\n(originally published in High Fidelity<\/em>, February 1958, and available online here<\/a>)<\/p>\n
\u201cThe contemporary American writer is in no way a part of the social and political scene. He is therefore not muzzled, for no one fears his bite; nor is he called upon to compose. Whatever work he does must proceed from a reckless inner need. The world does not beckon, nor does it grant reward. This is not a boast or a complaint. It is a fact. Serious writing must nowadays be written for the sake of the art. The condition I describe is not extraordinary. Certain scientists, philosophers, historians, and many mathematicians do the same, advancing their causes as they can. One must be satisfied with that.<\/p>\n
\u2014William H. Gass, from \u201cA Revised and Expanded Preface\u201d \u201c[E]veryone who is deeply into music has figured out how to download music for free, despite the best efforts of the record business to stop them, and has far, far more music downloaded to their laptops and iPods than they will ever have time to listen to in their entire lives. Gigabytes and gigabytes of meaningless data. These same students invariably report that they have actually listened to all the music they paid for. If a virtual tree falls in a virtual forest and no one opens the file, does it still make a sound?\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014Bob Ostertag, \u201cWhy I No Longer Give Away My Music\u201d \u201cPerhaps if we dedicate some time to exploring how classical can be listened to just like any other genre of music, we can view it as an art form that\u2019s easier to confront and enjoy. \u2026 Your hipster friend might judge you if you\u2019ve never heard of The Decemberists, but I can promise the classical community isn\u2019t so damning.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014Mary Sydnor, \u201cClassical Covers\u201d It was somehow appropriate that the nation’s capital was the meeting place for a group of music creators who hope to create a network that would give them more power.<\/p><\/div>\n I was unable to write anything for these pages last Monday since I spent most of the day in Washington, D.C. in a series of meetings with a group of music creators from all over the world. Many of these people had come to the nation\u2019s capital for the General Assembly of CISAC<\/a>, an International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, which most of the world\u2019s performing rights societies\u2014including the USA\u2019s (ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC)\u2014are members of. This ad-hoc group of music creators met in advance of the \u201cofficial\u201d CISAC convening essentially to talk about possible common ground between individual music creators worldwide and to look for ways that such a common ground could form the foundation for a viable network. But before I attempt to recount some of the conversations that transpired during the day and to explain a bit more what I believe the goals are of some of the people spearheading this initiative, I want to address the extensive and possibly excessive citations above. I believe these four quotes not only relate to what I witnessed in D.C., but also strike to the heart of what I believe could be a paradigm shift both within the composer community as well as a possible game changer in how we interface with the public at large.<\/p>\n \nThe opening citation herein, by Milton Babbitt from his now infamous 1958 essay (admittedly more infamous for its title, which he did not choose, than for its content which few people who decry it have actually read), came flashing into my mind as I was on a train headed from New York City to the District of Columbia and was attempting to read a book of short stories by William H. Gass. (I was reminded of Gass after reading his introduction to the most recent edition of Robert Coover\u2019s gargantuan McCarthy era parody, The Public Burning<\/em>. I was actually disappointed that my train journey prevented me from hearing Coover recite some of his prose at a concert of music by Daniel Felsenfeld, who has written extensively for these pages<\/a> and who had recently set some of Coover\u2019s words to music.) Anyway, I was shocked to discover in Gass\u2019s introduction to his own collection of stories a bleak assessment of the situation of contemporary writers in America that was exactly the same as Babbitt\u2019s view of the role of contemporary composers written a generation earlier. While many readers here might judge the views of both Babbitt and Gass as elitist and disdainful of the general public, I would contend, rather, that both were satisfied with what they perceived as being their role in society, for better or worse, and that nowadays, most composers\u2014at least the most vocal ones, myself included\u2014are not satisfied with such a marginalization of either our own efforts or the efforts of our colleagues. \nIn an essay I quoted from above, Bob Ostertag, a composer whom I would have clearly placed in the \u201coutside the commercial mainstream\u201d camp once upon a time, explained how he is now forced to charge people for his music just in order to make it available in places where people actually look for music and listen to what they find there. And Mary Sydnor, a 22-year-old contributor to Drexel University\u2019s online magazine and the author of my final citation, opined that the so-called classical music community is actually less elitist than many denizens of pop culture. All of which brings us back to that gathering of music creators in D.C.<\/p>\n Alfons Karabuda (standing on the left side of this photo), President of the European Composer and Songwriter Alliance (ECSA), opens up the meeting of music creators at the House of Sweden in Washington D.C.<\/p><\/div>\n Most of the North American attendees I encountered came from, for lack of a better term, the various worlds of \u201cpop\u201d songwriting (country, rock, etc.). But among the Europeans were Martin Q. Larsson, president of the Society of Swedish Composers<\/a>, a representative organization for composers of \u201ccontemporary classical composition,\u201d and Tomislav Saban, secretary general of the Croatian Composers Society<\/a> (HDS) which organizes the Music Biennale Zagreb. (I initially met Saban, who is also the vice president of the European Composer and Songwriter Alliance, a.k.a. ECSA, during the ISCM\u2019s 2011 World New Music Days<\/a> which was hosted by the Biennale.) Also present was Lesley Thulani Luthuli, the executive producer for the South African-based Wala Entertainment, who has recently formed the Pan African Composers and Songwriter Alliance<\/a> (PACSA), a group that will hopefully address the shocking inequities of royalty distribution to African musical creators that I learned about during the IAMIC Conference in Greece last year<\/a>.<\/p>\n \nA recurring theme during the talks in D.C. was the need to articulate to the general public the need for music to be disseminated on the basis of fair trade. Some of the people who spoke proposed that music creators should look to the fair trade coffee movement of the past decade as a model for how to proceed. Many coffee drinkers are willing to pay more money for their coffee if they believe that their money will reach the farmers who actually produced the coffee. The creators of the music are like those farmers in that, as Eddie Schwartz put it, \u201cWe create the one essential element in an enormous value chain. Creators need to determine fair compensation; it shouldn\u2019t be imposed on us from anyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n \nAnother pressing concern that several attendees spoke about is the need for performing rights organizations (PROs) to be based in the territories where they collect royalties. This is predominantly an issue for Europeans since there is growing momentum for PROs from various EU member states to compete with one another rather than to be the exclusive representative for creators within their own national borders. Opponents of this new business model claim that it will weaken PROs based in smaller countries and as a result will erode the culture of\u2014as well as ultimately hurt the economic livelihood of creators based in\u2014these smaller countries. According to Patrick Ager, secretary general of ECSA, \u201cExclusive assignment is a necessity of culture in Europe.\u201d Another major issue that was on a lot of people\u2019s minds was the negative impact of direct licensing, specifically the lack of transparency in the negotiation of such licenses. Perhaps no one put it more succinctly than Nashville-based songwriter Rick Carnes, the charismatic president of the Songwriters Guild of America: \u201cIf we can\u2019t be a part of the process, then we\u2019re not going to approve the process.\u201d Like a classic labor leader, Carnes pulls no punches. He asserted that \u201cwhatever happens to any creator happens to all of us.\u201d Seemingly taking a page from cognitive linguist George Lakoff (author of the provocative Don\u2019t Think of an Elephant<\/em>), Carnes asserted that the community of music creators needs to come up with its own language rather than argue positions using the frames that other constituencies\u2014whether its technology companies, record labels, publishers, or anyone else\u2014use for them. As he said, \u201cIt is important to have arguments based on your principles, not just Google\u2019s principles.\u201d<\/p>\n \nNone of the people I met in D.C. last week were content to create music in a society that doesn\u2019t value it, either aesthetically or economically. We should not be content either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most artistic endeavors in the 21st century have become completely blurry from both an aesthetic and an economic standpoint. I would argue that there never were only two \u201ckinds\u201d of music, but now the two larger umbrellas of \u201cart\u201d and \u201ccommerce\u201d hold no water at all. I would also argue that the wall that divided the \u201ctwo kinds of music\u201d from one another were equally harmful to both sides.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":522,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[622,618],"nmb_categories":[6],"how_to_category":[],"nmb_tags":[],"internal_taxonomy":[],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\n(written between May 26, 1976 and January 26, 1981) for his book, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories<\/em> (New Hampshire: Nonpareil, 1981), pp. xviii-xix.<\/p>\n
\n(posted<\/a> at On the Commons<\/em>, June 6, 2013)<\/p>\n
\n(posted<\/a> on Drexel University\u2019s online magazine, The Smart Set<\/em>, June 6, 2013)<\/p>\n![\"Washington](\"https:\/\/newmusicusa.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/DC.jpg\")
<\/a>
\nI\u2019ll go out on a limb here and state that part of what enabled both of them to feel content with their position in the greater society was the belief that there were two kinds of artistic creation\u2014work created for the sake of the art itself and work created for monetary success. In the beginning of the 21st century, there is no clear either\/or; everything has become completely blurry from both an aesthetic and an economic standpoint. I would argue that there never were only two \u201ckinds\u201d of music, but now those two larger buckets hold no water. I would also argue that the wall that divided the \u201ctwo kinds of music\u201d from one another was equally harmful to both sides and that there is no music, no matter how erudite the methods used to formulate it, that cannot be appreciated by a wider audience than it currently has. And aside from the ubiquity of music that is created without the slightest regard to the genre distinctions of earlier eras, the monetization of any kind of music making is still undergoing a massive transitional process. When I used the expression \u201coutside the commercial mainstream\u201d to describe the majority of the music we feature on NewMusicBox, Eddie Schwartz–author of the Pat Benatar\u2019s 1980 blockbuster single \u201cHit Me With Your Best Shot,\u201d president of the Songwriters Association of Canada<\/a> (SAC), and the prime mover behind a newly formed alliance called Music Creators North America<\/a> (MCNA)–asked me how much music I thought was commercially viable nowadays.<\/p>\n![\"DC](\"https:\/\/newmusicusa.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/DCMeeting.jpg\")
<\/a>