow hair on the string of the violin; the unstable squeal of wet fingers on a radio’s circuit board; the supply voltage collapsing in a cheap electronic keyboard. Hardware still does a better job of giving voice to the irrational, the chaotic, the unstable (and this may be the single most significant factor in the “Kuivila Dilemma” that prompted this whole rant).
Software is imbued with an ineffable sense of now—it is the technology of the present, and we are forever downloading and updating to keep it current. Hardware is yesterday, the tools that were supplanted by software. Turntables, patchcord synthesizers, and tape recorders have been “replaced” by MP3 files, software samplers, and ProTools. In the ears, minds, and hands of most users, this is an improvement—software often does the job “better” than its hardware antecedents (think of editing tape, especially videotape, before the advent of digital alternatives). Before any given tool is replaced by a superior device, qualities that don’t serve its main purpose can be seen as weaknesses, defects, or failures: the ticks and pops of vinyl records, oscillators drifting out of tune, tape hiss and distortion. But when a technology is no longer relied upon for its original purpose, these same qualities can become interesting in and of themselves. The return to “outmoded” hardware is not always a question of nostalgia, but often an indication that the scales have dropped from our ears.

Hybrids

Lest you think me a slave to the dialectic, I admit that there are at least three areas of software/hardware crossover that deserve mention here: interfaces for connecting computers (and, more pointedly, their resident software) to external hardware devices; software applications designed to emulate hardware devices; and the emergence of affordable rapid prototyping technology.

The most ubiquitous of the hardware interfaces today is the Arduino, the small, inexpensive microcontroller designed by Massimo Banzi and David Cuartielles in 2005. The Arduino and its brethren and ancestors facilitate the connection of a computer to input and output devices, such as tactile sensors and motors. Such an interface indeed imbues a computer program with some of the characteristics we associate with hardware, but there always remains a MIDI-tinged sense of mediation (a result of the conversion between the analog to digital domains) that makes performing with these hybrid instruments slightly hazier than manipulating an object directly—think of controlling a robotic arm with a joystick, or hugging an infant in an incubator while wearing rubber gloves. That said, I believe that improvements in haptic feedback technology will bring us much closer to the nuance of real touch.

The past decade has also seen a proliferation of software emulations of hardware devices, from smart phone apps that simulate vintage analog synthesizers, to iMovie filters that make your HD video recording look like scratchy Super 8 film. The market forces behind this development (nostalgia, digital fatigue, etc.) lie outside of the scope of this discussion, but it is important to note here that these emulations succeed by focusing on those aspects of a hardware device most easily modeled in the software domain: the virtual Moog synthesizer models the sound of analog oscillators and filters, but doesn’t try to approximate the glitch of a dirty pot or the pop of inserting a patchcord; the video effect alters the color balance and superimposes algorithmically generated scratches, but does not let you misapply the splicing tape or spill acid on the emulsion.

Although affordable 3D printers and rapid prototyping devices still remain the purview of the serious DIY practitioner, there is no question that these technologies will enter the larger marketplace in the near future. When they do, the barrier between freely distributable software and tactile hardware objects will become quite permeable. A look thru the Etsy website reveals how independent entrepreneurs have already employed this technology to extend the publishing notion of “print on demand” to something close to “wish on demand,” with Kickstarter as the economic engine behind the transformation of wishes into businesses. (That said, I’ve detected the start of a backlash against the proliferation of web-accessed “things”—see Allison Arieff, “Yes We Can. But Should We?”).

Some Closing Observations

Trombone-Propelled Electronics rev. 3.0, 2005. Photo by Simon Lonergan.

I came of age as a musician during the era of the “composer-performer”: the Sonic Arts Union, David Tudor, Terry Riley, LaMonte Young, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. Sometimes this dual role was a matter of simple expediency (established orchestras and ensembles wouldn’t touch the music of these young mavericks at that time), but more often it was a desire to retain direct, personal control that led to a flowering of composer-led ensembles that resembled rock bands more than orchestras. Fifty years on, the computer—with its above-mentioned power to fuse three principle components of music production—has emerged as the natural tool for this style of working.

But another factor driving composers to become performers was the spirit of improvisation. The generation of artists listed above may have been trained in a rigorous classical tradition, but by the late 1960s it was no longer possible to ignore the musical world outside the gates of academe or beyond the doors of the European concert hall. What was then known as “world music” was reaching American and European ears through a trickle of records and concerts. Progressive jazz was in full flower. Pop was inescapable. And composers of my age—the following generation—had no need to reject any older tradition to strike out in a new direction: Ravi Shankar, Miles Davis, the Beatles, John Cage, Charles Ives, and Monteverdi were all laid out in front of us like a buffet, and we could heap our plates with whatever pleased us, regardless of how odd the juxtapositions might seem. Improvisation was an essential ingredient, and we sought technology that expanded the horizons of improvisation and performance, just as we experimented with new techniques and tools for composition.

It is in the area of performance that I feel hardware—with its tactile, sometimes unruly properties—still holds the upper hand. This testifies not to any failure of software to make good on its perceived promise of making everything better in our lives, but to a pragmatic affirmation of the sometimes messy but inarguably fascinating irrationality of human beings: sometimes we need the imperfection of things.

This essay began as a lecture for the “Technology and Aesthetics” symposium at NOTAM (Norwegian Center for Technology in Music and the Arts), Oslo, May 26-27 2011, revised for publication in Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Reproduction (Ashgate, 2015). It has been further revised for NewMusicBox.

Nicolas Collins

New York born and raised, Nicolas Collins spent most of the 1990s in Europe, where he was visiting artistic director of Stichting STEIM (Amsterdam) and a DAAD composer-in-residence in Berlin. An early adopter of microcomputers for live performance, Collins also makes use of homemade electronic circuitry and conventional acoustic instruments. He is editor-in-chief of the Leonardo Music Journal and a professor in the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His book, Handmade Electronic Music–The Art of Hardware Hacking (Routledge), has influenced emerging electronic music worldwide. Collins’s indecisive career trajectory is reflected in his having played at both CBGB and the Concertgebouw.

*
1. Although this potential was clear to our small band of binary pioneers, the notion was so inconceivable to the early developers of personal computers that Apple trademarked its name with the specific limitation that its machines would never be used for musical applications, lest it infringe on the Beatles’ semi-dormant company of the same name—a decision that would lead to extended litigation after the introduction of the iPod and iTunes. This despite the fact that the very first non-diagnostic software written and demonstrated at the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, California, in 1975 was a music program by Steve Dompier, an event attended by a young Steve Jobs (see http://www.convivialtools.net/index.php?title=Homebrew_Computer_Club) (accessed on February 21, 2013).

2. For more on the implications of MIDI’s separation of sound from gesture see Collins, Nicolas, 1998. “Ubiquitous Electronics—Technology and Live Performance 1966-1996.” Leonardo Music Journal Vol. 8. San Francisco/Cambridge 27-32. One magnificent exception to the gesture/sound disconnect that MIDI inflicted on most computer music composers was Tim Perkis’s “Mouseguitar” project of 1987, which displayed much of the tactile nuance of Tudor-esque circuitry. In Perkis’s words:

When I switched to the FM synth (Yamaha TX81Z), there weren’t any keydowns involved; it was all one “note”… The beauty of that synth—and why I still use it! — is that its failure modes are quite beautiful, and that live patch editing [can] go on while a voice is sounding without predictable and annoying glitches. The barrage of sysex data—including simulated front panel button-presses, for some sound modifications that were only accessible that way—went on without cease throughout the performance. The minute I started playing the display said “midi buffer full” and it stayed that way until I stopped.

(Email from Tim Perkis, July 18, 2006.)

3. Karplus, Keven and Strong, Alex. 1983. “Digital Synthesis of Plucked String and Drum Timbres.” Computer Music Journal 7 (2). Cambridge. 43–55.

4. Beginning in the late 1960s a handful of artist-engineers designed and built pre-computer circuits that embodied some degree of performer-like decision-making: Gordon Mumma’s “Cybersonic Consoles” (1960s-70s), which as far as I can figure out were some kind of analog computers; my own multi-player instruments built from CMOS logic chips in emulation of Christian Wolff’s “co-ordination” notation (1978). The final stages of development of David Behrman’s “Homemade Synthesizer” included a primitive sequencer that varied pre-scored chord sequences in response to pitches played by a cellist (Cello With Melody Driven Electronics, 1975) presaging Behrman’s subsequent interactive work with computers. And digital delays begat a whole school of post-Terry Riley canonical performance based on looping and sustaining sounds from a performance’s immediate past into its ongoing present.

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