Thanks for explaining my shit, Alex! 😉

I think at a certain point, we’ve become so accustomed to being disliked, so accustomed to accepting the fact that it’s the audience’s fault that our music isn’t adored that we’ve stopped questioning why more people don’t love our music. Why is our audience so small? Why do we have to advertise to people that ‘yo my music is accessible’. It’s just weird.

We ignore or react with hostility reactions to our music that are not obviously reflective of the academy’s rationalizations of the historical progressivist model of our musical canon. And as long as we have this ‘protected space’ of ‘we write what we have to and it’s accepted that we won’t be liked because our audience doesn’t know better’ I think our musical culture dies.

We are not engaged with a living musical culture that responds with passion. We live in a cold, heartless careerist driven world that itself can barely get excited about new music. When was the last time we saw, here at S21 anybody say, ‘This record is the most unbelievably great record I’ve heard in ages.’ Where is the passion? The fanaticism? The undying adoration that music from living cultures engenders? It just ain’t there. This is highly unusual for an art community. The heat is generated more by formal discussions here than music itself!

When I used to participate in electronic music BBS’s and forums and a new record by a big name came out, say Squarepusher, the ongoing debates would be endless. ‘What’s happened to him?’ Is this the greatest SP record evah? Why did he do that track with an acoustic bass?’

It was endless and fascinating and indicative of passion. It would be ferocious. We see these same types of fanatical devotion in classical music forums, bluegrass forums, but in new music we have zilch. That is also weird.

In large part, I believe, this refusal to engage the listening public because only WE know what is right is contributing to the incredible stylistic stagnation we’re witnessing right now. Dudes writing the same shit over and over that their teacher did and now that their teacher’s teacher did. We have witnessed practically zero stylistic innovations since minimalism in large part, I believe because of our musical separatism.

Steve- I had no idea. Thanks for that!

Tom

I’m “just” a listener, and a relatively uneducated one at that, but I can’t resist commenting, for better or worse:

Re Alex Shapiro’s frustration about terminology: As an outsider this is frustrating to me as well. Even non-negative terms like “contemporary classical”, “new music”, and so on, are pretty much useless to me in terms of telling me anything about whether I’d be interested in hearing a particular work by a particular composer. Contrast this with (say) popular electronic music, where there’s endless inventiveness in coming up with new terms to identify new styles (see for example “Ishkur’s guide to electronic music” ), and where most such terms (e.g., “techno”, “trance”, “glitch”, etc.) are at least generally evocative of what the music sounds like.

Re the “accessible” question: “Accessible” is a relative term, not an absolute one, depending as it does on the background a listener is bringing to a work. I don’t want composers to try to appeal to some imagined lowest common denominator audience (whether Starbucks customers or whatever); they should write the music they want to write. However at the same time very little music is truly sui generis, and there’s no question that I and others can better appreciate music that has points of resemblance to things we’ve already learned to like. I’d therefore appreciate composers and critics pointing out affinities between new works and existing works, especially existing works that are “popular” (if only in the restricted sense of not being perceived to be part of “high culture”.) If you think that your instrumental works would appeal to fans of (say) Sigur Ros or Explosions in the Sky or that your art songs might be of interest to Bjork fans, don’t be afraid to say so.

A final comment in terms of “marketing”: As I was commenting on Kyle Gann’s blog a little while back, it’s nice that composers now have their own web pages and make MP3s available (and I appreciate “Steve’s click picks” and other attempts to highlight them), but at the same time people with limited time (like me) prefer to get music through a correspondingly limited set of channels (in my case, eMusic). So I think it’s important that composers still work to put out formal releases of their works in formats suitable for distribution through services like eMusic, the iTunes Store, etc. (eMusic in particular has a critical mass of subscribers with relatively esoteric tastes.)
Maybe someday applications like Songbird will make it dead easy to treat the “music web” as a unified virtual music store, but for now I at least find commercial digital music services much more convenient, and anything not available from such services is pretty much off my radar.

“Van Twee” wrote: They’ve released a number of discs along the lines of ‘Joni Mitchell presents music that’s inspired her.’ Taking the same approach to classical music should probably not be so offensive to classical lovers.

Now that would make a nice disc: a compilation of other people’s music that personally inspire(d)s Reich, or Adams, Glass, etc. etc… Hell, even one from John Williams might be interesting to me (& definitely more so than one of his own stuff!).

Let me put it another way: nobody loves anything because it’s accessible, pop or not. It’s like saying “I really like this book because it’s in English and the words aren’t too big.” Those qualities might be important to those who fear French and polysyllables, but wouldn’t inspire love.

Touting a work’s accesability is essentially negative. It says that there are classical works out there that are scary and forbidding. It affirms the potential listener’s fear of encountering these things. The accessible work in question has the virtue of being “not scary.” That’s not very descriptive of the piece, and bad for the rest of the musical community. Starbucks aside, Borchert is quite right in this.

Far better to describe the positive aspects of the work. I do like Steve Reich, but not because he’s accessible but because of his rhythms, the group interplay, the textural counterpoint and so on. Were I to market a Steve Reich concert, those sort of things are what I would emphasize, in much sexier terms. And with a healthy dose of “You don’t want to miss this!” instead of the “If you give it a chance, you might actually like it” message of the accessible.

Sorry that we me above.

As many folks have posted here before, it is just to frown at marketing that lauds a music’s “accessibility.” I’ve never heard a fan gush “I just love Beyonce, she’s so…accessible!!!”

All the same, while I agree with Borchert’s larger point, Starbucks is not the best starting point from which to make this criticism. What all the Starbucks artists have in common is that they make not-terribly-aggressive background music that is nice for gentle coffee drinking and paper reading, but the music might reward you with subtle pleasures if you choose to listen more closely. More simply put: Starbucks’s music brand is conservative, and it is valued for its conservatism. Disapointment that they don’t change their brand’s profile for the sake of new music seems a bit misplaced to me.

I guess the question is whether we write the “shit” we write in order to attract an audience, or (as I maintain) one can write “shit” that is honest and expresses something and over time, people catch on and like it. Reich once said (and I agree) that it is a very strange person who doesn’t want people to like his or her music. Let’s face it—we all want our stuff to be liked and to be performed. However, unless some attention is called to it, even the best “shit” will remain unheard. Just because you write great stuff doesn’t mean anyone is going to know about it without some sort of marketing. That doesn’t necessarily mean doing a serious PR campaign. Just distributing it on the Web for free, calling attention to it on MySpace or S21, etc. can do it. And if that’s not marketing, then I don’t know what is.

We all end up marketing our music in some way, shape or form. I do agree that music that is devoid of any expression is not likely to attract a large audience. But is that the metric we use to value a piece of music? My metric is simple: do I like it or not. I could care less if a ton of other people like it, or if it’s “popular.” Alvin Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire is something I’ve loved since the early 80’s, and yet has no melody, no rhythm and no large following. The music of Scelsi also, in many cases, has no beat, little if any melody, etc. Yet a growing number of people are captivated by his music, myself included. And so and and so forth.

If the masses don’t like the “shit” we write, then that’s life. If our music expresses what we want it to, then that’s all that matters, at least to me. I’d rather write music that I love to listen to but is unpopular than write crap that a lot of people like but that isn’t what I want to write. It’s not that any of us are taking a Babbitt-like approach; we do care if people listen. But we also have to be honest and write what grabs us. If there’s something there, then the audience will eventually come. Or not—but that’s not the primary thing of importance, at least to me. There will probably never be a large following for Scelsi, Young, Palestine, Partch and probably most new music composers. Even Glass and Reich have nothing on Coldplay or U2 in terms of audience size. And they have “beats” and “tunes,” so clearly having these features is no guarantee of attracting a large market of listeners.

I would agree that the music should “sell” itself. In a perfect world, it would. But the reality is that some degree of marketing, even just getting Web sites to link to one’s music page, is still necessary otherwise no one will know about it. Otherwise, why blog, reblog and do all the things many of us do to get the word out?