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…
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