Mind the Gap: February 2011 Archives

For years now, whenever my mother would lament my dismal church attendance record, I would point to my religious reading of Randy Cohen's The Ethicist column. Though there was no eternal salvation on offer, I always felt that its example was a weekly sermon that guided me towards moral honesty and perhaps kept me from impinging on the goodness of this world while I was on it.

So it was with some audible shock that I opened the Times site this morning to see Cohen's simply headlined "Goodbye" column: after 12 years, he is moving on to other projects.

I have an abiding love for all sorts of advice columns (a reading woman's Oprah?), but Cohen always inspired me to make a personal examination rather than gawk at the problems of others. I'll miss his insight when it comes to examining the small decisions that ultimately shape and define our lives.

And if you're wondering what any of this has to do with music and culture, I fully admit the link is tenuous. And yet, after consuming yet another week of arts coverage filled with musicians on strike and legislative threats to public funding, I think maybe a broader check-in regarding conduct and the public good as we plunge into the next debate is a stop worth making.

After a long weekend of travel, the number of "unread items" I had racked up in my blog reader was inducing panic attacks every time I checked in to put a dent in the ominously ever-growing pile. In the end, there were really just a few items that I saved for a full read--and the only reason I have for why slogging through hundreds of posts is preferable to simply hitting "mark all as read" when I get behind and starting clean.

In retrospect, however, I have to wonder: Did I really need to know any of this information? Wouldn't these topics be covered again if they were really important (a quick multi-site/source rehash of the same topic seems to be how things are distributed online)? Is online content like advertising, where you see a message at least seven times before it really registers anyway?

Whatever the answer, I can't seem to stop my greedy consumption. Like other bad habits of mine, this may be a behavior I need to work on altering somewhat in order to lead a more personally productive life. Meanwhile, if you're looking for lunchtime reading material, here's a quick sampling of what I learned:

The art of management
Business has much to learn from the arts.

Apple To Improve Download Sound Quality, Will You Notice the Difference?

Fear and Gaming: Being and Nothingness and "Minecraft"
Minecraft, an ugly game with no point and endless possibility.

Jeff Chang talks about the future of culture and technology
Non-profit arts sector has begun to rethink culture in a broad way.

And just for kicks:

Violin-Playing Robot Is Just Showing Off

Last fall I was captivated by the Google Chrome/HTML5 personalized movie making that was The Arcade Fire's video for their track "The Wilderness Downtown". Using a childhood street address and footage pulled from Google maps, the project draws on images from the viewer's own history and, if you're sensitive to such visual cues, taps in to a very intense personal nostalgia that suits the song perfectly. It was still in the experimental stage, but I was excited to see what new things in music videos would come next.

Today I was equally impressed as I wandered about inside this video for Craig Wedren's "Are We." [link via Mashable] I'm not sure if it was just the literal 360 of the presentation or something below the surface, but I found this to be a completely immersive experience. It was as if I had actually left my desk for a few minutes, blinked and found myself on a strange beach. Creepy. You can visit for yourself here.

Though other interactive video releases are out there, I haven't felt personally engaged by controlling a bird or a line on the screen (even when that line was quite lovely), coloring in the band, or choosing what kind of adventure the lead singer will have.

Messing with the mix can be amusing, but messing with the fourth wall in ways that deeply compliment the music? That's an undeniably deep hook.

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This creative little clip, posted by the Royal Opera House in support of the premiere run of Mark-Anthony Turnage's opera Anna Nicole, plays up exactly the kind of trashy, can't-look-away vibe you expect from the subject matter, but also boasts much higher production values than I would have assumed I'd see in a piece of online opera marketing. Yet the real shocker to me is the bait and switch game being played (intentionally or not) on viewers. The fine print on YouTube notes: "Watch the trailer for the world premiere of Anna Nicole, highlighting some key moments in her provocative life. Please note the music in the trailer is not the music from the opera." (emphasis mine)

Now, you could argue that the video is just trying to get a vibe going to generate a little box office excitement, and I would happily concede the point if samples of the actual music where also readily available for ticket-buyer preview. If they are anywhere to be found on the internet, however, I haven't found them.

Why do this? Am I being too cranky? I really like the video, but I'm stuck on this point. Does it work for you? My mind thinks it already knows what this show is going to sound like, and I know for a fact that it is wrong. Without any of the actual music to engage with pre-show, to me this is setting up a user experience akin to fast food joints that advertise a juicy hamburger on a fluffy bun when those with experience know perfectly well that's not what you're going to find when you hit the drive-thru and open up the wrapper on yours. If you go in honestly expecting food as advertised, however, you're destined for disappointment. And would you ever order from such a restaurant again if what you actually ended up with was a completely unanticipated fish sandwich?

Now, if you'll excuse me, watching that video so many times got the music they did use (Age of Consent's Heartbreak) stuck in my head and I need to go download it.

If I had any extra hours in the day, one of the things I've long fantasized about doing with them--and this is going to give you a frightening window into just how exciting a life I lead--is to host a Delilah-esque overnight show on Counterstream Radio. I could send out dedications to your sweetheart, empathize about orchestration issues, and we could have a good collective cry if a call for scores didn't result in a commission.

To date, this idea remains in the "to be pursued once independently wealthy" file, but elsewhere on the internet, the new music/talk radio combo is being explored full force. SoundNotion, a weekly audio/video podcast out of East Lansing, Michigan, gathers a few guys around the mic to chat about current events impacting the field. They are five episodes in so far, and you can track what they're up to here.

Two of my loves in one go! A new piece of vocal chamber music about a crunchy snack food. Music by Brian Friedland. Libretto by "whoever wrote the description on the bag of Pirate's Booty, circa 2009."

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Though I don't have a personal Milton Babbitt anecdote to relate to you (sadly, I never had the pleasure), I do have a favorite Babbitt quote. It's from our NewMusicBox interview with the composer, during which he turned the Q&A tables to ask Frank J. Oteri to explain sampling to him.

"I don't even know what hip hop is, to be honest with you. Do you understand hip-hop?" he inquired, seeming genuinely perplexed and curious. "What is all this scratching of records?"

For those of you out there similarly confused, Aaron LaCrate offers a quick primer on the language of sampling using two turntables for NPR's Science Friday, which appears alongside a discussion of the current ethical issues related to this method of creating new music geared to the newbie. Take the Sampling 101 crash course here.

They're still kicking around the "what benefits a new music review most" topic over on NewMusicBox, a subject that really deserves a constructive discussion and is to everyone's benefit if it ultimately results in better reviews being written and published. I'll admit here that the topic also makes me a bit nervous, however, because it reminds my of my own anxieties when it comes to balancing the needs of the insider and the general audience, the creator and the consumer, as well as the professional talents of the artist being critiqued vs. the writer doing the critiquing (alongside those of editors of all stripes). I've never been a composer, but I've been a performer and understand intimately the many hours that go into preparing a performance. I only spend a fraction of that time drafting my response, and I feel the weight of that responsibility every time I start typing.

Much of the Box discussion has spun off around one issue: the impact of space constraints. Online the number of acceptable characters is a question of attention span, but in print she is an even crueler mistress. For never was a story of more woe, it sometimes irrationally seems to me, than when I'm sitting at my laptop, watching that word count tick up and the hours tick by, and editing my own work back around to the point that I'm shouting to no one in particular besides the cat, "But what do I even really mean by that anymore?!?"

My most memorable moment of jumping such hurdles (funny after the fact, but not at the time) actually came in a review I did for the Washington Post. I was handling two new discs: one from Meredith Monk and one of work by Morton Feldman, together, in what was probably supposed to be 250-word item, but the review I brazenly turned in had 288. It took me all day--literally. I found it so difficult to work out how to fit the puzzle pieces together that I questioned if I should even be a music writer anymore. By nightfall, I cut my loses and hit send. If I had contributed no great insight, I felt I had also done no harm.

Now, if we follow this particular story to the end, my editor wrote back thanking me for my new music haiku, but pointed out that it seemed there had been a miscommunication and that each disc could have been written about individually. The additional available space suddenly felt luxurious. But really, in light of attention-grabbing experiments like Chris Weingarten's 1000 Times Yes project, during which he tweeted 140 character record reviews (you can catch the "best of" and all the rest around here), I wonder if more words are really the issue. Maybe at this point in music journalism's evolution, the issue worth focusing on concerns what your community of readers need and want from however many words you give them. Reflecting on the parameters of meeting that challenge, internally and with the community, is surely a discussion worth having regularly.