Stolen Music

A long time ago I had a student come for a couple of lessons on guitar. He didn't last very long as a student, but one thing about the encounter has stuck with me. He had a big three ring binder with him containing hundreds of pages of music. Every single page was photocopied from an original or another copy. He had never actually purchased a piece of music in his life! This is not so unusual of course. When I was studying in Spain there were copies of many pieces of music floating around in second, third, even seventh-generation photocopy. But they were photocopies of hand-written scores with fingerings. That's why we were copying them. You couldn't buy these versions.

But the photocopy machine spelled the permanent decline of the music publishing industry. When it is easy to simply photocopy a three or four page piece for pennies a page, who would pay several dollars for the score? The answer is, just about no-one. So, publishers publish fewer scores, especially of obscure pieces. That was decades ago. Now, you can download a surprising number of scores from the internet and just print them out.

But the phenomenon has spread to the general consumption of music. Fewer and fewer people pay for music. Or, at least, they pay nothing to the artists who create the music. Here is a recent article in Salon that summarizes the situation pretty well. It turns out that people are paying to hear music--just not to the musicians! They are paying Verizon, ATT and others for internet access; they are paying Google and Apple for software and hardware--they are paying thousands of dollars for music! But the artists are getting nothing. Well, of course, this is over-simplifying. I'm sure Rihanna and Lady Gaga have a few bucks coming in. But the numbers say that recorded music revenue is down 66% since 1999 which means that a whole lot of musicians--probably the most interesting ones--are not making any money.

It's all about the gatekeepers. The lords who could command entry to the bridge, or access to the mill, could absorb revenue from everyone who needed those things. The record companies, as long as they were the only ones that could manufacture vinyl records, could absorb revenue from everyone who wanted to purchase music. Now the gatekeepers are the computer companies, the internet service providers and the search software people--without them, you can't gain access to the music.

My attitude might seem strange, but I think that access to music actually involves something that is not a commodity, digital or otherwise. The 'music' is available to anyone who can perceive and absorb it. The guy with a $5 harmonica who can really play it has the 'music'. The guy downloading thousands of songs to his iPod who only hears them in the background, does not have the 'music'.

I have no idea where this is going, but the article is worth reading for some clues. One thing is certain, the consumption of music is going through some huge changes. Not just economic ones as the article is talking about, but also psychological and aesthetic ones. What kind of world is it where everyone has a permanent musical soundtrack to their lives that they never listen to and probably don't even know how to listen to?

I would rather understand a few pieces of music than have 'available' thousands upon thousands. For me it is the understanding that is important, not the possession. But I'm the wacky fringe! It is what the consumers decide that drives the marketplace. As a consumer, if I like a piece of music and want to own it, I really don't feel right just downloading it. I would much rather buy it and hope some money goes to the musicians. I'm the same with DVDs. I don't buy pirated copies. Just a personal decision. You start to look at this a lot differently when you have released a recording and someone comes up to you one day and says, "oh, I made a copy of your record for my friend who wanted to hear it. You don't mind, do you?"

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Music, Subsidy and Commercialism

I've posted before about commercialism in music and how I'm tempted to call myself a "non-commercial" musician. As we all know, commercialism is bad. Bad, bad, bad. But nothing is ever that simple! If you dig into the history, most of our present day musical institutions, such as conservatories, symphony orchestras and subscription concert series, not to mention the specially-designed concert halls where artists perform--these institutions that we see as being above the commercial fray, were all the product of audience demand, i.e. commercialism. The huge growth of a prosperous middle class in the 19th century and their appetite for music that manifested itself in sales of pianos and sheet music and attendance at concerts was the driving force behind the creation of professional symphony orchestras. At first, the development of recording technology also was a great spur to recording all the classical repertoire on long-playing discs for sale world-wide. A great number of classical musicians had spectacular earnings from recordings.

But as the 20th century progressed and popular music took over the lion's share of revenues from recordings (classical music probably represents around 3% of sales nowadays), lovers of classical music more and more recoiled against commercialism and called for government and private subsidies for classical music. How's that working out? Alex Ross has a post up praising Alec Baldwin for his work supporting the New York Philharmonic. He quotes Mr. Baldwin as saying government support of the arts should foster "freedom from the commercial considerations that so often compromise and eventually suffocate real art." But commercial considerations didn't seem to compromise and suffocate "real" art in the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Why now? One extreme way of putting it would be to say that the cult of romanticism, with its emphasis on the individual vision as being the only authentic truth in art, metamorphosed into the 20th century modernist ideology that the individual artist's evolutionary progression to greater and greater technical complexity means that the interests and likes of the audience are no longer of any importance. Therefore, if society wants 'real' art, it has to pay for it by subsidizing the avant-garde, even if no-one wants to listen to it.


That is put a little baldly, but it is not far from the truth. But now that seems to have faded. Just what is it that government and private donors are subsidizing at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting these days? With a hat tip to Alex Ross for the link, here is what is on the menu:

PBS OFFERS MUSIC AND DANCE LOVERS
EXCITING NEW PERFORMANCE SPECIALS
THROUGHOUT MARCH AND APRIL

Featuring THE OSMONDS 50TH ANNIVERSARY REUNION,
THE CLASH LIVE: REVOLUTION ROCK, PETER AND THE WOLF, JAMES TAYLOR,
MARTINA McBRIDE, SARAH BRIGHTMAN, ANDRE RIEU, JAMES LAST,
DANIEL O’DONNELL, HOLLYWOOD SINGING AND DANCING, THE HIGH KINGS,
MY MUSIC: MY GENERATION – THE 60S, SHANGRI-LA and More

James Last, for pete's sake? Something seems to have gone horribly wrong somewhere!

I suppose PBS has decided that this is what their demographic wants to hear. To put it baldly again, the recipients of public money for the arts seem to ultimately end up being those who know how to play the game. The professional grant-appliers, the experts at seeming, the fakers, the coldly ambitious. The public rarely seems to get their money's worth. The programming shown above features the popular music of one or two generations ago, which is still loved by the aging boomers. Why does this need to be subsidized?

The logical conclusion is that aesthetic worth and commercial worth are not on a see-saw and neither imply nor exclude one another. Neither giving money, nor withholding it will guarantee anything. Beethoven's music has been a commercial success for two hundred years, but that does not mean it is bad music. The music of the total serialists of the 1940s to 1960s has never been a commercial success, but that does not mean it is good music.

Here is a little example. Beethoven's last string quartet in F major, op 135 is justly admired as a musically great work. But the last movement is famous for its joke about a sometime patron named Ignaz Dembscher who failed to pay his dues for the premiere of the quartet op 130. When Dembscher wished to borrow the parts for that piece, Beethoven refused unless he paid up. Dembscher wailed “do I have to?” (“Muss es sein?!”). Beethoven responded by writing a canon on the phrase “yes, you must!” (“Es muss sein!”) and sending it to Dembscher. A falling and rising three note phrase standing for Dembscher's question is used as the theme for the slow introduction to the last movement of op 135. The quick section of the movement starts with the answer: "yes, you must!" That second theme, rising then falling, appears at the 1:18 mark in this performance:

For Beethoven, there was no contradiction between making money and making music. Commercialism need not affect the quality of his compositions. If it does affect the music of other musicians to the point that it seems they are merely pandering to the audience, then that would seem to be a problem with the musicians and not with commercialism as such.

I'm just waiting for Elliot Carter to send me a canon on the theme "stop writing about my music!"

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Introduction to the 19th Century

I'm avoiding calling the 19th century the age of Romanticism because it is so misleading. The term 'romantic' is a complex one that can refer to an immense span of things: everything from a particular kind of dinner to a variety of philosophical idealism, to a kind of musical harmony and orchestration, to various literary genres and so on. Romanticism in music is a term that has seen considerable re-evaluation. Richard Taruskin's monumental history of Western music avoids it as a title of a volume, using instead the neutral "Music in the Nineteenth Century". One reason is that there were a host of different currents in the 19th century including romanticism, realism, verismo, nationalism and on and on. The century saw the growth of an immense group of middle-class consumers of music that attended concerts, bought pianos and other instruments, purchased sheet music and in so doing caused the development of many of the musical institutions that still exist today. These include the development of the discipline of musicology, subscription concert series, large concert halls, concert tours, arts management, and professional orchestras in every city. The practice of classical music also spread into territories it had scarcely touched previously such as Russia, the United States, Canada and many other countries that had been on the periphery.

One of the most important and long-lasting consequences of the events of the 19th century was the very creation of that particular body of music we now call "classical" music. The 19th century was when what we now see as the 'standard repertoire' was assembled and, ironically, one of the causes was commercialism. Without the growth of a newly prosperous urban population the great concert halls and professional orchestral concert series would not have been built and developed. This may be hard to believe, but at the beginning of the 19th century there were only two public concert halls in Europe (as opposed to opera houses, which have a longer history): the Hanover Square Rooms in London and the Gewandhaus in Leipzig. Vienna, the residence of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and later, Brahms, did not have a hall for orchestral concerts until the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde built one in 1831, after the death of Beethoven and Schubert! This was followed by the construction of concert halls in most European cities offering subscription concert series.

Thus, odd though it might seem, the 'standard repertoire' of orchestral works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven augmented by those of Bach, Schubert and others, was a response to demand from a public hungry for music. It was not the creation of a government bureaucracy or a group of elite taste-makers. Though let me hasten to add that the elite taste-makers, in the form of newspaper critics, conservatory professors and professional musicians and composers, were a guiding element in the formation of the repertoire. But they too were responding to a public hungry for music.

Here is another surprising fact: around 1800, approximately 80% of the music performed in Vienna, Leipzig, Paris and London, was by living composers. By the later part of the century, around 1870, 80% of the music performed was by dead composers! The standard repertoire had truly been formed and the concert hall become a kind of museum. Imagine the consequences for living composers! In order to guarantee the quality of music presented to the public, the promoters demanded music that had stood the test of time, that was 'finished', that was not experimental. And this is the world that we still live in today!

My thanks to Richard Taruskin for assembling and making so much sense of the reams of data we have from the 19th century. And now a piece from this standard orchestral repertoire to whet your appetite for the next post on 19th century music. Franz Schubert, Symphony No. 8 in B minor, the "Unfinished":

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Commercial vs Non-Commercial Music

A lot of my blog posts try to look at things from a slightly different angle than we are used to and this is another of that kind. I have to do a bit of biography as an introduction. My mother was a fiddler playing what we, in Canada, call "Old-Time" music. It isn't country music as known in the US, but the descendant  of Celtic music. Jig and reels are frequent, along with a mix of other things like two-steps, waltzes and so on. It is primarily dance music, but with a long vintage. It is also primarily fiddle music. My mother played from an early age and played dances her whole life. She was born in a small town in northern Canada where there were, quite literally, no professional musicians of any kind. For nearly all her life she played for dances every weekend and only in her later years was she ever paid for it. She was a good fiddler, more than once provincial champion.

So this was the environment I grew up in. Lots of music, but no commercial musicians (by the simple definition, did they get paid or not). I didn't meet a full-time professional musician until I was a music student in university. In my mind, for me, music was always a vocation, not a profession. Which probably explains my mixed success as a music professional! For a possibly amusing post on this, have a look at this one. The intersection of music and business was one that I usually found troubling. Sometimes these days I am tempted to call myself a 'non-commercial' musician since I only play benefit concerts and compose music without prior commission.

For most of music history, most composers seemed to have no problem combining the two. Bach could write music for the glory of God, but at the same time pester the Town Council for more money. Beethoven could write "from the heart, may it go to the heart" on the score of his Missa Solemnis and at the same time somewhat duplicitously sell the same piece to two different patrons. But I seem to be allergic to commercialism in music. I see a concert by a young trio from Julliard, how they dress, how they chat with the audience and what sort of music they choose to play and I think how little I am enjoying this and how distressing it is that this is what you have to do to be successful in a music career now. I look at publicity photos of very fine musicians and think how desperate they look for our attention. I think how the expressive, aesthetic nature of the music is a distant second to whatever career ambitions the artist harbors.

I think how I prefer an artist who has not got his or her eyes on the main chance, but on the unfolding of the music. But maybe this is just me. Does anyone else have any of these hangups?

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It Used to Be a Joke

I'm going to do something terrible: explain why a joke is funny which will mean we can't laugh at it any more. Here's the joke: Rachmaninoff was on tour, giving solo recitals and one night his manager noticed that while playing he was constantly looking out to the hall, swiveling his eyes from row to row. After the concert the manager asked why he was doing that. Rachmaninoff replied, "I was counting the house, I think the impresario is cheating us"! Not terribly funny, but the reason why it is a joke is interesting. The humor depends on there being a dissonance between musical performance and box office receipts. This joke probably used to be funnier than it is now, because for us, the dissonance is becoming muted. In earlier times, a music performance had an almost sacred dimension to it. In some way, music was a transcendental experience that lifted us out of the mundane world. It was inconceivable that the audience, let alone the artist, be thinking of ticket prices while deep within the experience of music. But now, with music videos stuffed with virtual advertisements for luxury cars, high fashion and expensive jewelry, the transcendental dimension of music is pretty much crushed.

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