Counterstream Radio is your online home for exploring the music of America’s composers. Drawing upon New Music USA’s substantial library of recordings, our programming is remarkable for its depth and eclecticism. The station streams influential music of many pedigrees 24 hours a day. Keep listening and discover the sound of music without limits. Click here to open Counterstream Radio.
As part of the Chamber Music America conference in New York last month, I sat on a panel that discussed the ways in which classical and jazz are isolated from other genres of music and what we might do to help de-silo our work (a much more complex and serious problem than being cordoned off in our own glass room in Tower Records was in olden times). There’s a pretty large gap between how the jazz and the classical community see these fields and how the rest of the music community sees them (as a quick scan of the Billboard charts often makes painfully evident), and that has both cultural and economic repercussions. Current delivery platforms and participation rates in the creation of new work mean music of any and all types is coming at us at a phenomenal rate. This then requires music makers to place a high priority on and devote precious resources to being effectively present in this general music marketplace—to being where music fans are, so that those who are interested in what’s available can find and enjoy it. This has challenges, for sure. Market share (or strange ideas about composition vs. recording date) can result in classical and jazz being left out of splashy mainstream productions such as Twitter #Music and the Google Music Timeline. Services such as Spotify and iTunes don’t handle the more complicated metadata very well, often rendering music in these genres harder to discover and sort. But building a tailor-made private playground cut off from huge pools of listeners is an even worse attempt at a solution, effectively serving only to drain resources and build walls. Seen in this light, standing in a crowded YouTube field or Live365 index makes a lot more sense. On its own it’s just an open door, but at least that door is open and there’s active street life beyond its threshold.
From there, standing shoulder to shoulder with other artists across genres takes us a certain distance further away from being an untouchable “other.” NPR does this in their “Best of the Year” album round up, on which Caleb Burhans’s Evensong is followed by Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap. Here on Counterstream Radio, we did it through meaningful conversations between artists such as Meredith Monk and Björk.
Keeping out of that silo also requires keeping pace with what the major mainstream players are developing and how their work might help us entice more people to walk down our lane and visit our home. This made me reflect back on a talk I heard Tim Quirk, head of Global Content Programming at Google Play, give at the Future of Music Coalition’s Policy Day last October. He spoke about how new technology has allowed the development of services “that let thousands of potential masterpieces find their ideal audiences” independent of traditional gatekeepers. “Telling the world what it should or shouldn’t listen to has become far less important than simply making this overgrown jungle navigable…Context is more important than opinions.” On balance, that sounded like a powerful potential opportunity for classical and jazz music to me.
Later in his talk, however, the argument got a little more challenging. “Getting people to pay attention to something new has always been hard work and it’s only getting harder as the amount and, I think, the quality of the competition explodes while the ability to listen to something else instead becomes even easier. Capturing people’s attention and then hanging onto it is the fundamental challenge for artists and labels and their managers in the 21st century.”
It will be all the harder for those who find themselves stuck up a tower, never even making it to the party in the first place.
Get ready to get creative. As announced last May, New Music USA (publisher of NewMusicBox) has reconfigured five of its funding programs into a single stream of support for new music, and you can now apply by creating a project. Individual performers, composers, organizations, presenters, and other artists can all request funding on behalf of their projects simply and at no cost. The first deadline is November 4.
The new system boasts a streamlined process for applicants, designed to allow music makers to showcase their work and ask for the support they need in a succinct and efficient manner. No more mailing (sorry, USPS) hard copies of media and commitment letters! Work samples can be shared through services such as Vimeo, YouTube, and SoundCloud; collaborators can confirm their commitments with the click of a button. Funded projects will be showcased on New Music USA’s website and will be easily shared among patrons and fans. Explore New Music USA’s project gallery, and read through the complete guidelines now on New Music USA.
I first heard about Coursera a year ago when I was carpooling to a gig with my friend Kate. She told me about a personal finance class she was taking. The class was free, the course materials were really great, and she was attending every Saturday. “Oh wow!” I said. “So where’s the class?”
Turns out, the class was online. Kate was enrolled in a MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) at Coursera, one of the internet’s largest providers of online classes. Although I didn’t know it at the time, MOOCs are one of the biggest hot-button acronyms in education today. They’ve been hailed as both a revolution in access to information and a harbinger of corporatized educational doom. At first glance, the opportunity to take free online courses from some of the country’s most prestigious universities—Coursera partners with schools like Stanford, Princeton, Rice, and Yale—sounds great. My friend Kate represents a relatively noncontroversial MOOC student: an educated adult taking a class in a non-university, not-for-credit setting. She’s what proponents of MOOCs would call a “lifelong learner,” and an ideal beneficiary of free, high-quality online education. But for some educational stakeholders, organizations like Coursera—which is for-profit, funded by venture capitalists, and doesn’t classify itself as an institution of higher learning—represent a threat to higher education as we currently know it. MOOCs are particularly controversial when they are offered for credit in the setting of a university degree program. Holding up MOOCs as a fast, cheap alternative to a traditional college education—which for most American students comes with a heavy price tag—could result in a two-tiered class system in which rich students get face time and poor students get screen time.
MOOCs also raise concerns about attempting to replace or devalue real, live university professors. California legislators recently rejected a controversial bill which would have outsourced some entry-level state university courses to for-profit companies like Coursera and Udacity. The bill was uniformly opposed by professors in the California State University system.
In light of all this possibility and controversy, I was interested to learn that my alma mater, the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University, had become involved with the MOOC wave. I reached out to Cynthia Cyrus, my former dean and musicology professor who is now associate provost for undergraduate education. Cyrus has a career-long passionate interest in scholarship’s presence on the web. When she first arrived in the provost’s office in 2011, hardly anyone was talking about MOOCs, she said. Since then, MOOCs have become the focus of a national education debate, and Cyrus has helped oversee and develop the university’s partnership with Coursera. Cyrus described the work as exhilarating. “It’s not very often,” she noted, “that someone gets to start a whole new division of the university.”
In my conversation with Cyrus, I learned a great deal about the particular copyright challenges that schools of music face when it comes to using recordings and other media in the context of online learning. We also discussed how Vanderbilt is choosing to relate to the complex ethical questions that MOOCs raise, offering a window into the important decisions that higher education institutions across the country are making. Ellen McSweeney: Vanderbilt initially wanted to have five Coursera offerings—one from each school. Is the Blair School of Music course up and running?
Cynthia Cyrus: One of the Blair School faculty is lined up and ready to teach for Coursera, and that was supposed to be one of our first five offerings. But the copyright questions in music are so much a higher hurdle to cross over that we haven’t actually brought that particular course to fruition. Some of the other schools teaching for Coursera try to skirt copyright issues by linking to things on YouTube. But Vanderbilt’s policy is that if it’s a violation of copyright in one arena, simply linking to someone else doesn’t get us out of that moral dilemma.
We’re trying to be really mindful about the ways in which musicians are compensated as we move forward in this digital medium.
EM: What would your ideal solution be for the copyright issues that music MOOCs are facing?
CC: The strategy that I’d really like to see come to fruition is for Coursera to do negotiations with one or more of the music aggregators to say, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could get access to the iTunes list, where students could listen for free during the course and then purchase it later if they’d like?” This is similar to what’s been done with textbooks. That’s my ideal, whether it’s iTunes or Naxos or maybe even a BMI or ASCAP relationship. I think it would be best for all concerned if we have a broad musical catalog to draw on for these teaching purposes.
The second model, which will be [Vanderbilt’s] default if we can’t get Option A to work, is to simply negotiate copyright for each and every example that the faculty member wants to use. But that’s a huge amount of money and a large amount of work. Last year, with no staff supporting the Coursera project, that was simply not an option, which is why the Blair course is still on hold.
EM: Face-to-face university professors can use musical examples without copyright concerns. Why aren’t the use of musical examples in Coursera considered fair use? Is it because the Coursera is for-profit?
CC: It’s not just that they’re for profit, but also that they haven’t defined themselves as an institute of higher education. There is no case law to determine whether there is fair use in this area, and nobody wants to be the one to provide the case law! But there’s a real need, not just for Coursera, but many different providers of intellectual knowledge, to be fluent in the idioms of 21st-century culture that aren’t in any of the protected categories under U.S. law. There’s a real absence of legal framework for handling these kinds of issues.
That’s one of the reasons, if you look at the Coursera course list, there’s quite a list of things that can be taught without copyright-protected musical examples. Faculty members must deliberately restrict what materials they use as illustrative examples. It drives me nuts a little bit. Without structural and legal support, we’ve categorized an entire area of culture as being off limits for MOOCs. And I have issues with that, coming from a school of music. Although it does remind me that there’s a reason that I like to work on [materials created by] dead people! The 15th-century nuns are not going to object to what I’m out there printing.
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EM: There are major ethical concerns surrounding MOOCs—about who’s funding them, who’s taking them, and whether they’re trying to replace higher education altogether. Where does Vanderbilt stand on those questions?
CC: Vanderbilt is treating Coursera as outreach, as a means of global penetration, and as a way to reach out to alumni and support continued engagement with the university community. None of our classes are available here for credit, and that’s an important distinction. The model that the state of California was contemplating is worrisome on a couple of levels. First of all, using one school’s intellectual capital to meet your own institutional agenda is a way of ceding your authority as an institution of higher education. Coming from my faculty background, that makes me uncomfortable. The idea of taking, for example, our one-credit nutrition course out of the Vanderbilt environment and having another institution say, “Boom, you complete that course, you get one credit!” is problematic. That needs to go through a university’s faculty governance. Faculty should always be the ones to determine whether a course is meeting their educational vision. Here at Vanderbilt, we haven’t asked any of our faculty to review the MOOCs in a for-credit environment. That’s not what a Vanderbilt degree is about.
While none of our Coursera offerings are for-credit, faculty can use materials developed for Coursera as part of their face-to-face courses. Faculty have been able to do “flipped” classroom teaching, which means that students do passive learning—like watching lectures—at home. Professors then use class time for group activities and active learning that hasn’t always been possible, given the constraints of the schedule.
We’ve also done quite a bit of experimentation with what we call “wrapping,” in which a Vanderbilt professor can use a MOOC as part of their own course content. Professor Doug Fisher did this with one of [Coursera cofounder] Andrew Ng’s courses. Doug taught a class that was “wrapped” around Ng’s lectures. Doug’s course drew on those as a body of common knowledge and a jumping-off place for the students.
The crux of the issue is that what one does in a college class is more than acquire content. MOOCs are great for the content part, but the community insights, the ability to synthesize material, those higher-order processes happen because you are studying a common area. They are not themselves the common area of study. And the thing we know from longitudinal studies of students is that they don’t remember the content, but they do retain the intuitions that they developed while working through that content. That’s the part that we could lose when schools are relying too heavily on digital media. EM: What do you see other schools of music doing with their MOOC offerings? CC: Berklee College of Music has a number of Coursera courses, and they have opted mostly for subject matter that doesn’t require too many copyright-protected musical examples: Jazz Improv, Intro to Music Production, Songwriting, Intro to Guitar. There are a variety of music courses out there, but each one of them has had to invent its own solution to the copyright problem. Schools of music are not yet working cohesively as a team to get these issues worked out. Curtis has a course live now on Beethoven Piano Sonatas, and another one on Music History through Performance that goes live in October. There, I think, they are probably capitalizing on out-of-copyright works. I don’t know what their solution would be for the 20th or 21st century. With older repertoire, they have to worry about performer permissions, but they don’t have to worry about the permissions of composers.
EM: Right! I’m writing this article for a contemporary music community audience, and realizing that we may have particular barriers to participating in the MOOC wave.
CC: Right. It is entirely possible that when we get into pulling courses together, people will be generous with permissions. However, most of the people we negotiate permissions with are lawyers. It’s not the musicians saying yes, I want to compromise and be part of this social good. We’re dealing with lawyers. To me, lifelong learning audiences need to and want to be engaged with the musical details of the music that they’re choosing to hear live. But it’s awfully hard to get through the hurdles of how to get that up and online without stepping on somebody’s toes.
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How would you feel if you heard your own or a colleague’s music emanating from a high school student’s ear buds or car speakers? How might you feel if, several seconds later, it is heard mashed up with the latest Katy Perry or Kendrick Lamar track? How might you respond to a teenager who is arranging the music for a group of her friends who play various instruments in a middle school ensemble? Can you envision yourself video conferencing with a group of elementary school or university students who recently posted video clips of themselves discussing new music on YouTube or who admitted that they would like to try transforming a piece from the genre into electronic dance music? These questions hint towards possibilities that some may find problematic and that others may consider appropriate and beneficial for new music, musicians, and students. While some might question the ways in which the young people in these images are engaging with new music and aspects of what might be considered participatory culture, others might find it out of place that these young people are even involved with new music in the first place.
Along with outreach and marketing, music education can play a powerful role in expanding the public’s engagement with new music. Closer relationships between new music and music education communities could increase the presence of new music in educational settings. First, though, we need to recognize different ways that people in new music and music education communities conceptualize “music education” and “new music.”
For instance, my default conception of music education conjures images of working with in-service and pre-service music teachers on contemporary approaches to teaching music or with groups of young people engaging with music in elementary, middle, and high schools. However, I understand that many involved in new music also engage in music education in university classrooms, practice rooms, lecture halls, studios, concert halls, online venues, and other settings. Others might wonder if music education still exists in schools (yes, and it is vibrant, thriving, and evolving in the majority of schools across America) or have vivid images of music education consisting of plastic recorders, marching bands, and a capella groups.
Similarly, music educators have different notions of what “new music” means. For instance, many K-12 music educators’ perceptions of new music are sometimes tied to whatever music is marketed to them in specialized magazines, publishing catalogs, or at professional conferences. For a large number of music educators, new music is limited to the composers last addressed in their final undergraduate music literature or theory course. Perhaps ongoing dialogue spurred by NewMusicBox’s education week may lead to an increased number of people who find themselves involved in both new music and music education.
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The following scenarios are based on my experiences, observations, and thinking as a music teacher educator working with pre-service and in-service music teachers. They offer possibilities of what could be rather than actual descriptions of particular people and places.
Looking in on Contemporary Pedagogy
For years, Bob Hinton stood or sat at the front of his university classroom and lectured. Some of his students joked that he had made a permanent indentation in the floor. Three years ago, he began experimenting with flipping his classroom. In other words, he video recorded lectures and discussions of the music his students were analyzing and performing and posted them online for his students to view prior to meeting in class. This freed up class time to facilitate discussion and engage with music more actively. Last year, he leveraged the multimedia and interactive aspects of the cloud-based service VoiceThread to have his students upload their own text, video, or audio responses around his videos. This led to dialogue prior to class. Skeptical at first, Bob recognized that his students were more engaged and were beginning to make connections to the content in class in ways that many had not in prior years. Students of his who also studied pedagogy in their education courses were able to identify how Bob was transforming his classroom from one that was teacher-centric to a more student-centered setting.
Bob began borrowing strategies he picked up while collaborating with a team of colleagues on a grant that funded long-term partnerships between the music program, local music educators, and K-12 students. He lectured less and began spending more time facilitating projects. He found himself circulating around his classroom frequently as his students collaborated in groups on projects he designed. His students were creating, analyzing, discussing, performing, and researching music around questions such as: How do musicians relate or respond to their environment? How does music reflect or affect society? What is my role as a musician in the 21st century? He began observing how most of the key concepts he planned to address in class emerged from students’ work on their projects, particularly when he asked questions that helped them reflect more on what they were doing and how it related to the course content.
Bob felt himself shifting away from seeing his role as someone who imparted knowledge or delivered content to his students and moving more toward helping them construct their own understanding and meaning of the key concepts important to his course. While he still poked fun at the phrase “being a guide on the side rather than a sage on the stage,” it described his developing pedagogy. He was asking questions and guiding students’ inquiry in ways that encouraged them to problem-solve and think critically about the course content and its relation to their lives. He was beginning to see the possibilities of a contemporary approach to his pedagogy.
Looking in on Participatory Culture
Kelly Sutton only recently came across the idea of participatory culture at a music education conference presentation she attended. After eavesdropping on some of her students’ conversations and hearing about the song Radioactive by Imagine Dragons, she started searching YouTube to identify examples of participatory culture by observing how people engaged with the music beyond listening to it.
Curious, Kelly looked up the names of other popular songs she found on Billboard’s Top 100 and searched for similar examples on YouTube. Sure enough, she found similar videos and realized how unaware she was of the ways that people engaged with music beyond those in her music program. She then looked for examples beyond a mainstream popular music context and found remix contests related to music released by Steve Reich, Yo Yo Ma, Eric Whitacre, and DJ Spooky. Kelly was intrigued by an app that allowed people to rework Philip Glass’s music and was surprised to find that the Berliner Philharmonic and Brooklyn Philharmonic had made recordings of Mahler and Beethoven available to the public for remixing.
As Kelly learned more about participatory culture and the ways that people were expressing themselves, engaging with music, and sharing their creations with others (Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clinton, & Robison, 2009, pp. 5-6), she recognized how several orchestral concerts she had attended incorporated this type of ethic. She remembered that some people used their mobile devices to tweet during concerts and had heard about blogs and other social media that concert attendees contributed to. She was also surprised to find out about initiatives that involved the general public collaborating on the creation of a symphony and an opera. Kelly wondered what might happen if professional musicians and cultural organizations such as orchestras expanded aspects of participatory culture related to marketing and outreach to connect with educational projects and long-term collaborations with music educators. She was also curious about the potential of integrating aspects of participatory culture into her own program.
Looking in on Contemporary Pedagogy, Participatory Culture, and New Music
During a recent conversation in her evening grad class, Brenda Jayden realized that she had left a gap in her middle school music courses. Looking at the music in her curriculum and the posters of great composers lined up on the back wall of her classroom, Brenda recognized that her students could easily be left with the impression that composers were, for the most part, dead white men from Europe with funky hair. Brenda understood that this was problematic. Slightly embarrassed that she was unaware of anyone currently composing music in the state where she lived and only able to name six living composers other than those who appeared in the magazine from which she ordered music for her classroom, Brenda decided to address the issue head on. Brenda developed a project with her students to familiarize them with examples of new music and the people involved in the new music community. She searched for and contacted people involved in the field to determine possibilities for collaborating on the project with her students. She also applied what she was learning in her grad class about participatory culture in the context of music education. After several Skype sessions and Google Hangouts with composers and a new music ensemble, Brenda and her collaborators generated the following questions to structure the project: How is music expressive? What makes new music new? Brenda was unclear about how copyright, creative rights, and fair use applied in the context of her students engaging creatively with the composers’ music in her classrooms and ensembles. Out of respect for the professional musicians, she asked them how they felt about students appropriating their music in an educational context and tried to determine what she and her students could or should do with the music. Shortly after corresponding with the composers, one of them immediately expressed interest in the idea of Brenda and her students engaging with her music by creating covers, arrangements, remixes, and mashups. As students listened to this composer’s music, they discussed their perspectives on how it was expressive and “new.” They also created and performed their own “new” music that expressed what it was like to go through a day as a middle school student. Several weeks into the project, students formed groups and chose aspects of participatory culture that they wanted to engage with in relation to the composer’s music. Some created remixes while others analyzed the music by copying and pasting recorded excerpts into Garageband along with their own commentary in the style of a radio interview. One group created a music video and one individual was inspired to create his own music inspired by the original. As the students worked on their projects, Brenda moved around to the different groups asking questions that forwarded their work and developed their musical understanding. The students were extremely motivated to work on the project and were gradually becoming fans of new music. They began wondering aloud how they might hear new music live.
The students and composer developed a 21st-century pen-pal-type of relationship, exchanging video posts, holding Skype sessions, and sometimes exchanging tweets. Some students became curious about other living composers and started researching music online. Others began generating playlists of new music on Spotify and purchasing new music on iTunes. One student proposed that the class work with a composer on a Kickstarter campaign to have new music for middle school students to perform that could also be remixed or used in mashups. Students updated the back wall of their classroom by creating posters of contemporary composers and ensembles with whom they felt a connection, having engaged with their music in ways that were relevant and meaningful to their lives.
After completing the project, Brenda maintained contact with several composers and performers in the new music community. They planned to apply for a grant to have a set of new works commissioned that would provide rights for schools to transform and appropriate the work in any way students wished for non-commercial purposes. The ensemble would provide schools with each part recorded individually as resources to use in creative appropriation and for teachers to use in their instruction. Brenda was reinvigorated by the possibilities afforded through participatory culture in her classroom and felt that her students had not only learned much about the expressive potential of music, but had developed as musicians and young people.
New Music in New Music Education? Music education and new music will continue evolving. However, whether they do so apart from one another or in collaboration depends on our actions. The above scenarios invite possibilities that deserve dialogue and debate. A shift towards more student-centered classrooms and projects or inquiry-based learning can provide an excellent context for people to engage with and develop a deep understanding and passion for new music. Likewise, embracing participatory culture can provide people with opportunities to engage with new music in ways that generate interest, develop understanding, and are meaningful to their lives. Those in new music and music education communities might consider collaborating on projects that provide young people with multiple ways of interacting with and learning about new music.
Musicians involved with new music might release audio recordings of music to be remixed, covered, mashed-up, mixed into DJ sets, or manipulated in ways that assist educators in providing students with interesting ways of exploring and interacting with the music. Composers might also allow their works to be recorded and shared as individual parts, stems, or composite recordings for these and other purposes. Music educators experienced with contemporary pedagogies might expand their curricula and open their classrooms to new music. Furthermore, music educators might ensure that at minimum, students are aware of the ways music is being created, performed, and engaged with in contemporary society. Regardless of how intersections of new music and music education might play out, dialogue and collaboration are key in moving forward.
Continuing Conversations
The dialogue fostered by education week on NewMusicBox can catalyze ongoing and sustained conversations between multiple communities. This goes both ways. Music educators might identify and dialogue with organizations and individuals dedicated to supporting and forwarding new music. Music educators should also commit to maintaining awareness of the new music world by listening to the music as well as reading online magazines such as NewMusicBox along with related websites, social media, and the blogs of musicians engaged in new music. Likewise, those involved in new music might interact with music educators online, in K-12 or university settings, or at state and national music education conferences. New music communities might also increase their awareness of the varied perspectives and discussions taking place in music education by reading professional blogs or reading related research journals, several of which are open access. In the spirit of discussion and collaboration, I plan on holding a Google Hangout at some point during the Spring 2014 semester when I teach my Digital and Participatory Culture in Music course to foster related dialogue. I hope some of you will consider taking part in continuing the conversation.
The themes of contemporary pedagogy and participatory culture articulated throughout this article can be unpacked, explored, and critiqued in greater detail in whatever context makes the most sense to educators and new music practitioners. More importantly, however, is their potential for collaboration that can contribute to the musical lives of young people, develop the capacity for music educators to integrate new music into their programs, and support those most closely involved in new music.
Dear Members of the Disquiet Junto, This week’s project focuses on the spatial aspect of sound. The instructions are as follows…
It is Franklin’s own Junto Society that provided the name for this association. Image courtesy Disquiet.com
On Thursday night, I get an email from the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud. It’s a homework assignment I know I will not complete by its Monday deadline, but one that fascinates me nonetheless. It’s also one I know will result in the creation of many tracks of new music built by others.
If this sounds intriguing to you, you can join in at any time—anyone can participate, no application necessary. There are just a few rules and simple guidelines to ease everyone into the party.
Even for those who don’t want to wade in and create music themselves, with 88 projects already completed, the curious listener has a cavernous library to select from (and ample shared process notes from each track creator to get lost in). More files are being added each week.
It would be difficult, if not impossible, to select for you any kind of “best of” representative mix from this project, but for anyone intrigued by the sonic ideas this type of exercise can generate, your spelunking down the Disquiet Junto rabbit hole is sure to be rewarded. When you stumble on something special, please share it in the comments! Drowning in options, I decided to start with some personally intriguing assignments and work from there. We begin at the beginning, a very good—if chilly—place to start. Access the full assignment details and track notes by clicking through to each file’s SoundCloud page. Assignment #1: Ice Cubes
Quick Questions with Junto founder Marc Weidenbaum Molly Sheridan: You win the gold star for the most creatively stimulating homework assignments I have ever encountered. What took the Disquiet Junto from neat idea to actually happening project?
Marc Weidenbaum: Thanks! That’s super generous of you. The enthusiasm of the participants, who come back week after week, is what has made the Disquiet Junto happen: their music, their ideas, their energy, their generosity. I’m afraid to say that had the first project not been so warmly received—40-plus participants joined in, if memory serves—I might not have had the nerve to do a second. Instead, we hit the ground running, and we haven’t stopped since, one week after the next.
MS: Let’s quantify this image. Can you throw some fun numbers at me—number of participants since the project started, number of tracks, hours of music created, number of plays and comments gathered—that sort of thing? How many people does it take to run this machine or does the machine provide the tools on its own?
MW: Sure thing. Here are some numerical accountings of our goings-on, as of September 4, 2013:
2,533: number of tracks currently live in the Disquiet Junto group page
372: number of musicians responsible for those 2,533 tracks
87: number of weekly projects
71: number of tracks submitted to the most active weekly project
18: seconds in length of shortest project (a mini-suite based on the Vine app)
4: number of days from project announcement (Thursday) to deadline (Monday)
4: number of live concerts thus far (one each in Chicago, Denver, Manhattan, and San Francisco)
1: number of moderators (that is, it’s just me)
0: number of weeks we’ve taken off
MS: You’re the Junto founder/moderator, but are you also an active participant?
MW: I believe I’ve only participated in the Disquiet Junto once, for a project called “audiobiography,” the 60th, back in March 2013. I don’t really make much music, myself, in the direct sense, though I think the projects themselves count as a kind of music-making, in a meta sense. I do fiddle with music at home. I play with iOS and Android apps—at some point I may even upload some super minimal rhythmic work I’ve been up to. I used to make pause tapes in my teens. I had two turntables and a mixer until my kid was born. I do a lot of push-button, straightforward reworking of existing material—like, I enjoy running instrumental hip-hop through the Automaton plug-in from Audio Damage. But I think of much of that as “active listening” more than as music-making. And with only a few exceptions, the Junto projects have been way, way beyond my meager ability level. This whole thing comes out of my experience as an editor of arts/culture journalism and of comics, both of which I have done a lot of: I assign work I could not myself accomplish.
MS: While I haven’t participated myself, it’s been my impression that the restriction provided by the assignment is key but that discussion of the employed method(s), a sort of “show your work,” is also central. There’s an outsider input and public process to the music making. Even though we often talk about the digital cocooning that new technologies allow, this is a reversal of that in some ways through technology—bringing others into what is often normally a private creative space for just one artist. MW: Yeah, I agree entirely. I think three key things are essential to the Junto’s success. The restraints and the deadline are big, but so too is the knowledge that not just an audience but an audience of peers is at the ready: to listen, give feedback, befriend, collaborate with. As for the “through technology,” as you put it, absolutely: this project exists specifically as a means of utilizing the SoundCloud interface. I’m not saying it would not have existed otherwise, but it exists as it does to make the best use of that virtual public space as SoundCloud both intentionally and unintentionally happened to have designed it.
MS: Where does the Junto project, both the structure of it and the work coming out of it, stand in relation to other music in the 2013 landscape? It strikes me that it touches so many current anxieties and obsessions: remix culture, social media, transparency, collective action, crowd sourcing.
MW: One person’s anxieties are another’s enthusiasms. The Disquiet Junto is the most “fluid” and “immediate” work I have ever done, and I think fluidity and immediacy are common factors in the various phenomena you list. A key distinction I’d add is that the Junto is often as much about sound as it is about music, or about music as a subset and/or adversary of sound, and about both sound and music being a means to explore ideas non-verbally. MS: The concept has since moved offline through some concert organizing and such. I haven’t heard a live event, but I can see how that might generate some conceptual tensions. Is the Disquiet Junto bigger, or at least about more, than the sum of its online parts? MW: I like to think that the SoundCloud Disquiet Junto presence is a home, not a family. The Junto members can go other places from time to time and be a family there, too. Those can be virtual places, like YouTube and Vine, and they can be physical places, like concert halls and art galleries.
MS: No one is making any money here, correct? No albums made and sold, created content shared to varying degrees (depending on the assignments and the participants). Considering its collaborative nature, can things like ownership and revenue generation co-exist here or is this space not for those end goals.
MW: Some small amount of money has been made here and there, though making money is at best a quaternary aspect of the Disquiet Junto. We charged a small ticket price at some of the concerts, though others were free admission. Some people have released some of their tracks commercially. SoundCloud gets money from those who elect for a higher grade of account. More likely the projects have refined and expanded the skills of the participants, myself as moderator included, and that experience perhaps has helped people economically elsewhere. As for the Creative Commons matter, we have not engaged with some projects because of financial concerns—for example, there was a cool band that did an open remix project, but the band stipulated that it retain the full, rather than shared, copyright of the remix, and that seems unfair, so I didn’t proceed with it. Though I’m still thinking about it. Did I mention this is all fluid? See, while making money is not a focus of the Disquiet Junto, commerce—the exchange of ideas, culture, technology—is.
I was a very early adopter of music notation software. I bought my first home computer—an Apple IIGS—soon after it arrived on the market in 1986 and shortly thereafter acquired Pyware Music Writer. My newly embraced music engraving apparatus was admittedly far from perfect (e.g. the program was limited to six staves and I was using a dot matrix printer), but the shortcomings were a small price to pay for the amount of time it saved me in getting my music from my brain into a notated form. Prior to my digital conversion, I typically would spend two hours per page carefully shaping every single notehead with a ballpoint pen, a protractor, and numerous jars of Liquid Paper™. Revisions were agony. But through using a computer to notate my scores, the ability to listen back to what I had written—albeit via rather chintzy early MIDI—allowed me to proofhear the music and fix various pitch and rhythm errors; I used to make many such mistakes. Over the years I changed computers several times as well as notation programs—the latter often requiring me to re-format each score all over again. I just started using Sibelius 7 on a Windows 7 operating system and am terrified that I will need to tweak a bunch of my old scores once more. But I have no desire to go back to pen and paper. (I did only once, twelve years ago, out of frustration with Finale’s awkward method of beaming across barlines, which is what ultimately led to my use of Sibelius.)
I recount this whole history because I have been worrying quite a bit this past week about the permanence of data that is created and saved digitally. Part of it is paranoia resulting from having problems with my home computer; I have been unable to retrieve files from it for nearly a week. Recently several other friends have also reported having problems with their computers. All my music files are presumably safe on a detachable hard-drive and the repair of my own machine is imminent; but still, not having access to them has been unsettling especially since, as a result, I have not been able to further flesh out a compositional idea that’s been brewing in my head for days. Then, as part of my recent obsession with the writings of Robert Coover, I came across an essay he wrote for The New York Times back in 1992 called “The End of Books.” In it, he talked about some of the pioneers of hypertext fiction and poetry. Intrigued, I thought I’d acquire some of this stuff. I was particularly eager to read “Afternoon, a Story,” a 1987 hypertext by Michael Joyce, which was touted by Coover and others as a landmark of the genre. Soon, however, I was disappointed to learn that the CD-ROM containing Joyce’s work, though thankfully still available, cannot be opened by computers using the most recent versions of Word. Information technology now develops faster than any of us can keep up with, and to what end? If there is no permanence to the formats we use to store information, what is the point of storing information in them? Of course, I’m well aware that paper manuscripts are also not indestructible. Over the weekend, I read that the score and all the parts for the Third Symphony of York Bowen, an early 20th century British composer whose chamber music I love, were destroyed in a flood at the premises of its publisher back in the 1950s. No format guarantees survival.
Although I finally said goodbye to my Blackberry back in February, I still carry around a FlipCam and, gasp, a Palm T/X. Some people find it amusing that I’m still attached to these outmoded devices, but I’ve learned how to use them quite effectively, particularly the Palm, and they now do exactly what I need them to do. Why else would anyone be saddled with technology in the first place? I haven’t kept any staff paper around the house for years now, but I suppose I could restock my supply and jot some notes down the old fashioned way.
Over the past week, I’ve been acclimating myself to the great green north again as I begin my third summer teaching composition at the Interlochen Summer Arts Camp in Interlochen, Michigan. Not only does this adventure give me the opportunity to advise some very talented students and collaborate with many top-notch performers from around the country, but I get to work with several composer colleagues who never fail to inspire. Whether it’s a discussion over plastic trays laden with that day’s lunch, a presentation to the studio in our Composition Techniques class, or late-night musings over IPAs and bourbon, these interactions are a never-ending source of provoked thought, re-evaluation, and outright discovery.
One perfect example of this occurred earlier this week when the four composition faculty—returning veteran Robert Brownlow, first-year faculty N. Lincoln Hanks and Jonathan Newman, and myself—presented examples of our own work to our studio of 18 student composers. Newman, with a bit o’ flair for the dramatic, concluded our presentation with a brief but very effective demonstration of how the combination of a quality recording and basic video technology (i.e. iMovie) can be used to introduce a new work to conductors, performers, and gobsmacked campers.
Score video of Blow It Up, Start Again by Jonathan Newman, performed by the Florida State University Wind Orchestra under the direction of Richard Clary
Newman explained later that he had been inspired by the jazz composer Tim Davies, who had created several score videos for his big band works (see below), and decided that it could be a useful and eye-catching tool to generate interest in his newly transcribed piece. (Blow It Up, Start Again was originally written for the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra in 2011 and transcribed for wind ensemble the following year.) Davies’s Quicktime videos are more simplistic, displaying the full pages as the recording plays along, but they are also still very effective.
Score video of Counting to Infinity by Tim Davies, performed by the Tim Davies Big Band
Each of these videos allow the viewer to digest the music they’re hearing in different ways. Davies’s videos let the eye meander over the entire score page with little attention to detail, since the image is relatively small. Newman, on the other hand, only shows you what he wants to show you but in much greater detail. In both instances, however, it’s difficult to not be affected by the video as you listen to the music. The visual stimulation is strong for those who can read the scores, and aspects of the pieces that may have been glossed over in a purely aural setting are sharply enhanced.
Neither of the videos mentioned above are intended to be part of the artistic presentation; they were made primarily with the hope that conductors and performers would enjoy the work enough to purchase and perform it. Of course, these aren’t the only examples of composers using video to enhance their music. The incorporation of video as part of the creative process is slowly becoming a new and important aspect of new music in general. From Michel Van der Aa’s groundbreaking work, including his Grawemeyer Prize-winning cello concerto Up-Close and his new 3D film-opera Sunken Garden, to Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir projects which incorporate social media and crowdsourcing concepts to an extent that could not have been imagined only ten years ago, composers are exploring how video can be used in the creation, performance, and dissemination of their music. As technology becomes even more pliant and simple to use, we’re only going to see more innovations in this area in the years ahead.
At the risk of sounding like someone who hyperbolically rhapsodizes about every new technological gimmick, the new Orchestra iPad app is pretty great. At the very least, it presents an extremely pleasant and novel way to listen to and/or learn about classical music, in the very capable hands of Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra. Thought of in a certain light, it’s like a rather strange and ambitious compilation album. The featured pieces are carefully selected, spanning the history of the Western canon from Haydn to Salonen (naturally), and are performed with impeccable craft.
The presentation is similarly meticulous. For each piece we get video from three different angles (two of the orchestra and one of the conductor), a stage plot of the ensemble, a score that automatically follows along with the audio, and a mini-essay by veteran L.A. Times critic Mark Swed. The interface presenting all of this is impressively intuitive, making it easy to seamlessly switch between and resize these different views. My only complaint in this regard is that there are only two note size options with the score, with no ability to freely zoom in and out. In fact, most of the time it’s not possible to see the full score on the screen all at once.
This may be part of the reason why we’re also given a “curated score” view that only contains a few instruments at a time. Personally, I found the curated score frustrating, since it’s not a true short score, merely omitting rather than compressing staves. But others may find it helpful in following along with the more important lines and themes. And if you don’t read music, it’s simple enough to switch to a piano-roll sequencer-style notation, or to minimize the score entirely. Besides, the video is entertaining enough on its own, with a musicians’ view of Salonen swinging his arms about with ferocious facial expressions, and well-chosen close-ups of the musicians themselves, which allows me to play one of my favorite games, “Which celebrity does this orchestra member vaguely resemble?” (That clarinetist looks like Brent Spiner…and there’s Rowan Atkinson on tuba….Hey, it’s Toby from The Office on cello!)
Of course there’s also ongoing commentary from both Salonen and the musicians, which can be toggled on and off as audio or subtitles. Salonen’s commentary is generally insightful and occasionally witty. (I particularly liked his comparison of Debussy’s music to something organic, “like a flower or a cat.”) By contrast the musicians’ banter is a little less focused, but still interesting.
But what struck me most about hearing the music in this context is how it subtly, almost casually presents an argument for the orchestra itself, as both an institution and an artifact. As a maker of new music it’s easy to feel that the orchestra isn’t as relevant as it used to be, a sort of behemoth of a bygone age, especially with the recent struggles that so many orchestras have endured. But encountering the music in this way, it’s impossible not to feel that orchestral music is important, exciting, and vital. You see, very clearly, the effort and talent of everyone involved. And perhaps more importantly, you see them as people, with their quirks and mannerisms intact.
You can also see quite clearly the progression of Western art music, with each generation iterating on the innovations of the last. It’s one of the most persuasive arguments for the Western canon’s vitality and endurance that I’ve encountered, and it does so entirely in subtext, without any grandiose, pompous pronouncements.
For this reason I think the decision to include a breadth of styles and time periods was a smart one, even though it means you only get to hear movements or excerpts from most pieces. (Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune is a highlight simply because you get to hear the whole thing.) But in the end, maybe this is for the best anyway, as it acts as a sort of appetizer that piques interest to hear more. I, for one, would love to see more classical music presented this way. John Cage app, anyone?
From the “Festival in Two Worlds” hosted in the virtual environment Second Life to Eric Whitacre’s captivating crowdsourcing project Lux Aurumque and “telepresent” concerts hosted by Pauline Oliveros and the Deep Listening Institute, new music enthusiasts and composers alike can explore the outer limits of collaboration in the digital age. Music technology explodes exponentially in the third millennium.
Composers have historically explored and exploited the latest tools to meet their own ends, quickly incorporating the printing press, the phonograph, and circuitry in their own musical creations. Today, advances in internet development, robotics, virtual reality, and social networking usher in with them the next generation of compositional methods. Most of these tools require nothing more than a high-speed connection and a little bit of time to learn and use. The possibilities feel limitless.
Technology in contemporary music, however, also poses unique challenges—logistically, technically, and aesthetically. Directly speaking to the challenges of crowdsourcing and technology in collaborative projects, co-founder of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra and founder of the Princeton Soundlab Perry R. Cook points out:
As with much technology-based music and art, the demand that each new piece be absolutely novel, or nearly unique, is higher than with acoustic/traditional art. Nobody would demand that a new string quartet use new technology and sound completely different from all other past string quartets, but an art piece that uses new technology seems to carry an extra burden that it use really NEW technology.
In the mad dash to explore new technical heights and dimensions, complaints about the musical value or even sheer purpose of works created solely to exploit technology come to light. The challenge for composers lies in creating lasting works that move past sheer novelty, although there is value in experimentation for experimentation’s sake.
What follows is a brief exploration of several collaborative projects which challenge conventional definitions of composition, and some of which would be impossible using only traditional means.
Crowdsourcing and Opera by You
For those unfamiliar with the concept of crowdsourcing, imagine the inner workings of a high-functioning beehive. Each member works on a specific task towards a collective goal. In the same way, artistic efforts involving crowd-sourced talent assign each member a specific creative task that benefits the collective efforts of the whole. Each musician works towards the final project.
Although primarily designed for independent film projects, Wreckamovie has sections designated for operas and music videos. A project leader sets up a free online account and posts images, video, and a blog about the opera. Then he or she designates individual tasks for writers, artists, musicians, and other key roles. Participating members join the production and upload materials for each task. While some productions require members to sign a talent release form, the Wreckamovie website includes legal text that specifies the voluntary nature of collaboration on the site. The majority of productions are based in Finland, but international productions like music videos and indie slasher films also use the service.
While collaboration at a certain level is integral to large-scale productions like opera and film, the creators of Opera by You produced an opera entirely created through crowdsourcing. The project was the brainchild of a group of Finnish artists including Markus Simon Fagerudd, Samuli Lane, Iida Hämeen-Anttila, Jere Erkkilä, and Päivi Salmi, and they used the website Wreckamovie.com to create an opera from scratch exclusively using crowdsourcing with the support of the Savonlinna Opera Festival. From concept to score to costume design, each element was tasked out to the Wreckamovie community and then completed by volunteer composers, artists, writers, and actors. Participants in the 400-member online crew each receive credit for their contributions.
Opera by You challenges ideas surrounding intellectual property and musical ownership. Several composers worked with Markus Simon Fagerudd on developing themes, orchestrating music, and editing scores. The libretto is an eclectic mix of Dante’s Divine Comedy, political commentary, and cameos by famous historical figures like Mozart and Oscar Wilde. While Hämeen-Anttila finalized the libretto, the community developed plot ideas and twists, and literally put words in each character’s mouth. All community members signed a formal license agreement giving the Savonlinna Opera Festival property rights to Opera by You.
Free Will by Opera by You – record
21.7.2012
Opera by You premiered July 21, 2012, at the Savonlinna Opera Festival in Helsinki, Finland. The festival has also embarked on a new children’s opera called The Seal Opera, which has a libretto selected by the public using an online voting system. According to a 2011 press release, the winning libretto was created by elementary school children at the Helsinki European School. Over 6,000 participants voted for it online.
YouTube Collaborations
In 2008, YouTube, the London Symphony Orchestra, composer Tan Dun, and even the Hyundai Motor Company played key roles in a virtual experiment. Using YouTube.com as an online auditioning platform, aspiring amateur musicians competed online with professional musicians for a spot in the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. In the end, thousands of musicians auditioned, and 101 instrumentalists made their way to the Sydney Opera House for a live performance.
The end result of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra seemed to be a mixed bag, with reviewers balking at the choice of program and lack of nuance in the performance. In a March 21, 2011, review in the Los Angeles Times, Marcia Adair compared the final YouTube Symphony Concert to band camp concerts where the emphasis is on the experience and not the music. The YouTube Symphony Orchestra suffered from a lack of cohesiveness of sound that a few hasty days of rehearsal could not resolve.
Not all collaborative efforts using YouTube have involved willing participants. In 2009 Israeli composer and activist Ophir Kutiman developed the innovative ThruYOU online video series. Kutiman created video mashes using clips of musicians and vloggers on YouTube. Videos such as My Favorite Color and Mother of All Funk Chords involved dozens of short video clips tightly edited by Kutiman. The composer created complex musical compositions with each clip, using slick editing techniques and jazz arranging skills. Kutiman scavenged YouTube for each original clip, including everyone from bashful moms playing the organ to seasoned pros showing off their drum chops. Old rules regarding copyright were blatantly ignored, making the experiment controversial in some circles. The end result is raw, refreshing, and unique.
Ophir Kutiman continues to use technology as a means of expression and activism. His more recent 2011 video work, This is Real Democracy, demonstrates his trend towards political activism and shift away from purely musical pursuits.
Perhaps one of the most popular contemporary works using crowdsourcing and technology to date involves choral composer Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir and the viral rendition of his Lux Aurumque. Since his first successful YouTube video hit the internet, Whitacre has followed up with other Virtual Choir projects. The sleekness of production, the lush musical beauty of the works, and the gargantuan scope of a collaboration involving over 185 voices from a dozen countries have all helped launch Whitacre into a world of online stardom.
In a 2011 TED Talk, Eric Whitacre explained the simple beginnings for Virtual Choir. A choral student named Britlin Lucy uploaded a fan video for his work Sleep to YouTube. Inspired by the intimate sound and setting of the video, Whitacre uploaded a recording, sheet music, a piano track, and conducting video for Lux Aurumque to his blog and YouTube with a call for fifty singers to participate in a virtual ensemble video. The online auditions involved singers from all over the world.
Producer Scott Haines volunteered to cut the video and clean the audio, inserting clips of Eric Whitacre conducting the virtual ensemble, which is somewhat reminiscent of a scene from Superman 2. The high production quality of the first Virtual Choir project, in HD no less, does not compare to the second version, Virtual Choir 2.0 which involved over two thousands singers performing Whitacre’s Sleep in a virtual computer generated universe of interconnected spheres with a lone Whitacre at the epicenter.
More than a musical experiment, Whitacre’s Virtual Choirs explore and redefine community from a 21st-century perspective. Members experience a connectedness with strangers through this project. They reveal the possibilities of a more integral communication phenomena through social networking and technology that has only been imagined in the past. The musicians connected through space and time, if not through touch. During his Ted Talk, Whitacre described his virtual singers as “souls all on their own desert islands…sending electronic messages in bottles to each other.”
Telepresent Performance and The Telematic Circle
The concept of international “telepresent performances,” or collaborative performance occurring in tandem from different locations, has its beginnings in the late 20th century when the internet first reared its digital head. A paper by Ajay Kapur, Ge Wang, Philip Davidson, and Perry R. Cook called “Interactive Network Performance: a dream worth dreaming?” discusses the beginnings and practice of complex networked performances, including the projects like the GIGAPOPR, remote Internet 2 media events at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and experiments at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Japan. The article describes in detail earlier efforts to create global telepresent concerts such as work in the 1990s at Chukyo University of Toyota in Japan and at the USA/Japan Inter-College Computer Music Festival in Tokyo. Both of these efforts seem primitive compared to today’s sleek smartphone, virtual world, and multimedia video collaborations. For a technically detailed description of a few key collaborative projects like VELDT (Networked Visual Feedback Software) and The Gigapop Ritual, “Interactive Network Performance: a dream worth dreaming?” is a read well worth the head-scratching and technical wonder.
A quick look online will reveal that the concept of telepresent performances in real time has captivated the hearts, minds, and efforts of a number of composers and artists. The Internet2 community, a consortium of academic communities and researchers, has used technology for artistic pursuits like Trespassing Boundaries between Tel Aviv and New York University and the cross-continental simultaneous live performances of InterPlay: Hallucinations. Multicasting or webcasting has become popular not only in the Internet2 community but with independent musicians through publicly accessible live streaming sites like UStream.com.
Composer Pauline Oliveros first experimented with telepresent performances using an Internet2 connection. A performance in 2005 involved dancers in California and France interacting with Pauline’s improvisations at RPI. As Pauline improvised, video was simulcast to France and California. Dancers improvised with Pauline’s musical gestures and with each other. Several challenges—including latency and issues with a firewall in France—threatened the performance until the day of the concert. At the premiere, Pauline serenely began her dream-like improvisation, natural percussive instruments in hand, as dancers flung far across the globe interpreted her musical gestures with their bodies.
Today Oliveros’s Telematic Circle involves universities, musicians, and composers throughout the world and facilitates telepresent concerts with minimal latency using both the latest technology and what Oliveros describes as “low tech audio.” The group utilizes a combination of tools including Internet2, Apple’s iCHATav, Skype, and other audiovisual means of communication. By working together, the various institutions hope to learn how best to overcome technical issues regarding latency, logistics, and teleconferencing limitations that limit real time musical performance.
Vox Novus 60×60 and Macrocomposition
Inspired by musical efforts like The Frog Peak Collaborations Project and Guy Livingston’s Don’t Panic, composer and director of Vox Novus Robert Voisey developed the 60×60 project as a means to expose audiences to new music. The project utilizes technology and digital collaboration to create a unique concert experience that has had hundreds of performances globally, and, on its tenth anniversary, has presented music by more than 2,000 composers.
The concept for the 60×60 project is simple: Combine sixty one-minute electronic compositions into an hour-long new music concert experience. With minimal funding, 60×60 survives directly as a result of pooled talent from composers from all walks of life. More than a random mix of works, 60×60 involves macro-composition, which Voisey describes as, “the act of creating a musical work incorporating several fully formed ideas or complete works.” And just as “ballet, operas, and movies are all perfect examples of many artists contributing to a greater artistic whole orchestrated by the ‘macro-artist’,” says Voisey, the Vox Novus 60×60 project involves this multi-layered method of composition in the same way with sixty smaller sections sifted and sorted musically by a macro-composer.
Technology plays a key role in contacting and recruiting musicians for 60×60. Vox Novus members send out numerous calls both on the 60×60 website and through active music groups like the International Alliance of Women in Music (IAWM) listserv and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Participating composers submit their one-minute works using an online submission engine. The 60×60 project has a number of mixes each year, and each mix typically generates hundreds of submissions. This type of large-scale collaborative project involving thousands of composers from every corner of the globe is only possible through contemporary methods of Internet communication.
Other Collaborative Projects
Random Acts of Culture
Supported by the Knight Arts Foundation, Random Acts of Culture combines flashmobs and social networking with classical music. While not a means to create new forms of music, Random Acts of Culture has used social networking to expose unsuspecting mall-goers to spontaneous performances of “O Fortuna” from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, works by Verdi, and Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus. The performances are meant to create a sense of community as unsuspecting participants join in the performance, tweet live about the experience, or simply grab a few snapshots with their phones.
Bicycle Built for 2000
Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an Amazon site that essentially serves as an online marketplace for microtasking, project designers Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey commissioned over two thousand people from over seventy countries to make vocal recordings of a brief excerpt of the song Daisy Bell for the price of six cents a recording. The participants did not have prior knowledge of the grand end-scheme. The final result of Bicycle Built for 2000 may seem a somewhat nightmarish version of the original tune, but still stands as an interesting experiment of grand scale crowdsourcing.
And even more…
Crowdsourcing musical talent reaches outside the realm of experimental electroacoustic wizardry, with popular examples like Smule’s Glee, Thounds.com, Kompose.com, and collaborative projects in the virtual world of Second Life by composer Alex Shapiro. For those that have a love for Karaoke, I warn you that Smule’s Glee can get quite addicting.
Practical Applications
More than just a digital playground for the curious, the internet provides an exciting engine for creativity and change.
As a composer of limited resources, producing a full-scale opera seemed impossible to me, but the Internet provided the talent and resources needed for my current virtual opera project. Websites like Music Xray, Blogger, Twitter, and OurStage were ideal for setting up online auditions. Sites like Wreckamovie, LinkedIn, and Moviestorm added talented artists, graphic designers, and animators to the film crew. Unlike a traditional live performance, Libertaria: The Virtual Opera is animated with Machinima, an animation style using virtual actors in a computer graphics environment first popularized by the video game Quake. Minor animation tasks are set up for crowdsourcing through Wreckamovie, while a core group of “Machinimators” will work together on major scenes. The cast rehearses using Opera Rehearsal Album downloads at Bandcamp. Each Opera Rehearsal Album comes complete with scores, an updated libretto, and click tracks. The film crew has never met. Typically this type of production would be prohibitive for a single composer to write, compose, and produce. By tapping into the vast resources available online, previously impossible things are achieved.
The key to many crowdsourced collaborative efforts lies in making a cohesive and understandable musical experience out of the amassed materials. Like the macro-composer in the Vox Novus 60×60 Project or the designers for Bicycle Built for 2000 and Virtual Choirs 2.0, a master artist assimilates each individual entity into the final whole. In this way, even a project involving thousands can have a single purpose, a single concept.
The technology described here is already moving towards the realm of digital antiquity. The point is to create incredible music with the resources at hand, not to exploit the latest digital gadgetry for the sake of shock and awe. Technology invaded music centuries ago.
What are some practical ways you can use today’s technology in your next musical project? You can crowdsource your next opera, flashmob the local grocery store with a new oratorio, conduct international auditions through YouTube, or premier a string quartet virtually in Second Life. Use Thounds.com, Google+, or Twitter to bounce your musical ideas off of other musicians, or improvise a telepresent jazz concert in real time using Skype or your iPhone. Connect to musicians a hemisphere away and find the talent you are looking for. Contemporary technology opens new doors to musical creativity.
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Acknowledgements: A special thanks to Pauline Oliveros, Robert Voisey, Päivi Salmi, and Perry R. Cook for providing additional insight into this topic.
Ajay Kapur, Ge Wang, Philip Davidson, and Perry R. Cook, “Interactive Network Performance: a dream worth dreaming?” Department of Computer Science (also Music), Princeton University, Music Intelligence and Sound Technology Interdisciplinary Center (MISTIC), and the University of Victoria (2005).
Pauline Oliveros. “Reverberations: Eight Decades.” 2012. Abridged version in upcoming Journal of Science and Culture (2012).
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Award-winning composer, author, and obsessive sci-fi buff Sabrina Peña Young composes multimedia works that have been presented throughout Asia, the Americas, Australia, and Europe. Her music has been heard in international film festivals, radio, electronic dance clubs, random boom boxes in France, and as not-so-pleasant-background music. Young’s recent projects include the post-apocalyptic Libertaria: The Virtual Opera, the Afro-Cuban multimedia oratorio Creation, and film scores including Rob Cabrera’s animated short Monica and Sean Fleck’s time-lapse film Americana. Young’s works have been heard at the Beijing Conservatory, ICMC, SEAMUS, Miramax’s Project Greenlight, Art Basil Miami, the New York International Independent Film Festival, Turkey’s Cinema for Peace, the Pulsefield Exhibition of Sound Art, London’s Angel Moving Image Festival, and other international arts venues.
While most folks walk around with one all-purpose handheld device, I prefer carrying around three: a Palm T/X and a FlipCam (both of which have been discontinued) plus a BlackBerry (which the rumor mill claims is also not long for this world). Photo by Kevin Clark
While reactions within the composer community to the possible discontinuation of the Sibelius music notation software program have ranged from shock and outrage to indifference, my own feelings are a bit more complicated. While they are somewhat colored by my attraction to abandoned technologies, they are also informed by the fact that I, for the most part, abandoned pen and staff paper for music notation software more than a quarter of a century ago. These two things are actually related to each other in my personal experience.
One of the activities I prided myself very highly on when I was a teenager was the creation of musical scores with meticulous calligraphy. I would literally devote hours to each individual page. My materials consisted of: Passantino manuscript paper (in various dimensions depending on how many instruments I was writing for); protractors (to guarantee that every stem was perpendicular to the staff and to measure each one precisely); numerous jars of Liquid Paper (not so much to correct mistakes but rather to customize margins and sometimes to increase spaces between staff systems, very time consuming and not recommended); and Paper Mate black ballpoint pens (blue pens when I composed in 31-tone tuning, but that’s another story). If someone back then had told me that I would no longer engage in this activity once I graduated from college I would have thought it an affront to the core of my personal identity. Yet the first significant purchase I made, the year after receiving my bachelor’s degree from Columbia in 1985, was a personal computer (an Apple IIGS) and a color dot-matrix printer (the ImageWriter II)—which to this day remains the first and last time I ever bought products made by Apple. I was talked into bringing these machines into my life by several very persuasive salespeople—I would never have listened to just one—who convinced me that owning the then brand new IIGS (September 1986), which was specifically designed for graphic and sound applications, would completely change my composing regimen. For better or worse, it did.
Before it changed my music writing habits, it forever changed my relationship to writing prose. Whatever its flaws in retrospect, AppleWorks was a vast improvement over the old Royal typewriter I had been using for anything I wrote and wanted someone else to read. (The less-than-ideal manifestation of prose originating from that particular device, which I bought for a pittance at a Salvation Army thrift store, was compounded by my having no idea how to clean typewriter keys at the time, so all the Os were invariably completely filled in, etc.) But not only was the readability of the text printed on the Imagewriter a quantum leap beyond what I had been imposing on folks, the content also improved dramatically. Using a word processor was how I learned to edit myself. It’s still an uphill battle, but at least now it’s one I’m aware needs to be fought.
The earliest piece of music notation software that I became aware of that was compatible with the IIGS was something called Pyware Music Writer. (I was amazed this morning when I searched for “Pyware” that the company is not only still around but is still producing music notation software!) After those first few months adapting to composing words at the computer, using notation software seemed a parallel evolution for writing music. And it was. I no longer worked on a composition from beginning to end in a linear fashion, but rather ideas would flow for different parts of a piece and then, via the machinations of technology, eventually become a coherent whole. And I could make changes without constantly rewriting pages and going through gallons of Liquid Paper in the process.
The biggest shortcoming of the version of Pyware Music Writer I purchased, however, was that it was limited to six staves in total. As I was mostly interested in composing chamber music, especially since no orchestras were knocking on my door at the time, this did not pose an insurmountable problem. But I sometimes wonder, even if a performance would still not have been immediately forthcoming, if my inspiration would have led me to larger ensembles had the program afforded me the ability to notate for them. Perhaps a worse problem, however, was that my Pyware notated scores were extremely difficult to read in a dot matrix print out. I had gone from creating engraver-quality handwritten scores to abysmal computer-generated ones. I send out heartfelt apologies to everyone whom I had subjected to these scores for virtually a decade.
Still, I was reluctant to abandon ship after spending so much money on this equipment and so much time learning how to use it and inputting so many hours of work into it. Apple made it even harder for me to upgrade since they discontinued the IIGS and made their subsequent operating systems completely incompatible with it, which meant that if I were to switch to a more recent machine I would need to learn a completely different system and re-enter all my music again from the beginning. (Because of this and my feeling that Apple’s infringement suit against the Franklin Ace was unfair, I have remained fervent in my boycott of their products.) But eventually common sense won over my stubbornness and I switched computer systems. I still remember donating the IIGS to the same Salvation Army shop where I bought the Royal typewriter that it had replaced.
For a brief time I used Finale on my new PC, but I couldn’t get it to do what I was trying to do in a composition I was working on at the time—extensive passages involving different cross beamings in every instrument (which I believe it can now do)—so I went back to notating music by hand. And then I learned about Sibelius. It took me only a weekend to figure out the basics of how to use it and within a year I had transferred almost everything I had composed up to that point into it. I was using version 2.0 at the time. I’ve since upgraded to 5.0 and luckily all my older files open, even though they occasionally need a few tweaks here and there. Sibelius is now up to a version 7.0, but I’m not a technology chaser so I have no intention of upgrading anytime soon. And if the doomsday scenario folks are talking about comes to pass, I won’t be able to purchase newer editions anyway.
The years of being saddled with the Apple IIGS and Pyware Music Writer taught me to do the best with what I had, something the folks who wait in line overnight to buy the latest iPhone will find incomprehensible. Often the latest technologies are not the most useful. Back in 1998, some friends who were annoyed that I kept forgetting appointments chipped in and bought me a PalmPilot. It was discontinued last year, but my alarms still go off like clockwork and guarantee that I’m where I’m supposed to be most of the time. The handy and very easily searchable memos and address applications also help me remember and quickly access a ton of information I otherwise would have forgotten. Last year I bought a FlipCam about a month before it ceased being manufactured; it also remains a constant companion. I have no intention of throwing my BlackBerry out amidst rumors that it too might not be long for this world. And I laugh at all the folks who have abandoned their CD collections for iPods, cloud services, or whatever the latest soon-to-be-discontinued technology-du-demain is; my thousands of LPs still sound great! And so do harpsichords, recorders, lutes, analog synthesizers, and myriad other musical instruments that were supposed to have been made obsolete by “improved” instrument designs.
There is no way we can ever catch up with what we think the future will be, or rather, what others (mostly marketers) tell us the future will be. At the end of the day, that time could be better spent honing our skills with technologies that work for us and that we are comfortable with. I still haven’t mastered all the details of Sibelius 5.0 (or even 2.0, for that matter); its already available intricacies will probably serve my compositional needs for the rest of my life. Now all I need to do is make sure that a computer that can run the software will last as long.
Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.
