Molly Sheridan

I’ve never been one to crack a beer and settle into the sofa for an afternoon of sports on T.V., but I’ve been doing some late-night Olympic viewing. Turns out a colleague of mine at NewMusicBox has been doing a little spectating himself, and he has drawn an interesting parallel between the audience for new music and the audience for the 50 km speed walk. By the end of his post, his basic question is this: Why does the new music community remain so fixated on how to attract a bigger/broader audience? In their off hours, are the speed walkers strategizing how to attract an NFL-sized (or at least Michael Phelps-sized) crowd next season? Randy suspects not; I would tend to agree. I wonder if that’s true, or if we’re just too far removed from the field. Anyone here involved in an obscure sporting activity with a violently active audience-development branch?

It actually brings me around to another audience-building move that has a lot of currency: attaching the music to some other genre. Classical, indie rock, jazz. Sometimes the relationship is true (and therefore also often successful) but in other cases the association feels like an ill-considered move to grab hold of a life raft filled with someone else’s artistic personality and attendant fan base.

True, the music under this poorly-named “new music” umbrella has splintered into quite a few strains in the course of things, and it’s time to celebrate that fully–for each to find their own name, their own place. But there’s no point in breaking up with new music and then crashing someone else’s party. It may be comforting to hang with folks who are already popular. It probably feels great to play for a larger-than-expected fan base. But it’s also awful easy to get lost in a strange land and get drowned out in the crowd.

There was an anecdote I heard once, I think it was at the Lincoln Center Festival’s Merce Cunningham retrospective six years ago, that put Merce and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg all together in a vehicle crisscrossing the nation. John Cage was driving. This was back in the early days of their careers, when few people were paying attention and even fewer were actually paying serious cash to see their work. Anyway, ever since then I’ve wondered: Did they end up recognized as great creative minds because they were all friends and moved in the same circles? Or were they friends because they were some of the great creative minds of their time?

From there I wonder about the next generation of remarkable creative artists and the networks they have formed. I look for these people. Has the internet changed any of this at all really? Does virtual connection really hold a candle to real-life feedback?

And then I get to the big question: Would Merce and Co., and by extension any artist, have been able to create as great a body of work as they did without the influence of those working right beside them? Even those with a flaming singular voice may need to feel the warmth of creation around them to do their best work. Maybe those who create great work in isolation would be able to reach even further if pushed by a fellow traveler. We often assume a sort of great man ideal when it comes to creation–yes, plenty of collectives exist and produce, but let’s just put that aside for a moment–but what about the surrounding community of creative souls? Where is that van full of art and ideas right now?

Speaking of getting on the bandwagon, Pitchforkmedia.com, a site often driving these conveyances for a significant swath of the nation’s music fans, reviews new music this week in the form of new discs from Carl Stone and Elodie Lauten. In your humble opinion, how well did they do? 

I give Mike Powell points for risking mixing entertaining, over-the-top language–i.e. “foofy, inert bullshit peddled by charlatans to suckers who would stoop to intellectualize a rock”–with some universally comprehensible analysis:

Woo Lae Oak is an amnesiac for itself, an ever-renewing blank slate. The problem with assessing records like this is that they rely on the listener’s tolerance and imagination, which, comfortingly for all parties involved, nobody has any control over. …Stone even named the piece after the Chinese restaurant of his choice, a self-effacing gesture that acknowledges peace as marketable chintz– where other composers might aspire to recreate ancient prayer scrolls, Stone takes refuge in fortune cookies. Even when I can’t fully immerse myself in it, I leave with the important lesson that there’s no inherent grandeur to size, no necessary seriousness to serenity.

Evocative writing, but it’s not telling us what we’re used to when it comes to new music record reviews. Are you missing what you’re not reading? I like that there’s no name-dropping. You don’t need to know jack about any other recorded music in this genre to understand what’s being discussed. That’s not everyone’s cup o’ tea and sometimes the name-checking is vital to the issue at hand, but after reading this review I’ve seen the work from a fresh perspective and am excited to hear it again. That means it’s done its job as far as I’m concerned.

Are avant-garde music fans too apathetic for the field’s own good? (And here I clearly don’t mean you, Jim Altieri.) Audience passion for this music clearly must exist–you have to work to access it in real life, whether in concert or on recording, and then work some more (generally speaking) to access it intellectually and emotionally once the music is right there in front of you. But in our fandom, we rarely express our passions out loud for the world to see and hear. Is that a mark of high-art class or intellectual apathy?

I bring this up because just the other evening Darcy and I were discussing the challenges of blogging about new music vs. blogging about, say, the presidential campaigns or the hoo-ha that attends the leaking of a new Nas album. Typically in these cases, an incident is reported and every blogger worth his or her salt weighs in with an opinion, thought, or call to action. Blood pressures rise in tandem and cross-blog dialogue ensues.

In our particular musical pastures, this tends to not happen so much. A small gathering might get riled over the abstract issue of complexity in music, but it’s a rare day even in Gotham that we all jump on a bandwagon together. (Anyone ever leaked a Reich album?) I’m not saying it would necessarily do us a great deal of good to emulate the TMZ paparazzi, but it strikes me as a curious MO for people supposedly obsessed with the new that we don’t really fixate on the very latest. Maybe we simply can’t manage it because each and every one of us is doing something so completely cutting edge that there are few common roads to travel. Or maybe it’s that we expend our energy carefully rather than flinging it in what we see all too clearly are worthless pursuits.

*

That said, the early music crowd isn’t shy about getting tongues wagging. In an article that on quick read seems like it could only have appeared in the pages of The Onion, England’s Observer reports startling news of vibrato-lacking performances at this year’s Proms:

The chief conductor of one of Germany’s most famous orchestras, the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, [Sir Roger] Norrington has a history of provoking a passionate and polarised response among audiences. As a vociferous advocate of the controversial ‘pure tone’ or ‘musical authenticity’ movement, Norrington believes music should be played on period instruments and often at radically different speeds to the way it is usually heard. But musicians and audiences are now concerned that Norrington has taken his crusade too far. Norrington shocked Prom audiences last week by conducting a vibrato-less rendition of Elgar’s Symphony No. 1, a piece written in 1908.

Pity the Deerhoof fan with only Suzuki training to fall back on: The band’s latest single, “Fresh Born,” has been released via an über-hip delivery method the kids are calling “sheet music“. 

Check out the competition and then upload your own version.

Remember that time you and the other kids in the neighborhood strung up a bed sheet curtain in the garage and put on a show? Oh, wait, that was my memory? 

Well, anyway, Counterstream Radio and New Amsterdam Records have lined up some musical madness for the final East River Music Project show of the season on August 16 (doors at 2 p.m.), and we hope it will earn a place on your personal summer concert calendar. Join us for sets from itsnotyouitsme, Mark Dancigers, Jacob Cooper’s Timberbrit, Alex Sopp, and Matt Marks and the Li’l Death Band at the East River Amphitheater in NYC. Further details here.

*If I’ve been reading your concert PR and attending your shows for the last eight years, consider your attendance at this event mandatory. It’s new music karma, baby.

The problem with The Signal‘s mélange, she said, is that “I don’t know what’s coming,” i.e. whether the next thing will be a composed piece for orchestra or a recording from the last Pop Montreal festival.

The quote above was lifted from this article in Toronto’s Globe and Mail which I loved for its thought-poking potential. I’m no proponent of taking up the “elitist” yoke when it comes to any one particular genre of music, and mixing it up does seem the fashion-forward pose, but when is it progressive, and when is it bait-and-switch?

* Super awesome lure by Mark Frauenfelder.

Thought I’d coast you into the weekend with a little Baltimore Club. In a different context, would we be calling this a piece of great post-minimalism? Just sayin’.

Local connection of the visuals, the pro vs homemade video play, the completely confident delivery: I’m totally taken in by Rye Rye. So was MIA. I’m not feeling confident enough to even venture into live Bmore club (I’m too much a librarian type to shake it back up with any degree of cool), but I hope to get brave and stand unobtrusively at the back of the room some day soon.

Curious if it’s protected by U.S. Copyright? Slide down the slippery slope with me.

My fav is to set it on “Between 1979 – January 1, 2003” and then click on the asterisk mouse-over. Copyright law comprehension is part of my job and, like income tax preparation, its complexity still blows my mind.

Spins you right round, baby, doesn’t it?

(Thx for the lead, FJO)

Hunter S. Thompson was a twisted sort of role model for me to have had back when I was still wide-eyed Molly Sheridan, cub reporter, and I find that there’s really not a lot of call for that kind of journalism (other than how to tip a whiskey bottle) now that my beat is the new music field.

But maybe there should be. There are plenty of musicians around who could provide the “say what?” and Quentin Tarantino could provide the composer-associated profanity. Yes, hyperbole, but instead of navel-gazing op-eds detailing the end of civilization as evidenced by the death of the newspaper critic–seriously, who knew a chair at the obit desk was the critic’s heart’s desire?–maybe it’s time to get not a new topic, but a new angle on the proposition.

Greg Sandow has been writing a lot about how a rock vs classical critic tackles the live concert review, which has provided ample it-doesn’t-have-to-be-this-way food for thought, and AJ’s own fearless leader, Doug McLennan, has certainly embraced the show-don’t-tell model of change.

The inbox delivers up plenty of enquiring-minds material–many of them topics I wish there was more time to explore in summer road trip fashion and at book-length word count if only there were no need to pay the electric bill. But though that may be what the writer desires, what does the reader seek? In a digital landscape where (setting aside copyright concerns for a moment) content presentation is wildly open to fresh reformation, what do cultural consumers want from their media about media? Is the concert review, the cd review, and the once-in-a-while profile piece really all there is? What would gonzo arts reporting be and what might it do for the place?

UPDATE: Doug has also posted some deep thoughts in response to Martin Bernheimer’s recent “arts criticism was killed by the blogger on the Internet” essay in the Financial Times.