Simon Hewitt Jones

Next Release - March 2010...

London Violin Studio

Tomorrow is one of the first public versions of the Violin Workshop that we've been crafting for a while. I think it's a really really good program that we've put together, and I can't wait to see how it works. We (Drew and I) are at the wonderful 1901 Club again and look forward to seeing how it works out!

There's still 1 remaining place, so if anyone has a sudden last minute desire to come and play the violin for the first time tomorrow morning, now is the time to say!

http://www.londonviolinstudio.com/violin-workshops.html

Impact

I detest not blogging, and I detest unplanned silences. I was hoping to podcast monthly and blog daily by now.

"Events, dear boy, events."

Ultimately, I'm an agent of change, and I must focus on creating the most impact. Right now, that's elsewhere. It will return here, but it may be another month or two. Or maybe longer. Who knows? I don't. Sorry. It will be worth it!

Growing Music Audiences in Palestine

One of the most gratifying things to see on a repeat visit is a larger audience, and the town of Zababdeh did us proud.

Last year's concert had been overflowing anyway, so a move to a bigger church was in order... and it was still packed! Probably 300 or 400 people came to hear our first concert (helped I'm sure by the Christmas fayre taking place afterwards!).

But it's all an important part of helping the musical culture redevelop back to where it was pre-1948, and this was a really positive sign.

No Longer A Foreign Place

Do you regularly visit a place far away from home?

After about the fifth or sixth time, something really strange happens: The 'foreign' place suddenly seems like a second home.

It's as if there's a threshold of time after which point the volume of memories you have invested in a place gives it a tangible sense of no longer being foreign. Your identity meshes with the location. It feels like a home.

There's another phenomenon too: when you're working regularly with the same team of people but you don't see them (and they don't see each other) for long periods of time, it's like you never went away. We will pick up on things as if we had barely been away for a day or two. I've seen this happen several times and it's not a coincidence.

Blogging from Palestine

I'm in Palestine again, for the annual Baroque Festival of Al Kamandjati, the music center in Ramallah with which I am associated.

Last year I didn't blog, but though I can't post daily, I'll try and write a couple of stories to give you a bit of insight into the reality here on the ground in the West Bank.

The territories are actually full of fantastically warm and generous communities, and it's really not at all the foreign and scary place that Western news media would often have you think.

Distorted Reality

You can distort reality to a certain degree, but once it becomes so distorted that it no longer relates to reality even though it still looks like reality, then it is only a matter of time before everything implodes. 

(Unless you want to argue that it is still reality, but that reality has become a simulacrum!)

This is true of every economic bubble of the last 200 years, but it's not purely an economic function. Spin and politics replacing actual government, credit derivative swaps, manufactured pop music, tabloid media nonsense, a replacement of sophisticated artforms with tacky superficial replacements... the same principle can be found anywhere.

The silver lining is that after a burst bubble, the realization that follows can sometimes create a renaissance in sustainable values.

But the problem is that there are also people who will continue to peddle that same distortion even when things have imploded. After all, there's one born every minute...

Lloyd Blankfein and Simon Cowell have more in common than you'd think...

How The Internet Changed And Will Change Music

Phase 1: The disruptive force of digital technology, especially the internet (and in particular Social Media), transformed the way we created, consumed and interacted with music.

Phase 2: That change in how we interact with music is completely changing the nature of the music itself.

We just finished phase 1.

alt-Classical, or 'Alternative Classical'

The term 'alternative Classical' - or 'alt-Classical' for short - was coined by critic Greg Sandow back in 2003, but like any good meme, it's taken a while to reach wide acceptance.

But there's definitely a movement afoot to adopt 'alt-Classical' as a recognized genre, and I think that's a great thing. Read Anne Midgette in the Washington Post (Sandow's partner) for a start. Jessica Duchen continues the conversation here.

I think it is wrong to think of alt-Classical as purely a new name for Contemporary Classical music - it's much broader than that. It's more of a reflection of a whole new dynamic for presenting music that's rooted in or derived from a Classical tradition, and can refer to the presentation, the context of delivery, the actual music or composers themselves, or contemporary performance practice... or indeed any one or any combination of those things.

By extension, I think it's also wrong to depict alt-Classical or post-Classical as a kind of 'secondary sub genre' to the traditional Western Classical Canon. To the contrary, it is gradually going to become the primary 'contemporary art music' of our time. Arguably, any composer writing today in a style that's more advanced than Classical- or Romantic-period pastiche could be described as 'alt-Classical' or 'post-Classical'. For those who feel the compelling need to assign genres, calling a composer 'alt-Classical' shouldn't be a problem, regardless of whether they're atonal maniacs or diatonic mavens!

**

The broader existing problem is that the system we had in the late 20th Century allowed mainstream Classical to dominate to such an extent, that the 'fringe' of the Classical genre - which included avant garde and contemporary groups, but also smaller organizations and individual artists who pushed the boundaries of how 'Classical' was defined and presented - found it hard to gain the oxygen of publicity that their ideas needed for wide acceptance.

With the internet came the grassroots movement that so perfectly fitted and enabled genres like alt-Classical to reach the hard core fans that they needed. And so, there's a very healthy scene of alt-Classical today, ranging from Le Poisson Rouge and Classical Revolution in the USA, to This Isn't For You, NonClassical, and the OAE's Night Shift in the UK. They thrive through local networks, and digital networks such as MySpace and Facebook too (hence why I've invested all this time into MusBook; I seriously believe a social media network dedicated to Classical/Jazz/Contemporary music will make it even easier for fringe/alt-Classical musicians and fanbases to connect effectively).

Once again, we should relate these changes to what's going on outside of music, in order to gain a better understanding of where our contemporary performance practices are going. This inversion of hierarchy is exactly what enabled Barack Obama to come to power so dramatically, causes rebellions in Iran, and allows for the shockingly quick growth of new web 2.0 services.

Technology is leading musical evolution like never before, and we must pay attention to what's going on outside musical artforms in order to understand how music might develop next.

News: Musbook and musicDNA announce Joint Co-operation Arrangements

Download press release - click here

Musbook and musicDNA announce Joint Co-operation Arrangements

Brussels, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne - 2 December 2009

Musbook.com and musicDNA™ are very pleased to announce a collaboration that will lead to the integration of their services and technologies to provide a new eco-system for musicians and music lovers.

Peter Tregear, CEO of Musbook.com said “This collaboration helps us become not just an effective on-line social network for musicians but also a powerful conceptual, educational, and commercial tool. MusBook.com has always been about using the unique power of the web to transform, for the better, the way the music world works. musicDNA offers our site a strikingly original and immensely powerful means towards achieving that end”.

Managing Director of Pensive, Peter Brown said “This is an exciting venture for us and confirms our vision of helping people find their way clearly in increasingly busy digital lives. There is an excellent match in the use of our core technologies in this collaboration, with its emphasis on social objects that are managed under user control and networked through such an important online community”.

Antony Pitts of CTU said “musicDNA is about describing the musical universe in such a way that both people and computers can connect up the information we have - our knowledge about music - with actual musical resources: recordings, sheet music, comment and recommendation - from Joe Bloggs’s blog to the most erudite of scholarly articles. Integrating our model with MusBook’s social networking portal is an important step in making this joined-up vision a reality for music-lovers and musical organizations around the globe”.

The mission of all parties is to empower and enrich the world’s community of musicians by enabling not just professional relationships, but also relationships between musicians and music lovers, to develop in ways that have previously never been possible. They will support these new connections with a comprehensive range of services, tools, and information that will help musicians drive forward the development of musical culture like never before.

The combination of the respective contributions by each of the parties will go a long way to achieving this mission. During this period of collaboration they will integrate the existing Musbook.com web portal with the musicDNA service provided by Pensive / CTU - with its dynamic navigation architecture for mapping the musical domain, using models and processes for managing related musical concepts (such as musical works, performances, recordings, artists, venues, etc.). This integration will open up the possibility of creating a new social community for people around the world to share their musical interests, experiences and knowledge.

-- see press release (download above) for contacts --

Company History

Musbook.com was founded in 2008 by Australian conductor and academic Peter Tregear and English violinist Simon Hewitt Jones. From offices in Melbourne, London and New York they are creating a new infrastructure for people to discover, create, promote and share music. The MusBook.com website (http://www.musbook.com/) is a web portal, social network and digital publishing website that hosts a global community of musicians and music lovers.

Pensive S.A. (Belgium) provides a range of information management services that offer “GPS for your information” – either figuratively (in the sense of helping users find their way through difficult or unknown “information territory”) or literally - in the case of musicGPS™. Pensive’s unique approach to treating items of information as distinct “social objects” and valued assets, allows users to organize, identify, discover, navigate, annotate and share information more easily and - in contrast to most so-called “Web 2.0” services - always under the user’s control.

CTU is a research and design team whose members have collaborated at the BBC, at Unknown Public, and at the Royal Academy of Music in London. The musicDNA project stems from a long-standing research interest in the nature of musical, historical, and aesthetic time, and is about understanding and mapping the essential structure of musical events and resources in order to visualize and navigate this rich semantic space.

For further information:

about Musbook.com, see www.musbook.com

about musicDNA™, see www.musicDNA.info

about Pensive, see www.pensive.eu

Sixth Sense for Music

This video is mindblowing:

And here's a slicker demo of the same thing.

The recent release of this video has sparked lots of conversations about what types of changes this kind of technology will bring to our lives. Today I want you to consider what this could mean for music.

We're talking about a wholesale integration of the world of digital data into our offline world. This is as big as the concept of the semantic web (artificial intelligence - computers understanding what we want). Combine the two, and we are living in an altogether different reality.

This is a mindboggling step forward from the basic introduction of the internet in its '1.0' and '2.0' forms.

We are talking about a world where we no longer see a difference between online and offline, and where intelligent machines will be smoothly integrated into our day to day lives.

This is not science fiction: this is a reality that will be with us within the next two decades.

There's a beautiful sentence at the end of the video (10:50, to be precise), where Mistry says: "integrating information into our everyday objects will not only help us to get rid of the digital divide, the gap between these two worlds, but it will also help us in some way to stay human; to be more connected to our physical world."

This is absolutely fascinating: one of the most potent fears surrounding the move to intelligent machines is the idea that 'machines might take over'. But prophets such as Mistry are working to an entirely different tune: their belief is not that our current 'offline' world will be increasingly displaced by a world run by digital machines, but that it will in fact be extended and empowered by digital innovations. The potential of what we can already achieve in our everyday life will be massively increased.

Looking at it from that angle gives a much more humanized vision of developments that are already underway. If technological developments amplify human achievements, then positive human values will be extended in a transformational manner.

Equally, the inverse could be true: a 21st Century Hitler or a Stalin in control of a vast digital infrastructure could wreak infinitely more havoc than their 20th Century counterparts!

That's why it's essential to keep good human values at the heart of new developments - and therefore why it's so important that the arts are open and proactive in embracing technical innovations. We need to keep expressive, emotionally engaging art weaved intricately into the heart of a digital future, because if we don't keep the arts up to date, they will be sidelined. And that wouldn't provide for a balanced society.

Contemporary art is important because it reflects the context of the society in which it is created. And to maintain that relevance as we move into a world that is a digital fusion of on- and off-line, we need to make sure that music innovates as strongly as the world of technology.

There are implications here both for how music is presented and consumed, but inevitably also for how music itself develops.

How could we expect our interactions with music - and music itself - to change when this kind of technology becomes commonplace?