Tag: music conferences

The Gathering Storm: How We Made a Conference

Posted on December 8, 2015 by Daniel Felsenfeld - Columns

[Ed. Note: The initial New Music Gathering, which was organized by Daniel Felsenfeld, Mary Kouyoumdjian, Lainie Fefferman, and Matt Marks at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music from January 15-17, 2015, seemed to have emerged out of nowhere but it was a remarkably successful event that attracted composers, interpreters, and new music aficionados from all over the country. Its second iteration, which will take place from January 7-9, 2016 at the Peabody Institute of John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, promises to be equally impressive. To get some grounding in what this is all about, we asked each of the four founders to share some thoughts about the whys and wherefores of putting together a new music conference and festival for and by its practitioners. We will post their respective musings here on consecutive weeks. We start with Daniel Felsenfeld, who is no stranger to NewMusicBox, describing how it all began. – FJO]

Claire Chase, Lainie Fefferman, Daniel Felsenfeld, Mary Kouyoumdjian, and Matt Marks standing together in an empty room.

Claire Chase, the keynote speaker for the first New Music Gathering with NMG founders Lainie Fefferman, Daniel Felsenfeld, Mary Kouyoumdjian, and Matt Marks standing together during the initial convening of NMG in San Francisco in January 2015. (Photos courtesy Mary Kouyoumdjian.)

It began, as so many things do, with a moment of discourse on social media, a Facebook thread that got—as these things tend to do—heated on a topic I cannot recall. Matt Marks mentioned he’d been to some kind of new music summit wherein the oft-vaunted crises facing contemporary art music (or whatever—call it what you will) were discussed in hopes of drawing up solutions. As the thread ran to predictably pugilistic, I messaged Matt privately—the modern equivalent of repairing to the hotel bar for the sanity of a quiet drink—and said, simply, that we needed an actual space where these things could be talked about, wondering why we had only online spaces to discuss these matters. We can all romanticize (and I sure do) the days of the San Remo Bar or Specs where artists talked face to face rather than from the safe distance of their screens, but there is a lot to be said for it. Could we not, I wondered, make such a space?

Matt and I met in person (already advancing the spirit of the New Music Gathering) to discuss, in a realistic way, if we could actually make something happen—a thing that, to our knowledge, had no precedent. While I am short on details of exactly what we discussed (not for reasons of drunkenness but more for reasons, at least in my case, of the persistent exhaustion of parenthood), I do remember a few things laid out by one or both of us that contributed a lot to the success of the eventual gathering, notions cribbed from our admittedly scant experience of other conferences: some do’s, mostly don’ts. Not academic, but not not academic; no exhibition floor where people set up stalls to hock wares—in fact, no commerce whatsoever; no competitions—one could not arrive and subsequently lose. But above all, what we envisioned was a truly grassroots organization that never would billow or bloat into an organization. We would keep our overhead not just low but essentially non-existent. We would take no salaries (nor, for that matter, present our own music), rent no office, hire only staff we needed and nobody permanently. Unlike so much that claimed to be about a community, we wanted to do our best to make good on the promise.

Wisely, we asked Lainie Fefferman and Mary Kouyoumdjian to aid and abet and co-found—Jascha Naverson was also pressed into service—and lo!: a conference-concert series hybrid with the hard-earned (and coded-ly nerdy) moniker New Music Gathering.

I was skittish about our maiden voyage, which was to take place at the San Francisco Conservatory. What if nobody came? What if we did not meet our expenses? What if the blissful esprit that was our aim turned out to be impossible to manage. What if, what if, what if…? I steeled myself—and we steeled one another—for this as a distinct possibility. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be among the best weekends of my life. Now I can only remember it with the amber-dipped distance of, say, my wedding or the first days of my daughter’s life, but images and musical scenes too numerous to mention continue to surface that do not fail to re-enchant: Taka Kigawa striding casually to the stage to play (from what can only be a prodigious memory) the complete piano music of Pierre Boulez in a single sitting; Megan Ihnen and Hillary LaBonte’s set for two unaccompanied singers that opened the proceedings; an overstuffed and overheated (in both the sense of the climate and the rhetoric) tiny room addressing—for far too short a time—issues women face in our field; Sarah Cahill’s playing of the music of Terry Riley (and a chance to hug the great man himself, a hug I will always cherish); the local new music chorus Volti filling the stage; and, perhaps most strongly, Claire Chase’s astonishing keynote speech, which included the line “Every time you premiere a piece of new music you change the world.” There was our mission, one I believe we accomplished, and one I cannot wait to continue accomplishing, alongside the four amazing co-founders who double as revered friends in the year and decades to come.

Matt Marks, Sarah Cahill, Terry Riley, Daniel Felsenfeld, MaryClare Brzytwa, Lainie Fefferman, and Mary Kouyoumdjian standing together.

The NMG founders Matt Marks (left), Daniel Felsenfeld (center), Lainie Fefferman, and Mary Kouyoumdjian (far right) joined by pianist Sarah Cahill and composer Terry Riley (between Marks and Felsenfeld) and multi-instrumentist/improviser MaryClare Brzytwa (between Felsenfeld and Fefferman).

Go Tell It To The Choir—A Report from ACDA

Posted on March 6, 2015 by Frank J. Oteri - Uncategorized

Part of the Salt Palace building with a large sign for ACDA

A late night view of part of the Salt Palace where the 2015 ACDA Conference was held.

I had been told that last week’s gathering of the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) in Salt Lake City, Utah, would be the largest national music convention held in the United States. More than 10,000 people were in attendance two years ago in Dallas when the ACDA held their previous biennial convening. The event had attracted not only directors of professional, amateur, church, and school choirs from around the world but also tons of singers, publishers, and composers of choral music. This time around, thanks to a newly added composer track at the conference (organized by Steven Sametz) and a greater emphasis on new music, even more composers and new music aficionados were expected to show up. According to ACDA’s associate director Craig Gregory, counting conference registrants, exhibitors, members of performing choirs and their chaperones, more than 12,000 people were there. (The only music convenings I can think of that are larger than that are those of the Texas Music Educators Association (TMEA), which is not national, and MIDEM, which is international.)

Anyway, suffice it to say, it was incredibly crowded at the so-called Salt Palace (officially the Calvin L. Rampton Salt Palace Convention Center), even though it boasts more than 500,000 square feet of meeting space and feels larger than most airports. In fact, many of the local hotels were completely unequipped to handle the onslaught. There were several reports of attendees showing up to the hotels at which they had confirmed reservations only to learn that all available rooms had already been booked. A promotion associate from one of the large music publishers reported that another conference registrant was given the same room assignment as hers and unknowingly barged in on her. When I showed up about 1:00 a.m., I was also assigned a room that was already occupied; luckily the person who arrived there before me remembered to bolt the door and by 3:00 a.m. they had found a new, empty room for me to get a few hours of shuteye before the whole shebang began early the following morning.

Continuing the airport comparisons, waiting in line to officially register and then in another to pick up conference materials resembled the check-in and TSA lines during the busiest time at O’Hare, but ultimately ACDA was way more efficient. Even though there were so many people, it moved pretty fast, though admittedly this is perhaps because no one had to take off their shoes.

Two long lines of people and carts filled with score packets

Waiting to pick up score packets after registering for ACDA.

But, before I get into any greater details about the sessions I attended, here’s Steven Sametz explaining the thinking that went into the composers’ track.

Excited to plunge into new music-focussed sessions from the very beginning, I jaunted in a mad rush up one level and what seemed like a half-mile down various corridors to attend the first one on the schedule, called “Thirty-Something: New Choral Music by Today’s Hottest Young Composers,” which was to be hosted by Dominick DiOrio, a Bloomington-based composer and conductor who leads NOTUS, Indiana University’s Contemporary Vocal Ensemble. Sadly, due to numerous flight delays (ah, those airports again), the session was postponed for later in the day during a time I was unable to attend, although I did get to hear DiOrio lead the fabulous singers of NOTUS later that week. More to follow on that later.

Meanwhile, not wanting to waste time, I zoomed into the first room where a session was taking place and—as luck would have it—I stumbled into a fascinating discussion about barbershop quartet singing featuring live demonstrations of various techniques by The Fairfield Four and Crossroads. One of the central themes of the presentation was how what we now instantly recognize as the classic barbershop sound derived from an earlier African-American quartet singing tradition which involved a greater use of microtonal intervals—yes, I was in heaven here—which got straightened into equal temperament when white groups appropriated it. Perhaps an even greater takeaway, however, was a comment made by one of the presenters about how valuable barbershop quartet singing can be in schools since it “brings out the best in imperfect voices.”

Circle of men in white shirts singing together.

I later heard some impromptu barbershop harmonies near the booth of Barbershop HQ in the exhibition hall.

From there I ran to the ballroom to hear the legendary 82-year-old Minnesota-based conductor, composer, and new music advocate Dale Warland being interviewed by 28-year-old composer/conductor Jake Runestad who has been a rising star in the Twin Cities choral music scene. Warland, who has been one of the most active commissioners of new choral music, spoke about the very first piece of music he commissioned, from Jean Berger in 1953, before he knew that commissioning a composer required a payment. He said that “money shouldn’t be an obstacle” and there is always a way to make a piece of new music happen, imploring the audience “to keep the art alive and to take risks.” He was proud that there are now “15 full-time composers in the Twin Cities; 50 years ago there was only one composer who wasn’t part time and he was supported by his wife.”

Sadly, following that, a scheduled conversation with Jake Heggie was also cancelled since he had caught the flu and decided not to travel, but an afternoon talk to a room packed to capacity called “Integrating Technology in Choral Music” by Christopher J. Russell, who maintains a technology in music education blog, more than made up for the loss. He began with a provocation and an analogy that was difficult to contradict: “Are you here to learn or are you here to change? You wouldn’t go to a hospital that looks the same way now as it did 50 years ago.” Then he systematically went through eight ways in which choral directors could integrate elements of technology into their rehearsals and performances that would make the experience more efficient and, he claimed, more exciting for younger audiences. He was particularly passionate about using digital musical scores instead of physical sheet music and was prepared to ruffle a few feathers when he argued that it was better for a chorus to perform with a MIDI accompaniment than a live pianist if the pianist or piano was sub-par. I kept wondering throughout his talk how a chorus that was more comfortable using technologies he was advocating for such as NotateMe, SmartMusic, Weezic, and Kahoot could be persuaded to be more comfortable performing newly composed music rather than the old classics. He might write about this for us later this year. Stay tuned.

The highlight of events the following day was a master class by composers Steven Sametz, David Conte, and Robert Kyr in which the three finalists in the ACDA’s Brock Student Composer Competition (Nathan Fletcher, Connor M. Harris, and Cortlandt Matthews) had their pieces discussed by the three mentor composers and performed by NOTUS led by DiOrio. Conte spoke persuasively about thinking like an orchestrator when writing for chorus—which he called “chorestration”—and Sametz spent a lot of time focusing on specific issues when text setting—being aware of the relative audibility of text in various registers—and making sure that what was on the page was performable without help from an “interpretative conductor.” It was another well-attended session. My only disappointment, which could have easily been remedied by other conference attendees and people in that very room, is that the three mentoring composers, the three composers being mentored, and the choral conductor (who frequently added his own advice from the podium) were all male. There could have been a greater ethnic diversity as well. In 2015, this seems far more anachronistic than singing from an octavo, which is exactly what every group I heard perform at ACDA did, pacé Chris Russell.

I spent quite a bit of time wandering through all of the exhibitions and meeting with various composers there, among them a young composer/organist Julian Revie who is in residence at the St. Thomas More Chapel at Yale.

It was particularly intriguing to learn from Nebraska based composer Kurt Knecht about the new promotional platform for composers he has set up called Music Spoke.

And then there was the actual music. A particular standout performance was by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir in Abravanel Hall, which is usually the home of the Utah Symphony. Though their hour-long program took place in the middle of a hectic day of conference sessions, they made time stand still with their magical interpretations of works by their compatriots Arvo Pärt and the late Lepo Sumera, plus a stunning post-modern take on the music of Gesualdo incorporating electronics by Australian Brett Dean. Sadly, no American composers were represented. That evening, a long line circled the Mormon Tabernacle and stretched outside the iconic Temple Square to experience a performance by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. This Grammy and Emmy Award-winning 360-voice volunteer choir was founded in 1847 and since 1929 has performed on a weekly radio show, which is one the longest-running broadcasted programs in radio history. While new music is not the centerpiece of MoTab’s repertoire, they did devote a portion of their program to American music, which included their orchestra playing an excerpt from Morton Gould’s 1941 Spirituals, as well as a hymn composed by the current MoTab music director Mack Wilberg. There were also several arrangements scored for a large antiphonal handbell ensemble, which sounded somewhat surreal. Though almost everything performed on the concert ended in a bombastic climax, they waited only about a second or two before proceeding to the next selection, the audience having been instructed in advance not to applaud until the very end of the program. And applaud they did, for what seemed like the same duration as most of the selections.

The exhibition booth for the Mormon Tablernacle Choir

The 2015 ACDA Conference offered attendees not only an opportunity to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but to sing along with them as well.

The members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir were also the stars of ACDA’s exhibition hall back at the Salt Palace. Placed directly in front of one of the two entranceways to the exhibition area, their booth maintained a perpetual video loop that alternated between a brief documentary history of MoTab and the chorus singing “Amazing Grace” for which ACDA attendees were invited to join in and be green screened into the video singing along after which they were then given a file containing their “performance.” Throughout the conference, there was usually a line of folks waiting to have this post-modern musical experience—one person I witnessed even turned around and started conducting them. I wonder what she’s going to do with that video clip.

On the third day there were two back-to-back sessions in the composers’ track, both of which merit some mention here. The first was about composers who conduct and conductors who compose and how in the choral community the line between the two is often quite porous. David Conte, who moderated the session, pondered whether Bernstein’s advocacy for Copland on the podium was ultimately more significant than Copland’s mentoring of Bernstein as a composer. He also spoke at length about Robert Shaw revoicing a chord in a Poulenc choral work, a revision that bordered on being compositional. While Conte and Karen P. Thomas, who leads Seattle Pro Musica, were both composing music long before they began conducting, two of the other participants—Steven Sametz, who leads The Princeton Singers, and Eric Banks, who leads The Esoterics (also in Seattle)—confessed that they were conductors long before they ever considered themselves composers even though both are now very actively writing music. Sametz, who described walking out of his only composition lesson at Yale, claimed he was a “closet composer” for over a decade, at first just writing pieces to fill holes in programs he conducted. Banks is also completely self-trained. There seemed to be a general consensus during the session that academic training is damaging to composers, particularly to composers interested in writing choral music. In addition to being a composer and conductor, Fahat Siadat, who arrived halfway through the session, recently added publisher to his range of activities. His company, See-A-Dot Music, grew out of his work as a conductor and was started as a way to advocate for some of the other composers he met through his involvement in the NYC-based group C4, the Choral Composer-Conductor Collective.

The latter session, called Composers Speak Out, offered an even broader range of perspectives from composers spanning several generations. Alice Parker, who will turn 90 this year, boasted that she only writes a piece of music if she gets a commission, saying, “I never want to write something that doesn’t get performed. You don’t cook a big dinner and then find people to eat it.” She further commented that she does not think of the music of the future, only the present.

Japanese composer Ko Masushita, who also divides his time between composing and conducting, spoke about how precious his composing time is. Norwegian-born and now USA-based Ola Gjello (b. 1978), who was the youngest composer on the panel, talked at length about his compositional process. He works mostly in Logic, improvising ideas which he then bounces onto mp3s and listens to far away from his studio, walking around outside: “I try to put myself outside my music as much as possible.” Carol Barnett perhaps made the most polemical statement of them all:

Music is an art of nostalgia. Nobody is writing completely new music. You’re always referencing something you’ve heard before.

While that philosophical position seems diametrically opposed to the impetus for perpetual innovation and revolution that has long been de rigeur in many quarters of the new music scene, it seems to more and more central to musical aesthetics in the 21st century.

Out of Network

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Rob Deemer - Columns

For composers and conductors who are involved in the wind band genre, there are few events like the Midwest Clinic. Occurring annually during the week before Christmas in Chicago, Midwest has been a staple destination for anyone interested in writing for wind band for the simple reason that there are so many conductors in one place at one time. Works that get performed there by public school and collegiate ensembles get heard by band directors from all over the country. There are hundreds of exhibit booths where all of the major publishers and retailers display their latest catalogs as well, chatting in the halls and trying to gauge where tastes are headed. All in all, thousands of pre-college and college students, educators, and professionals create a massive scrum of lanyards, tote bags, free CD’s, fried food, and—most importantly for composers—networking opportunities.
It’s been interesting over the years to witness a great many viewpoints on the idea of networking—some composers take to it like fish to water, while others see it as a necessary evil and others still cringe at the very mention of the word. Attitudes toward intentional social interaction between professional colleagues in order to create mutually beneficial opportunities to collaborate seem to be often based both on the individual’s comfort level with socializing and the perceived value of that interaction; if the composer doesn’t see any benefit from actively engaging with others, they probably won’t want to do so. In addition, there’s the thought that one’s music should speak for itself and the creator shouldn’t be required to actively pursue performances, commissions, or other collaborative activities.

While online communities such as Facebook and Twitter can be an aid in creating and fostering relationships, it is fascinating how those digital connections can become enhanced (or not, as the case may be) at events like the Midwest Clinic through face-to-face meetings. I’ve had many colleagues describe their experiences meeting people with whom they have interacted on a weekly or daily basis for years and finally get to meet in person; once that real connection is made, usually the chance for strong collaboration increases dramatically. For as much as we think we know one another via online profiles or personas, most of us tend to wait to begin to have close professional partnerships with people until after we’re able to meet and interact with them in the same room.

The thing about networking that needs to be pointed out is that it is but one ingredient in a composer’s career or life (the two are not necessarily the same thing). There are plenty—plenty!—of examples of composers who quietly write amazing works that may only get a few performances, but those works and performances are recognized and praised nonetheless. Neither a vast collegial network nor the creation of an incredible piece of music are in and of themselves guarantors of success, but finding one’s own place in the world and the right methods with which one interacts with that world should be a goal for us all.

The Past, The Present, and The Future

Posted on June 25, 2013 by Frank J. Oteri - Columns

It’s relatively quiet here at my desk in New York City today, but the past seven days have been anything but. If you recall, last week at this time I was on my way to St. Louis for the 2013 conference of the League of American Orchestras. Bad weather conditions at both Newark and St. Louis slowed down my arrival a bit, but I still managed to cram quite a bit of activity into the 41 hours I got to spend in The Lou. Aside from being a city with a fabulous orchestra and an acoustically marvelous (as well as extremely opulent) concert hall, it also boasts the highest Zagat rated BBQ in the entire USA (tasty and worth the sweltering mile-long walk past the national headquarters for both Tums—symbolic?—and Purina), a baseball team with the 2nd best track record for winning the World Series (though that’s a term that has always irked me since only American and Canadian teams compete), and being only an hour away from the nation’s very first designated American Viticultural Area. (I had no time to trek there, but I did scope out a bottle of Augusta wine at a grocer five blocks away from the conference hotel.) And let’s not forget that Arch, which turns 50 next year and which I could see directly outside the window of my hotel room at the Hyatt Regency where the majority of the League’s conference sessions, as well as the exhibition room, were located.

One of St. Louis’s greatest gifts to the world, especially after BBQ!

Sadly due to my subsequent journey to Dublin (on that more shortly), I had to miss most of the conference, which lasted from June 18 until June 20, but I did manage to glean quite a bit of information from what I did experience of it. The opening session at Powell Hall, “Imagining 2023,” featured a riveting performance by the St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra (conducted by David Robertson) of Ingram Marshall’s mesmerizing Kingdom Come, followed by a series of speeches and the presentation of the Gold Baton Awards. (There was apparently no time to officially announce the winners of the 2013 Adventurous Programming awards, which in past years had been co-presented with ASCAP during the conference. This year they were instead announced online on June 18, and we published the full report.)
It was great to hear Gold Baton honoree Don Randel, president emeritus of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, address why we must do more to encourage music and resist the overwhelming saturation from sports in our society. I’ve long believed that while both activities show the importance of group activity, there is something pernicious about the sports paradigm where there must be losers in order to have winners whereas in a musical performance everybody wins.

League of American Orchestras President and CEO Jesse Rosen unveils another way of attracting new audiences to the concert hall–the “I Love Orchestras” tattoo!

I was also very glad I was able to hear the keynote address by Elizabeth Merritt, the founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums. I was particularly fascinated by how she delineated two “possible futures” for orchestras from what she described as a “cone of plausibility.” In the first possible future scenario, which she called “fragmentation,” orchestras basically continue along the exact same path they’ve been on and their audience continues to shrink. The second scenario, which she labeled “ubiquity,” has orchestras involved in a variety of functions which they have traditionally not been associated with including a great deal of interactive educational initiatives, many of which will be online. To further her arguments that everything is moving online and to ignore that reality is tantamount to organizational suicide even right now, Merritt cited a statistic that claimed there are 2.4 billion current internet users worldwide. Although if Geohive’s data is to be believed, there are more than 7.1 billion people on the planet as of yesterday, which means that less than 34% of the world is currently online. So much as I share her zeal for online communication (otherwise why would I be writing these words here), I remain suspicious of the notion that the web could ever somehow magically reach everyone nor do I think that anything could or even should reach everyone. I also took exception to her implication that non-participatory activities are somehow authoritarian, since I believe that if we are incapable of attentively listening to one another, a skill that listening to music instills, we will ultimately fall prey to authoritarianism.

Even the lobby of St. Louis’s 1924 Powell Hall is regal.

A couple of hours later, Robertson was back on the stage at Powell Hall leading the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in a program he proudly proclaimed spanned four centuries, stating in an on-stage comment in between pieces that “we all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.” But while the orchestra sounded equally convincing in performances of overtures and arias (for which the orchestra was joined by bass/baritone Eric Owens) by Mozart (18th) and Wagner (19th) as well as symphonies by Sibelius (20th!) and John Adams (21st), there was something that felt very un-21st century about this collection of repertoire—it was exclusively composed by white men, three of whom were dead Europeans. As a composer in the 21st century, I know that I “stand on the shoulders” of creators of both genders from all over the world. Despite my heretofore stated belief in the sanctity of the non-participatory listening experience, I guess that puts me in the “ubiquity” camp.
The following morning I put my philosophy about inclusive repertoire into action during the session I moderated called “New Music: Opportunities to Broaden Audiences.” It was easy to do with the group of panelists who sat with me. Robert Franz, music director of the Boise Philharmonic, spoke of the great success the orchestra had back in November 2012 with a concert pairing The Rite of Spring (which had never been previously performed in Boise) and Sacred Land, a brand new work (though his fourth commission from the orchestra) by local composer Jim Cockey that was inspired by the Shoshone and Bannock tribes. Chicago Sinfonietta Executive Director Jim Hirsch spoke about the orchestra’s recent Chi-scape project which, under the stewardship of Jennifer Higdon, presented music inspired by Chicago architecture written by an extremely diverse group of composers—Armando Bayolo, Vivian Fung, Jonathan Bailey Holland, and Chris Rogerson. Finally, Jazz St. Louis Executive Director Gene Dobbs Bradford and Tim O’Leary, general director of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, talked about how these two local organizations worked together on Terence Blanchard’s first opera, Champion, which was being staged in St. Louis the week of the conference. The opera is inspired by the life story of Emile Griffith, an African-American boxer who accidently killed his opponent during the welterweight world championship in 1962 and who—thirty years later—was viciously beaten and almost killed in a homophobic attack. While new music does not represent the majority of the programming of any of these organizations (during the Q&A period one of them exclaimed that I must really not like dead people when I pointed this out), it was abundantly clear that it was the programs which included new works that garnered the most excitement from the communities in which they were based and that it is new music that is most likely to attract new audiences to the concert hall.

There were many additional sessions during the conference that focused specifically on new music, including a conversation between David Robertson and Jesse Rosen, the League’s president and CEO, called “New Music from Here to 2023,” and a talk moderated by Norman Ryan, vice president of Schott Music Corporation, called “Learning from New Ensembles.” But I had to rush to the airport in order to participate in another panel discussion the following morning in Dublin which was part of a day-long conference called “The Future of Music in the Digital World 2” organized by the Contemporary Music Centre of Ireland. Although my session in St. Louis ended at 10:15 a.m. on Wednesday and the session in Dublin didn’t begin until 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, thanks to time zone differences I actually had only 17 hours and 45 minutes to get from door to door. I almost missed my connection due to the wide separation between the domestic and international terminals at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and a glacially slow security line. But then I got lucky, because although I just barely arrived at the gate in time for my departure, the plane arrived in Dublin half an hour early, which actually allowed me to check in to my hotel and even take a shower!

At a local Dublin bookstore, first editions of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are proudly on display. If only we were as proud of our own writers. Then again, if only the Irish were as proud of their composers as they are of their writers!

I must point out that I was pleasantly surprised to notice quite a bit of American repertoire on the Aer Lingus flight I was on. There were a total of 8 CDs in the classical section that were devoted to music by American composers, including two discs of music by Eric Whitacre as well as Steve Reich’s Double Sextet, Hilary Hahn performing the Ives violin sonatas, and Arnold Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 4 (a twelve-tone piece he wrote in Hollywood). Admittedly 8 out of a total of 101 CDs to choose from amounts to pretty slim pickings, but it’s better than nothing. There were no discs featuring Irish composers, which I found outrageous from an Irish airline flying to Ireland. The jazz choices were also solid—not just classics like Mingus Ah Um and Sonny Rollins’s Saxophone Colossus, but also discs by Philadelphia-based pianist Orrin Evans, superstar Esperanza Spaulding, and Pat Metheny’s wild Orchestrion project (which I finally got a chance to hear as a result). The alternative rock selections ranged from some fascinating albums like Dirty Projectors’ Bitter Orca and Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest to some odd choices—how are Ozzy Osbourne and John Cougar Mellencamp alternative? (On the United Airlines flight back home Sunday there were only 24 CDs in the classical section, none featuring American or Irish composers, and no Alternative Rock section at all. Home sweet home, but I’m getting ahead of myself.)

The secret to my staying awake after all that traveling is the strong and very appropriately named Insomnia coffee.

The conference in Dublin offered a fascinating range of perspectives including Steve Lawson, from New Music Strategies, who claimed that no musician “should feel entitled to earn a living” to singer/songwriter Julie Feeney, who talked about the precarious tight rope she has walked balancing creating truly innovative music (songs that are very densely orchestrated, sometimes featuring her playing all of the various instruments) and eking out an income in the precarious economic environment that most musicians are in these days. Nick Sherrard, from Sound and Music (which is sort of the U.K.’s version of New Music USA), captivated just about everyone in the audience at The Carolan Room of Dublin’s National Concert Hall (jetlagged me included), with his description of the Minute of Listening project which provides a minute-long sound file for primary school children to listen to each day of the year. Representatives from various digital archives such as Breandán Knowlton of Europeana, Sandra Collins from the Digital Repository of Ireland, and Malachy Moran of the RTÉ , offered information about their services which will probably take me years to surf through. In the afternoon, Lawson co-led a two-hour participatory workshop about digital connectivity with his New Music Strategies colleague Andrew Dubber, the author of many provocative and often brilliant essays (including this one). Once again, he didn’t disappoint, at one point describing futurists as “astrologers” and social media experts as “snake oil salesmen.”

On Friday, I was shepherded around the city to listen to various performances during National Music Day. I caught the tail end of an ethereal performance by the National Chamber Choir of Ireland in Dublin’s General Post Office, a pop-up action that was not announced to the general public in advance. Then I wandered around town trying to find a tiny venue on an elusive street (although Dublin is relatively small, the similarity in some street names can be confusing) eventually catching part of a short concert devoted to electronic music by Gráinne Mulvey, some of which featured a live performance by soprano Elizabeth Hilliard accompanied by pre-recorded sound. Later in the day, Uilleann piper Mark Redmond was joined on the organ by composer/arranger David Bremner in a series of duets for this unlikely yet totally convincing combination at Christ Church Cathedral. But my personal favorite was probably another pop-up event, “Sun Ra Lives,” featuring the idiomatically otherworldly interpretations of OuterSpaceways Inc. and the people of Dublin who joined in on bongos and other sound producing devices as costumed musicians marched around alternately swinging and wigging out.

Channeling Sun Ra in Dublin

Saturday I was on my own during the morning so I wandered into several museums, seeing everything from an exhibition of artifacts belonging to the poet William Butler Yeats (at the National Library) to a group of millenia-old corpses that were discovered in bogs (which apparently are even more effective at preservation than mummification). It was majestic yet somehow horrific. Quite a way to end a week of discussion focused on how to shape the future while still holding on to things we cherish from the past and present.

Then again, there are some things that I saw this past week that I still don’t completely understand.

Matters of Convention

Posted on January 11, 2013 by Ratzo B Harris - Columns

January is a great time for music conferences (or conventions). A few organizations holding them this month that I can name off-hand are: the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP), the Jazz Educators Network (JEN), Chamber Music America (CMA), and the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM). Sadly, my relationship with the economy is tipped slightly out of my favor at the moment and having to replace the car this year means that the only convention I’ll be attending is (hopefully) the International Society of Bassists in June. (I resisted joining ISB until two years ago, mainly because their convention was being held that year in San Francisco, where my mother lives, so I could write off a visit with her as a business expense. At the convention I was wowed by the virtuosity of the likes of Nicholas Walker, Putter Smith, John Clayton, Bertram Turetzky, and Jiri Slavik. Doing lunch with Michael Formanek and Mark Dresser were also high points, but taking a private lesson with the legendary Barre Phillips changed my life and sold me on the ISB.)

I had planned to go to the Jazz Connect events at APAP, which are free and end today, but my work schedule has put the kibosh on my plans. I’m supplying the musical accompaniment for a one-person play written and performed by Stacie Chaiken, Looking for Louie, which is being staged at the Rockland Center for the Arts this Sunday (January 13) afternoon and will be in rehearsal during the second day of the convention. On Jazz Connect’s first day, I was glued to the computer writing this post and putting together a part for the rehearsal.

While it might seem paradoxical to some, that an improvising musician would be writing a part for a performance, it’s actually not at all at odds with how improvisation works. Chaiken incorporates interactivity with her audience as well as with her accompanist in Looking for Louie and the bass part is largely improvised. However Looking for Louie was staged previously, in Los Angeles and Israel, and a structural element exists in the music that specifically relates to the work’s plot. To provide improvisations that are in line with the work’s style and surface contours, I transcribed the bass part from the Israeli performance into Finale® and inserted it into an MSWord® document along with the play’s script. It’s essentially the same way I prepare for playing jazz, except the research I do for that is on-going and I’ve been at it for a longer time, so I don’t have to do it for every situation that comes along. Fortunately, Chaiken is very comfortable working with jazz musicians (her husband, Martin Berg, used to play trumpet in the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra and is currently on the board of directors of the California Jazz Foundation), and our first rehearsal went smashingly well. I think it’s possible to now bring my own sensibilities, which lean more towards the avant-garde than her previous accompanists, to our final rehearsal without disrupting the drama.

Rockland Center for the Arts (ROCA) is a terrific place to hear music. The acoustics of its main gallery are superb and neither Chaiken nor I will need any sound support. Because ROCA receives support from the New York State Council on the Arts, as well as from local businesses and subscription memberships, performers who play there are paid a living wage. Organizations like ROCA are in the business of presenting art, not the commodification of it. Sadly, there’s a stigma attached to the presentation of art as art that leads many to believe it to be unfathomable to most. While it’s true that the masses now, more than ever, are potential prey falling to those who would limit their exposure to good quality art, especially music, it doesn’t mean that it’s beyond the public’s ability to comprehend it.

This was made obvious to me last Monday at a memorial for the late saxophonist-composer David S. Ware held at St. Peter’s Church in Manhattan’s Citicorp Center. Ware’s memorial was well-attended—in fact, standing room only—and the program well-paced. The music played was not what one would expect to be included in the year-end memoriam of NPR or the NYT (neither included Ware), but it was of the highest caliber and performed with the deepest of conviction. Saxophonists Rob Brown, Daniel Carter, and Darius Jones gave stellar performances to honor their fallen comrade, as did drummers Andrew Cyrille, Guillermo E. Brown, Warren Smith, and Muhammad Ali.

I first heard Ware when he played at the Iridium Jazz Club in July of 2003. His quartet, with pianist Matthew Shipp, bassist William Parker, and Guillermo Brown, were part of a double bill that included a quintet led by bassist Henry Grimes (who I came to see) that featured trumpeter Roy Campbell, saxophonist Brown, pianist Andrew Bemke, and drummer Michael T.A. Thompson. I enjoyed listening to Grimes’s group, but when Ware started his half of the show, I was surprised to find myself witnessing what I can only describe as a singularity at Iridium. Ware and his group not only blew the roof off of the place, but did it with a kind of playing that is all-too-rarely presented there. Ware’s sound, like Gato Barbieri’s or Clarence Clemens’s, was huge, but devoid of commercial pretense. His compositions supplied him with long, slow-moving progressions, highlighting his improvisations’ multiple-tiered voice leading that infused rapid-fire filigree over a subtle linearity.

At Ware’s memorial I was also surprised to hear multi-instrument builder-performer Cooper-Moore—who, along with Ware and drummer Marc Edwards, was a member of the collective, Apogee—for the first time. Cooper-Moore performed a solo piece on an instrument he calls a harp, and it is a harp, but is played horizontally, like a piano. The piece he played was beautifully lyrical and juxtaposed nicely between the opening piece, “Prayer,” by William Parker (who conducted and played percussion) with his group (pianist Eri Yamamoto, vocalist Fay Victor, Rob Brown, and a string ensemble led by Jason Kao Hwang) and a trio featuring Andrew Cyrille, Daniel Carter, and bassist Joe Morris. Another first for me was to hear Morris play guitar, which he did in a duet with drummer Warren Smith, performing an exquisite Morris original, “Violet.” Muhammad Ali and Darius Jones played a duo that was truly a great moment in music, expanding on the legacy of saxophone-drum playing started by John Coltrane and Rashied Ali. Poetry was read by the passionately verbal powerhouse Steve Dalachinsky and memories of Ware were shared by his widow, Setsuko S. Ware; his business partners, Jimmy Katz and Steven Joerg; and finally his long-time pianist Matthew Shipp, who also wrote a heartfelt obituary about Ware for NewMusicBox last year. The final live performance (followed by a clip of Ware playing solo soprano saxophone) was by Ware’s rhythm section who performed a medley of two Ware compositions, “Godspelized” and “Sentient Compassion.”

One of the things the words spoken about Ware at his memorial acknowledged was that his sound was highly personal and entirely idiomatic to the saxophone. That’s what struck me about Ware the first time I heard him—his sound. Raw. Big. Relentless. But accepting without being acquiescent. Like his elders, Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp, his sound was unlike what the world of “mainstream” music accepts as the “pure” sound of the saxophone, yet it was pure saxophone. His was a sound that, like his compositions, leaned away from the Western art music paradigm he had mastered. While researching today’s post, I ran across a schedule of music educators association conferences that will be held this month in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, and Oklahoma. Jazz is now included in the curriculum of many schools in these states, although until the 1970s and ‘80s it mostly wasn’t. Still, it wasn’t until after 2000 that I saw a music professor teach the music of Ornette Colman to a class. I wonder how long it will be before the music academy will tackle the music of David S. Ware.

Blogging from NASA (North American Saxophone Alliance): Final Day

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Stephen Lias - Columns

The trails around Sedona

I always try to schedule some down-time when attending conferences to help keep my ears and mind from turning to putty. Arizona is a beautiful place for down-time, and a day on trails near Sedona was the perfect restorative. I returned to the 2012 Biennial Conference of the North American Saxophone Alliance eager to see how things wrapped up.

One of the most important facets of a conference like this is that it presents opportunities for students to perform and compete. Since I hadn’t seen this side of things yet, I decided to spend my morning listening to recitals by student soloists and quartets. Amid the admirable performances of pieces by Martin Bresnick, Francis Poulenc, and Ernest Bloch, one new piece stood out for its theatrical presentation and unusual score. I was immediately intrigued by The Kokila Quartet’s premiere of Patrick Peringer’s Inter(re)actions II: Created when I saw ten or twelve stands spread out around the stage and an obviously graphic score on the front one. The piece began with one player coming onto the stage alone, and then the others following one by one as the music grew. They progressed their way around the stage—sometimes at different stands, other times all at one—as the timbral materials evolved. Traditional tones were intermixed with pitch-bending, multiphonics, and wind effects in an engaging tapestry. Finally, all the players converged on the front stand and circled it with slow steps until one led them off the stage. I took the opportunity to talk to them shortly after the performance and ask them a few questions.

The next few hours became very “hands-on” for me as I helped prepare, rehearse, and present a lecture recital with the XPlorium Ensemble. I’ve been really fortunate to work with these exceptional musicians on a number of occasions recently, and today’s recital included my own work Mount Rainier Search and Rescue as well as Mark Engebretson’s Compression and Michael Young’s inventive reimagining of Saint-Saens’s Carnival of the Animals. By combining saxophones (the Oasis Quartet) with percussion, XPlorium not only represents a new instrumentation in contemporary music, but joins the two instrument groups that are most active in expanding their repertoire. It was gratifying to see how exceptionally the group played, and how well the pieces were received.

With that behind me, I found myself reflecting on what I have learned here. I’ve used this blog to highlight those that were outstanding, promising, or memorable in some way, but there were also quite a few pieces about which I was ambivalent. A conference such as this must, by its very nature, involve a good bit of showcasing a player’s technique. It sometimes has the subtle feel of a gathering of body-builders all flexing for one another. This being the case, there is a built-in tendency for the works presented to lean toward the technical and showy side. While this is sometimes done extremely effectively, these successes are more the exception than the rule. Many of the pieces served as little more than vehicles for the players—very challenging and impressive, but forgettable or (in the worst cases) vacuous. I also found myself wondering exactly how many of these world premieres will enjoy second, third, and fourth performances. Once the prestige of being first is gone, will the players continue to champion them? Or will they immediately turn their attention to the next premiere? Anecdotal evidence seems to suggest the latter.

These are not new questions. Certainly Weber and Liszt wrote some pieces that, while mostly bling, still hold the stage. Likewise, music history is littered with kleinmeisters whose new pieces were eagerly premiered and then disappeared into the ether. So, taken in perspective, this conference is simply a microcosm of a perennial process that is endemic to our discipline. The bottom line is that I’d far rather see lots of new music and have some poorer pieces mixed in, than the alternative. Just before the conference ended, I had a chance to pull conference host Timothy McAllister aside for a quick chat.

Thanks again to NASA, ASU, and Tim for his great conference! It was such a pleasure to watch, listen, and learn from. I have a feeling this will not be my last saxophone conference.

Blogging from NASA (North American Saxophone Alliance): Day 2

Posted on March 17, 2012 by Stephen Lias - Columns

I spent most of this second day of the 2012 Biennial Conference of the North American Saxophone Alliance in concerts of chamber music. A blow-by-blow account of all the pieces would make for very dull reading, so I’ll just hit the highlights.

One of the first pieces of the day was the world premiere of Roberto Kalb’s Three Scenes for Alto Saxophone and Piano by saxophonist Geoffrey Landman. This wonderful set is loaded with echoes of the composer’s Mexican roots–at times lyrical and sentimental, and other times muscular and energetic. The third movement is particularly engaging with an angular and vibrant opening and nice use of dance rhythms. As it grows, low motor rhythms in the piano (played by the composer) create a great sense of drama that is juxtaposed against short, lyrical gestures in the saxophone. Another favorite of the morning was Concentric Circles by Victor Marquez Barrios. I particularly liked the second movement with its charming dance-like motives and the shifts between contrasting emotions. This world premiere was performed with great finesse by tenor saxophonist Jonathan Nichol and pianist Jun Okada.

Easily my favorite quartet piece of the day was the Saxophone Quartet by Marcus Maroney performed by the Iridium Quartet (Paul Nolen, Marcos Colon, Paul Forsyth, and Eric Lau). Broken into “Act I”, “Entr’acte”, and “Act II”, this performance was incredibly visceral. It had all the qualities of an encounter with a dangerous animal. It came out of the gate snarling and then subsided into pants. After an undulating section in which an insistent figure in the soprano fights against ascending runs in the other instruments, the entire ensemble takes savage bites at the listener in the most exhilarating way. The middle section is sensitive and fragile and then transitions into a running figure that culminates in bold unison gestures. A little more biting and snarling propels the piece to a bold ending with descending runs.

At lunchtime I took a quick run through the exhibit halls which were lined with instruments, reeds, ligatures, and music publishers. It was a nice reminder of the astonishing amount of craftsmanship that is required to make musical instruments.

The afternoon had some nice surprises as well. The title of Charles Ruggiero’s set for piano, bassoon, and saxophone says it all: Chobim: Six Jazz Compositions in Honor of Frederic Chopin and Antonio Carlos Jobim. I hardly need to describe it further as you can imagine how delightful this might be. Also a world premiere, it was beautifully crafted, engaging, and exceptionally well performed by Joseph Lulloff (saxophone), Michael Kroth (bassoon), and Deborah Moriarty (piano).

The last concert of the afternoon began with a fascinating and sometimes violent electro-acoustic piece by Jesse Allison titled Critical Mass. Saxophonist Griffin Campbell, armed with computer, foot pedals, and amplification, led the audience through a crazy piece that included prerecorded voices and real-time distortion and harmonization. This world premiere required intense commitment on the part of the player and was easily the strongest piece on that concert.

My day of chamber music finished in grand style. ASU’s Katzin Concert Hall was, I’m sure, violating a few safety codes with people lining the walls and aisles from front to back. Much of the excitement was due to the first two performers on the program, both of whom are revered teachers and dynamic performers. Debra Richtmeyer began the evening with a world premiere of Stefan Milenkovich’s Surennatalia II a charming set of rags and dances. This was immediately followed by Frederick Hemke performing Gershwin with a string quartet. The nostalgia of the music clearly resonated with the audience for whom Hemke is a sort of patriarch. His lyrical and sincere playing brought some welcome balance to what had, until then, been a day filled with fairly frenetic music. The audience expressed their enthusiasm with an extended standing ovation and Hemke had to return to the stage many times.

After intermission, the music became far more technical. The Mana Quartet gave a terrific performance of Charles Wuorinen’s challenging Saxophone Quartet, and Steven Stusek, Liz Ames and Robert Spring followed up with a stunning piece by Mark Engebretson titled Sharpie for Saxophone, Clarinet, and Piano.

The last piece of the evening was a blisteringly difficult work for sax quartet and percussion ensemble title Krasch! This piece, by Swedish composer Anders Nilsson, was performed exceptionally by the XPlorium Ensemble. Full disclosure requires me to mention that I have a personal connection with this group (hence, my presence at this conference), so I should probably refrain from gushing. Suffice it to say that they provided an exciting and fitting ending to an exceptional day of concerts.

I’ve set aside some time tomorrow to recharge my brain with some hiking in the mountains north of Phoenix, but I’ll still have all day Sunday to look forward to. More soon!

Blogging from NASA (North American Saxophone Alliance): Day 1

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Stephen Lias - Columns

The performing world is rife with instrument-specific organizations that provide flutists, trombonists, percussionists, etc. to meet together annually, exchange ideas, discover new repertoire, and (most importantly), perform for one another. In this respect, the North American Saxophone Alliance (NASA) is fairly conventional. What makes it stand out, however, is the astonishingly high percentage of performances of pieces by living composers. As one of the younger instruments, the saxophone repertoire is continuing to grow and performers come to NASA with a strong desire to present new works. So although they call this the “2012 Biennial Conference of the North American Saxophone Alliance,” what they really have here is a festival of contemporary music (albeit a saxophone-centric one). After all, what else would you call a four-day music event that involves multiple venues, dozens of concerts, top-notch performances of solo, chamber, and concert music by world-class players, and no less than 76 (!) world premieres?

The 2012 NASA Conference is being hosted on the beautiful campus of Arizona State University with Timothy McAllister (ASU Professor of Saxophone and soprano player with PRISM) at the helm. As with most of these events, there are three or four spaces with lectures, coaching sessions, recitals, and competitions all going on simultaneously, and extra spaces for vendors (mostly instruments, reeds, and sheet music).

The first recital I attended began with a great performance of William Price’s Sans Titre II by Brian Utley, followed by three world premieres performed by Michael Torres on alto saxophone. These included Daniel Temkin’s Flourish, Jason Thorpe Buchanan’s First Study, and Torres’s own Voices of Contempt. All of these pieces highlighted the considerable dexterity of the performers and demonstrated an impressive command of the saxophone idiom on the part of the composers.

Later in the evening, the ASU Wind Symphony and Symphony Orchestra teamed up with conductor Gary Hill and an all-star slate of performers to present the Opening Gala Concert for the conference. It was presented in the elegant and intimate Tempe Center concert hall. Highlighting the propensity for saxophonists to program recent works, all of the pieces on the program (save the introductory work by Dvorak) were by living composers including Karel Husa, David Maslanka, and Steven Mackey.

Perhaps coincidentally, my two favorite works of the evening were by composers who were actually in attendance, Narong Prangcharoen and Hilary Tann. Prangcharoen’s piece Mantras was a compelling and honest work for soprano saxophone and wind ensemble. Working its way out from a pentatonic base, it explored cultural and musical ideas from the composer’s homeland of Thailand. The exceptional performance (from memory) by soloist Chien-Kwan Lin demonstrated a deep understanding of the music and an engaging commitment.

Following intermission, soloist Susan Fancher joined The ASU Symphony Orchestra to present Tann’s Shakkei. As with many of her pieces this work possessed an intimacy and organic quality that was simultaneously comforting and familiar (intentionally evoking Debussy’s Nuages in places), while also scrupulously precise in the nuances and subtleties with which she laces her pieces.

I took just a few moments to talk to both of these composers after the concert.

Of course, I’d be remiss if I failed to mention the outstanding performances by Zzyzx, David Dees, the ASU Saxophone Ensemble, and the PRISM Quartet, all of whom helped make it an exceptional evening of high-level playing. Gary Hill was a commanding and dynamic presence on the podium, and the ASU Wind Ensemble and Symphony Orchestra were uniformly strong. I’m eager to see what the next few days will hold. It certainly has begun with great promise.

***

Composer Stephen Lias is the Texas delegate to the International Society of Contemporary Music and serves on the editorial board of World New Music Magazine. His music is published by Conners Publications, ALRY Publications, Brassworks 4, Cimarron Music Press, and Southern Music, and his song cycle Songs of a Sourdough is available on Centaur Records.

Blogging MIDEM 2012: Toward a Single Global Market

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Frank J. Oteri - Columns

This year for the very first time, MIDEM hosted its own music festival featuring a wide range of bands for three nights in a row, in essence morphing into something of a European SXSW. But they are still competing with a longstanding MIDEM tradition: concurrent showcases in local Cannes clubs presented by the various countries in attendance here and which continue to attract large audiences. While Singapore deserves acknowledgement for their auspicious debut showcase, which has already been described herein, a special mention must also be made about the 2012 showcases presented by Canada, which seemed to dwarf those of any other country this year. Canadian bands played to fire hazard-sized crowds for three nights in a row at Morrison’s Irish Pub. I considered attending MIDEM’s own event each of the nights, but after needing to satiate my curiosity about the showcase presented by the performing rights society-averse web portal Jamendo on Saturday and checking out Singapore on Sunday, I felt obliged to check out bands from my northern neighbor.

Toronto-based singer-songwriter Emma-Lee brought a little country to the South of France.

I caught most of the set of an alt country-tinged Toronto-based band led by singer-songwriter Emma-Lee which completely delighted the international audience. Next came Alyssa Reid, whose music seemed a bit too mainstream for me to stay completely focused amidst the din. But I should try again at some point; I’ve long believed that personal taste can be a barrier to experiencing music, and I know all too well that a loud, overpopulated bar is not the ideal place to hear something I haven’t heard before. However, the evening’s concluding act, the Hamilton-based power duo P.S. I Love You, seemed capable of grabbing anyone’s attention in any venue. Their set was a relentless series of extreme electric guitar distortion, uninhibited caterwauling (the guitarist doubled as the band’s vocalist), and pulverizing drumming—I loved it.

The Kingston-based PS I Love You skronked out Morrison’s Pub while the ghost of James Joyce (painted on the wall behind them) connected them to the experimental tradition.

However, I’m not sure—just as I wasn’t in the case of the Singaporian showcase on Sunday night—if there was anything that belied a specific national identity in the music played by any of these Canadians on Monday night. I’ve certainly heard groups based due south of the Great Lakes that sounded similar to the three Canadian acts I checked out. Of course, the internet has even further accelerated the erosion of regional musical differences that had already begun to deteriorate with the advent of recorded sound, radio, and television during the 20th century. In the 21st century, we are moving more and more toward global music identities, and indeed such music has been the ideal soundtrack to compliment the numerous discussions here on Monday and Tuesday about an emerging single global market for music.

Early on Monday morning, the CEOs of the German and Swedish performing rights societies, Harald Heker of GEMA and Kenth Muldin of STIM, participated in a panel about the future of collective rights management in the European Union moderated by Musikwoche‘s Editor-in-Chief Mandfred Gillig-Degrave, and which also included Swedish composer Alfons Karabuda and two politicians, German Bundestag member Ansgar Heveling and Kerstin Jorna, the deputy head of cabinet for European Commissioner Michel Barnier in Belgium. Heker spoke to the difficulties in harmonizing licensing agreements among the 27 E.U. member countries, but acknowledged that it was a necessity in the current marketplace. Muldin added that music and audiovisual work ultimately have no borders. Heveling went further saying, “The time is gone for collection laws to be based on national legislation.” But everyone agreed that there needed to be rules in order to ensure fair competition. While the internet has certainly created a marketplace that is no longer circumscribed by geopolitical realities, it was interesting to learn that, according to Muldin, 60% of the total world income derived from the usage of creative work comes from Europe. Whatever collaborative initiatives that the performing rights societies will strive toward in the future, Karabuda urged everyone to secure a place for composers who operate at the edges of the marketplace, otherwise there is no guarantee of musical diversity.

Participants in the discussions about establishing an Indie Music Manifesto: (L to R, back row) Jonas Sjostrom, Portia Sabin, Rich Benglott, Nick O’Byrne; (middle row) Mark Chung, Charlie Phillips; (front row) Alison Wenham, Helen Smith

Sustaining musical diversity was also a key agenda item for a group of representatives of independent music companies from around the world who met to establish a Global Indie Manifesto. “Plurality is the best driver of creativity,” is how UK-based Alison Wenham, chairman of the Worldwide Independent Network (WIN), put it. Wenham, who led the discussion, also pointed out that 80% of new music releases are on independent labels and that independents employ 80% of the people who work in the music sector. She spoke passionately about the need for the independent sector to reframe the copyright argument, which has become a debate between large entertainment companies and the now even larger technology industry. As she put it, “It is people who make music, so it is people’s rights that have been hijacked in the debate about copyright.” Kill Rock Stars’ Portia Sabin, whose business card gives her official job title as “Label Dude,” didn’t mince words when describing Google and other powerful technology players’ claims that the music industry is not in step with the direction music has gone in, “We’ve heard the music industry doesn’t get it mostly from companies whose business models don’t include paying for music.”

A small portion of the German area of the MIDEM Exhibition Hall.

After that discussion, I was hoping to hear a panel about artists rights but the session was exclusively in French and this time there were no headphones offering instantaneous translation. I barely understand all the ramifications of these discussions when they are in English, so I wandered back to the exhibition hall. The exhibition booths in the halls still clearly show the disparity between various countries’ music industries, despite all the talk about our moving closer and closer toward a single global music economy. Germany, just as they had last year, had the largest presence of any country at MIDEM, even bigger than France, the country which hosts this event. But others, including Iran and Chile and even smaller countries like Macedonia and Cyprus, want to be part of the action, so they find a way to be here. But this year there was not a single exhibition booth from the entire continent of Africa. Will geographical diversity be sustainable as we move further into a global marketplace? And if it isn’t, who will be calling the shots?

The Macedonian music booth at MIDEM

The largest auditorium at the Palais de Conferences was given over to a series of technology-themed talks called Visionary Monday that occurred through the entire day. Each talk rushed by at warp speed, some lasting only 10 minutes. I caught about an hour’s worth of them before getting a little bit car sick from the information overflow. In a mere ten minutes, UK-based music analyst Mark Mulligan (who blogs at musicindustryblog.wordpress.com) described a future based on fan-fuelled creativity and urged us that “music needs to be free of the stasis of formats.” Will Sansom, a writer and consultant for the UK-based Contagious Communications, described Singapore’s StarHub musical fitting rooms where people try on clothing to a specific soundtrack that is targeted to them based on what they are trying on. The folks in the tryout room are then solicited to by the music via proximity SMS text messages and there has been a staggeringly high 84% click-through rate. Christoph Bornschein demonstrated his midemlab award-winning Vodafone app Mein Tweet als Lied (#tweetlied) which showed how fast Vodafone’s phone lines are through tweets that were turned into a song by a band in 15 minutes. After a short break, Dan Rose, Facebook’s VP for Partnerships, talked about how social media has the ability to finally make “music online the way it was meant to be.” He described the sharing of songs online as analogous to giving mixtapes to friends of songs recorded off the radio (something he did 20 years ago), only now it is “at scale.” In the last four months, according to him, 5 billion songs were shared across 50 countries via Facebook.

This morning’s talks began with a heated discussion about licensing “the cloud” in which participating panelists could not agree on exactly what the cloud is. Mitch Rubin, the head of music publishing business affairs for Nokia, stated that the cloud “is a marketing term; it is not legally defined.” But Richard Conlon, the senior vice president for corporate strategy, communications and new media at BMI, warned that it was erroneous to describe the cloud as merely a locker where you can store things:

If its just storage then it’s not commercial, but that’s a bunch of baloney and we have to be very vigilant about that. […] There is not a whole lot of love for the creative community in Silicon Valley.

One of the problems, as AMV Talpa GmbH’s Managing Director Jens-Markus Wegener pointed out, is that there is no way to stop illegal content from being on cloud-based services. But he was also clear that he does not want to impede progress: “Nobody is hindering good business models. If the model only works if you don’t pay for all the services [e.g. the music], then it’s not a good business model.” SACEM’s Thierry Desurmont hit the nail on the head of what the chief problem is with the new paradigms for the music business, “It’s not easy to obtain fair remuneration from the service providers.”

Participants in a highly-charged MIDEM panel The Cloud – Is it Just a Licensing Issue? (L to R): UK-based journalist Emmanuel Legrand (moderator); Rdio’s Head of Strategic Partnerships Scott Bagby (UK); Richard Conlon, BMI’s SVP, Corporate Strategy, Communications and New Media (USA); Thierry Desurmont, SACEM’s VP for Legal and International Affairs (France); Charlie Lexton, Head of Business Affairs and Legal Councel for Merlin (UK); PRS for Music’s Director of Online Licensing Ben McEwan (UK); Nokia’s Head of Music Publishing Business Affairs Mitch Rubin; and Jens-Makus Wegener, Managing Director of AMV Talpa GmbH (Germany).

The final discussion I attended on Tuesday was a lively debate about the Global Repertoire Database that pitted various publishers and managers from performing rights societies against representatives from Omniphone and Google. This was much more engaging than the talk I attended on this same subject last year in which the voices of individual artists or their representatives seemed conspicuously absent. The publishers now seem completely behind the idea of establishing this single database which would have detailed information on all licensable music in order to be a one-stop resource for everyone. However, Ralph Peer II, chairman and CEO of peermusic, who suggested that “we need to treat GRD as a Wiki-type project” also stressed that “it must have the cooperation from all sectors in order to be effective.” Sami Valkonen, who is the head of international music licensing for Google, bemoaned how long it has taken to establish a Global Music Database:

These talks started in 2008. It’s now 2012. Talking about this at MIDEM is like a carousel. If we have the data there’s a way to make this work. […]Google holds the view that the GRD is a public good. We should not be focused on who owns it; it should not be proprietary. […] There are people here who might not like this, but it is a fact that we are moving toward a global licensing system.

Jane Dyball from Warner/Chappell gave some details about an even more all-encompassing database than the GRD called the International Music Registry (IMR) that deals with all recorded performances (audio and video) as well as compositions, which is all that GRD is concerned with. Karen Buse, from PRS for Music in the UK, suggested that the next step should be a database for all audiovisual work. During the question and answer period, someone claimed that smaller independent publishers might see a global database as a threat, since it could make them less competitive in a global market. But according to Jez Bell, director of licensing for Omniphone, “This levels the playing field for smaller publishers.”

Indeed it still could be a brave new world, but now I have to brave the real world. It’s pouring rain in Cannes today, and rumor has it that it will turn to snow and flights will be cancelled. I am still planning to return to New York City tomorrow, but I might be stuck here. The all-powerful internet has yet to feature a viable means of teleportation.

Blogging MIDEM 2012: Cannes We Keep It Going?

Posted on January 29, 2012 by Frank J. Oteri - Columns

I’ve been a bit distracted by what has been happening in the outside world.

There’s lots to report on from my trips to Paris and Nice. I’ve been so busy, I apparently didn’t even notice an earthquake in Italy whose tremors were felt throughout southern France. But that will have to wait for a later date, as I am now in Cannes in the midst of the hurly-burly that is MIDEM. When I attended this mega music trade show for the first time last year and kept telling veteran attendees how amazed I was by the breadth and depth of it all, most of them sighed and bemoaned that what I was experiencing paled in comparison with what MIDEM used to be. It’s now a year later, and I’ve become one of those veteran attendees. I was told that a lot of people might not arrive yesterday when it all began, but it’s now the beginning of the second day and it still seems much quieter than last year.

But while there are fewer exhibitioners and fewer attendees overall, there are still so many sessions and other activities that it’s nearly impossible to soak it all in. Soak is perhaps an apt metaphor—it was raining when I arrived yesterday and never completely let up, although once at the Palais des Conference I was pretty much indoors until I ventured out on the streets of Cannes to have dinner and attend one of the myriad MIDEM showcase performances happening in local venues.

Among the attendees of MIDEM 2012 some musicians are clearly visible.

One thing that is significantly different about MIDEM this year is that there is now a lower artist rate for attending, so there are more individual musicians and bands here than before. It’s a welcome demographic shift which, as a result, has attracted a new kind of exhibitor, like the company Tonara which has developed software that enables your tablet to become an interactive digital sheet music reader that can follow you as you perform a score that is loaded on it, eliminating things like page turns (not even a pedal is needed). It can presumably understand when you are making a mistake, but they have yet to figure out how to receive input from percussion instruments or even from an accordion, and all the music that is available for it is standard notated public domain music. They’ve yet to negotiate deals with living composers and publishers of works still protected by copyright. It would be interesting to see if they could ever get this program to work with a John Cage score.

Another shift is that there is far more of an emphasis on live performances. MIDEM has created its own three-day music festival which takes place on three consecutive nights but, as before, there are many off-shoot showcase concerts in local venues presented by various exhibitors based in countries around the world. Of course, there are still tons of sessions. The first one I attended yesterday was a talk about using social media to promote music given by a fellow New Yorker, Ariel Hyatt of Cyber PR. I learned some useful statistics like 71% of all companies now have a Facebook presence and 59% are on Twitter, yet Twitter and Facebook combined only account for 3% of the revenue artists accrue from the promotion of their music online. Emailing newsletters directly to fans still yields the greatest draw: 30%. I also learned that the person who writes Britney Spears’s tweets is a friend of Ariel’s named Cassie. So much for the transparency of the new media paradigms.

There were a lot of references to 50s television in the YouTube panel at MIDEM. Well, like one of the classic TV shows from that era, The Outer Limits, YouTube now controls the horizontal and the vertical.

Then I attended a session sponsored by YouTube, which this year has an even bigger presence at MIDEM than last year. Patrick Walker, who is YouTube’s senior director of music for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, gave a very slick presentation overall although there was something somehow ironic in his not being able to get a YouTube video to load after several attempts. To this day, every time I see a presentation involving technology there’s always some kind of glitch. Yet in a world where Google (which owns YouTube) has greater annual profits than the four top record companies combined, a very successful technology company that seems to have a virtual monopoly on several key aspects of web browsing has become the music industry’s new gatekeeper. Some more stats: YouTube has 4 billion views per day, and 800 million unique users per month; of those, 500 million views are on mobile devices. (That number tripled in 2011.) San Francisco-based Chris LaRoca, YouTube’s project manager for music, talked about how individual artists and record labels could track their content on YouTube via their custom designed app Audio ID and Content ID, which should enable them to actually receive payment from the usage of their intellectual property. I’m curious to learn more about how this works in real life.

The various drinking parties at exhibitions at MIDEM bring people with all different agendas together.

After that it was free sake time at the Japan exhibition booth. Even with fewer attendees, the parties still go on. The last of the sessions I attended yesterday was a panel of intellectual property lawyers talking about termination rights. There is currently legislation under consideration in the United States that will revert the rights on sound recordings from the record labels to the recording artists who made the recording, effective January 1, 2013, for recordings released in 1978. However, it has yet to be determined who all the rights holders are: the producer of a recording in many cases has as much of a claim to ownership as the principal performer, and then there are sidemen who are not always identified who can be entitled to up to 20% of the revenue. Since the rule will only apply to the United States, it is possible that many recordings will be controlled by different stakeholders in the USA and abroad. Such a potential licensing quagmire should prove an even greater challenge in a world which the internet has been making into more and more of a single territory, but that wasn’t discussed.

I ended the evening by attending part of a showcase presented by Jamendo, a web business offering totally free legal downloads from artists from all over the world by circumventing one of the key licensing protocols: none of the groups whose music is featured there are allowed to belong to a performing right’s society. The band I heard was a Swedish indie rock group named Emerald Park, who were somewhat reminiscent of Athens, Georgia, bands. While a violinist conjured the folk incursions of R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, a backing female singer added a B52 Kate Pierson touch to the vocals, although Emerald Park’s singer was not quite Michael Stipe or Fred Schneider. Everyone there seemed to be having a great time, but after hearing four of their songs in a very loud and extremely crowded club where beers were 8 euros each, it was time to finally check into my hotel and call it a night.

The Swedish band Emerald Park was the headliner at Jamendo’s Showcase of bands unrepresented by performing rights societies.

More about today’s activities later. Now it’s time to head back to a session.

Frank J. Oteri

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