simon

Central America.

An old friend and very good person, Simon Helwig-Larson, has sprung up a weblog. Apart from his recent engagement, the good news is we now have a very direct and knowing look into the news of Guatemala. Take a look, here.

music part 2

More on the norms of music

It might be that we can imagine a song like a joke, or a story. (One must indulge me...in the efforts of imagining new norms, I'll need more wiggle room than a worm in heat.) And a, say, improvised music performance like a, say, improv company.

Put out of mind copyright issues for a moment. A joke is often funny or not funny as a result of the teller, not the substance. Mitch Hedberg is funny; me relaying one of his one liners is not. In the same vein, no one but Garrison Keillor can tell a Lake Woebegone story. Amongst other things, the artistic sensibility difference is timing. We seem to watch a funny stand up for the funny stand up much more than an account of the jokes told.

Of course this is not a complete picture. Comics sell books...just as there is something we value in good lyrics/chords. I think, though, in the end we value the delivery more than the sheet music. A song is in the delivery. Sheet music is like the information on a DVD, or the holes in player piano reels--instructions for performance.

Jon raises (below) the difference between covering a song and recording a cd track. It seems to me the difference is key here, in that one is a new performance and the latter is a copy of a recorded performance.

The Future of Music authors want a paradigm shift ot music a service, as opposed to product. I'm not sure that I fully allign- but this is from their third chapter:

Let's zoom back to 1887, when Emil Berliner invented the gramophone. Back then, the big deal was that the gramophone allowed people to listen to music without having to actually be at the performance. It forever changed the concept of music from a dynamic and interactive entertainment experience to a fixed product. Music became nearly synonymous with the medium that delivered it, beginning with wax cylinder, then vinyl disk, followed by cassette tape, and eventually, compact disc. In essence, music moved from being a performance and a service to being a product.

Because of this shift, we have become accustomed to the perfection and repeatable quality of today's music. Prior to the nineteenth century, music wasn't played exactly the same way more than once, since it was impossible to reproduce the exact circumstances of a performance. The instruments and orchestration would change, as would the performers and their moods, audiences, and performance environments. Songs were performed as well as they could be in that moment, and composers worked hard to create a continuous flow of fresh music for fairs, operas, concerts, trade shows, theaters, and so forth. The composers of the time also liberally borrowed material from one another, often adapting, updating, and improving the songs for the players and performances at hand.

Before musicians were placed in front of enormous gramophone recording funnels and asked to cut down their performance to an acceptable and packageable length, music was essentially an ephemeral art; if you weren't there you didn't hear it. These very same musicians were performing in hotels, bars, concert halls, churches, private homes, and on the street. Some were held in very high esteem, and a rare few were wealthy-if they were really good and if their message came across. The economics for musicians were not all that different from what they are today. Then as now, those who had something special and attracted an audience became successful.

After more than a century of music being pitched and sold primarily as static products, with musicians getting paid to perform on such products, in a way we are returning to those early days, and music can once again become more about the experience than the product. Of course some styles of music have never ceased to be a service, such as in niche markets, including classical music, world music, and jazz. Yet most financially successful musicians have become purveyors of products and hope to make a significant part of their living by "selling plastic."