When I was asked to come up for this conference on "New Music and the Media," I tried for weeks to think what new music and the media could possibly have to do with each other aside from both being eight letter phrases in which the second word begins with M. But then I talked to Tim Brady, who made me realize that my thinking had been very pre-9/11, as they say, and that I had been limiting the media to what we now universally refer to as the MSM, or the "mainstream media," which of course doesn't cover new music to any appreciable extent.

As a new-music critic for the Village Voice newspaper for 19 years, I used to be a representative of what we might now laughingly refer to as the AMSM, or possibly altMSM - the "alternative mainstream media." Laughingly, because now that the Village Voice has been bought by the huge corporation New Times Media, it has become one of 17 so-called "alternative papers" across the U.S. run by a large conglomerate that saves money by running the same film reviews in all those papers. Which means that the difference between the altMSM and the MSM now runs about as deep as the difference between unscented Ivory soap and regular scent Ivory soap.

Declining to join the new, more corporate altMSM, I graduated instead to the Blogosphere, where the media - by which I suppose I would include music blogs and classical music web sites - does cover new music, and quite extensively. As a member of the altMSM, I used to be an expert. I knew what went on in the Village Voice offices, and you didn't. I knew what the paper's editorial policies were, and you didn't. As a citizen of the Blogosphere, on the other hand, I am not an expert, or rather, I am as much of an expert as most of you are, and no more. The blogs I read you can also read. The information I have access to on the internet, you also have access to. I can't even tell you how to set up your own blog, because my blog was set up for me by ArtsJournal.com, so if you've started your own blog, you know more about blogging than I do.

Journalist Gary Kamiya at Salon.com wrote an article last week about the experience of having hundreds of people posting comments, many of them critical and even vituperative, after every article he wrote. One of the comments posted in reply suggested that, from now on, writers need to adopt a more humble and conversational tone, because we no longer speak ex cathedra to a faceless audience that can't speak back. So it seems to be a symptom of our recent intellectual climate change that I give this keynote address not because I am an expert on new music and the current configuration of media, but simply because I was the one of us who was asked to speak for the crowd. I will attempt to keep my remarks humble and conversational. I am going to try to put some ideas in order, but I rather despair of telling you anything most of you don't already know. The cultural paradigm to which we have recently switched is too new to be tremendously complicated yet, and one gets the sense that everyone has followed along so far. Culturally, and at least for the moment, the internet seems to have brought us all on the same page. In fact, the fact that you can't all immediately post comments disagreeing with me after I finish speaking today fills me with a certain sense of nostalgia.

So one of the effects of our climate change is to call into question the notion of expertise. Bob Christgau, dean of rock critics, who was recently fired from the Village Voice by the conglomerate that bought it for the crime of having too high a salary, wrote recently that newspaper criticism is dying because people have too many other places to go for recommendations, and no longer need to read the experts. For every compact disc you consider buying, you can look on the relevant page at Amazon.com and read reviews by people who have presumably have heard, or possibly haven't heard, the disc - for instance, if you look at my last CD there are two reviews that so misdescribe the music that they obviously didn't bother listening - and then those reviews are reviewed by the people who read them. The old saying "Everybody's a critic" is now literally true. Even publicly, judgment is no longer a specialized function.

But I have learned recently that in losing my privileged status as an expert, I have not merely receded into the great undifferentiated stream of humanity. Oh no. For awhile I was a "content provider," which I rather liked because it made me sound so - contented. As it turns out, though, I am not merely a content provider, that is, one who exudes words and images to fill a space between advertisements. As a content provider known for particularly precise recommendations, I am also a filter in the navigation layer. (I just found this out a few days ago. I feel like the prince in the film The Madness of King George who learns that he is also Bishop of Osnabruck, and comments, "It's amazing what one is, really.") You can't simply alphabetize all of the recordings that have ever been made and let people sift through them looking for something that might appeal to them. People who are looking for someone who sounds like Norah Jones would end up accidentally having to listen to my music, and become terribly perplexed. So the sea of digital music has a navigation layer: a network of links from one piece to another and one type of music to another, so that, given one recording you like, you will soon be reeled into the niches in which you feel at home.

The components of that navigation layer are filters, both mechanical and human. You've all seen the mechanical filters at work. If you recently bought a DVD of Sir Laurence Olivier's Henvy V on Amazon, the next time Amazon might suggest that you will also enjoy the films Regarding Henry, Henry and June, and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Most people already tend to prefer human filters, I think, which are more intelligently contextual and efficient. To be a good filter does not require, as being a good newspaper critic did, being a good writer, nor does it require intelligence or even taste (one could be a filter, after all, of Gilligan's Island episodes). What it does require is voluminous access to a certain niche literature and some degree of organization. In these areas I am exemplary. My access to postminimalist music of the 1980s and '90s is unparalleled. That is my niche, and almost no one cometh to that niche except through me.

It's one of the smallest niches on the internet, but that doesn't matter anymore. For to be a filter is to be a guide into what is now called the Long Tail. The term originated in a 2004 article, later turned into a best-selling book, by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson. (I apologize to all of you who already know all about the Long Tail, but I will be as humble and conversational in describing it as I can.) The idea is that if you rank any phenomenon according to frequency, such as book or record or beer sales, you get a distribution graph with a vertical part that curves into a horizontal part. For instance - and I take this example from Wikipedia -

in standard English, the word the is the most common word... about 12% of all words in a given text are the, while [the word] barracks occurs in less than 1 out of 60,000 words, but cumulatively, words roughly as rare as barracks make up about a third of all text.

So occurences of the word the would register way up at the top part of the graph, while occurrences of barracks would be way down in the long tail. But while instances of the vastly outnumber instances of barracks, rare words down in the Long Tail make up almost as much of our written language as common words like the.

The application to music, I think, is pretty obvious. The other day when I was writing this, the number one top-selling artist on Amazon was Norah Jones. My latest CD came in at number 234,754. However, in terms of sales there are thousands of times as many Kyle Ganns, as many artists who sell only a few hundred CDs, as there are Norah Joneses who sell hundreds of thousands of CDs, to the extent that the thousand least-known composers represented on Amazon may altogether sell as many or more CDs as Norah Jones does by herself. Therefore, if you have a brick-and-mortar store with only room to offer a hundred CDs, you will of course want to sell Norah Jones rather than Kyle Gann, but you will miss out on the equal sales you could be making from the thousands of artists whose CDs only sell a few copies each. This is where the internet comes in, because, not having storage issues, it can offer both Norah Jones and Kyle Gann and his myriad ilk. You walk the streets of Winnipeg trying out record stores, and you'll have a complete Norah Jones collection several times over before you find a Kyle Gann CD. But you go to Amazon and type in "Norah Jones" and "Kyle Gann," and either name comes up just as fast as the other.

Chris Anderson talks about how the era of "hits," of blockbusters, is over, giving way to the era of niches. Pardon me if you've already read this on the internet, but I'll quote at some length what he says in elaboration:

Most of the top fifty best-selling albums of all time were recorded in the seventies and eighties... and none of them were made in the past five years... Every year network TV loses more of its audience to hundreds of niche cable channels... The ratings of top TV shows have been falling for decades, and the number one show today wouldn't have made the top ten in 1970.

In short, although we still obsess over hits, they are not quite the economic force they once were. Where are those fickle consumers going instead? No single place. They are scattered to the winds as markets fragment into countless niches. The great thing about broadcast is that it can bring one show to millions of people with unmatched efficiency. But it can't do the opposite - bring a million shows to one person each. Yet that is exactly what the Internet does so well.

He describes talking to a Mr. Vann-Adibe who engineered an internet jukebox, and says,

During the course of our conversation, Vann-Adibe asked me to guess what percentage of the 10,000 albums available on the jukeboxes sold at least one track per quarter...

The normal answer would be 20 percent because of the 80/20 rule, which experience tells us applies practically everywhere. That is: 20 percent of products account for 80 percent of sales (and usually 100 percent of the profits).

...Half of the top 10,000 books in a typical bookstore don't sell once a quarter. Half of the top 10,000 CDs at Wal-Mart don't sell once a quarter...

So Anderson guessed 50 percent. The correct answer was 98 percent. That is, 98 percent of the tracks on the jukebox sold at least once per quarter. Doing research, he found that this 98 percent was pretty much a rule: whenever an internet company made a vast quantity of selections equally available on the internet, 98 percent of the products showed evidence of some demand every quarter. And he goes on:

...As the company added more titles to its collections, far beyond the inventory of most record stores and into the world of niches and subcultures, they continued to sell. And the more the company added, the more they sold.

Each company was impressed by the demand they were seeing in categories that had been previously dismissed as beneath the economic fringe... For the first time, I was looking at the true shape of demand in our culture, unfiltered by the economics of scarcity.

This description accords perfectly with my experience. I go around lecturing on new music and playing it for audiences, and everywhere I go, I find and create demand for new music. People come up to me afterward and ask, "That music was fantastic, where can I find it?" I run an internet radio station for new music, and people write to tell me all the time about the wonderful composers they discovered listening to PostClassic Radio. And then, on the other hand, I talk to publishers about books I want to write, and exactly as Anderson says, they invariably dismiss the music I'm a filter for as "beneath the economic fringe." They say, "Oh, we can't publish a book about that music, there's no interest in it." And newspaper editors tell me, "Oh, we wouldn't run a story about that music, there's no interest in it." For 25 years I've been shuttling back and forth between two realities, one in which there's patently plenty of demand for new music, and another in which there is confidently asserted to be no demand whatever.

The concept of the Long Tail now gives me a way to make sense of my experience. The book publishers, the newspapers, the radio stations, the record stores, are caretakers of the vertical part of the graph. They all make a living by finding out what items will be bought or appreciated by the largest number of people and offering only that. And for 25 years I've been a Chicken Little alarming people because that vertical stack of hits has gotten thinner and thinner and thinner, and more and more difficult to get one's music into.

When I was young, the best new music was on big, well-known labels like Columbia and Deutsche Grammophon. By 1980, those labels had abandoned new music, which was now on prestigious specialty labels like Lovely Music and New Albion. By 1990, the music I was most interested in writing about for the Voice was now on even smaller labels, rarely available in stores, like Mode and Artifact and Cuneiform. And by 2003, the music I most wanted to put on my radio station was at best on tiny labels run by the composer, like Mikel Rouse's Exit Music or Bang on a Can's Canteloupe, and more not even commercially recorded at all, just sent to me, or uploaded to the internet, by the composer. More and more and more of the Long Tail was abandoned by the industry that used to bring new music to the public and keep it alive.

And so it was at every level. The New York Times cut back its arts coverage by 25 percent, and the Village Voice made fun of them. The next month, the Village Voice cut back its arts coverage by 25 percent, and later both papers cut back still further. More and more, newspapers cover only the organizations that give them advertising revenue. The classical musical organizations who most reliably advertise in newspapers are the local orchestras. And so composers whose music gets played by orchestras have always had the most chance of getting publicity; by the 1990s, it seemed like they were the only composers getting publicity. If your music isn't played by orchestras, your chances of getting into the prestigious vertical shaft of the distribution graph covered by the MSM is just about nil.

For 20 years I've been kind of a professional pain-in-the-neck at music conferences, expounding a gloom-and-doom scenario based on the shrinking vertical part of the graph. What my congenital pessimism kept me from noticing was that, as the vertical part was thinning, a lot of institutional sand was running down into the Long Tail. As I read about new music on the internet, I see very different names than I'm accustomed to reading about in newspapers and music magazines. Composers with strong cult followings like Charlemagne Palestine, Brian Ferneyhough, and Phill Niblock get discussed far more often on the internet than they ever did in print. A lot of what we think of as successful establishment composers are nearly absent from the internet. Look up Milton Babbitt or Jacob Druckman, and you may not find much more than music publishers' blurbs, which are notoriously one-dimensional. But look up La Monte Young, or Kaikhosru Sorabji, or Claude Vivier, or the San Francisco composer Erling Wold, and you can find tons of information: scores, analyses, discussion groups, great Wikipedia articles.

Hundreds of scholars squeezed out of the vertical shaft by commercial pressures have emigrated to the internet. One of the first big composer web sites I saw in the '90s was a scholarly site for the Russian composer Cesar Cui; I'm sure its author was ready to write a book about him and was discouraged by publishers, and so blossomed onto the internet. In its discussion of subjects conventionally covered by print encyclopedias, Wikipedia leaves a lot to be desired. But its superiority to any print medium in the coverage of new musical genres and artists not found in dictionaries but nevertheless loved by thousands of people is absolutely phenomenal.

And given my experience hawking new music around the country and in Europe, I get a strong impression that the musical interest I see on the internet is closer to, as Anderson says, "the true shape of demand in our culture, unfiltered by the economics of scarcity." It starts to look to me like the classical music culture whose deterioration we're so panicked about, with its star system, its exclusive character, its timidity in the face of public opinion, its assumptions of economic scarcity, its conviction that you have to choose between me and Norah Jones and there's no room for both, was a neurotic, unreal system whose true purpose was never to disseminate culture, but to make money for the people in power. And what we see on the internet, flawed as it may be (and I'll get to some of its flaws in a moment), is more the result of true enthusiasm expressed by people who have nothing to gain and no reason to say anything but the truth.

Everyone who's sat on grant and award panels knows that often the piece of music that wins is not the one any panelist feels most strongly about, but the one that is the least offensive, that no one particularly objects to. Likewise, I think that for similar reasons of scarcity and the kind of concensus needed, our old musical life created a culture in which the music that aroused the greatest passions often got pushed out into the long tail. As Anderson says, "For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop." It seems to me that this is just as true in classical new music as it is anywhere else. Newspapers, book publishers, music publishers, orchestras, radio stations, all the various MSM outlets, and even television have a lot to learn from what goes on on the internet: which artists inspire heated discussion groups, which ones merit lengthy articles on Wikipedia, which ones amateur scholars furiously debate each other about. The internet, especially now while hardly anyone makes any money contributing to it, more immediately reflects which music inspires true devotion.

And though the artists best represented there may still seem commercially unfeasible now, the internet's ability to access the rare music of the Long Tail is bound to bring more and more listeners in that direction. Anderson's graphs show that not only does the vertical "hits" part of the distribution curve get thinner, its peaks fall lower, while the Long Tail becomes thicker as more customers discover it. How far the internet can change the landscape might be indicated by the fact that my blog was recently ranked as the number five most influential classical music blog - and we're talking about a blog whose idea of a big-name classical composer is Rhys Chatham. As Anderson writes about the ongoing collapse of the record business:

[T]echnology... offered massive, unprecedented choice in terms of what [people] could hear. The average file-trading network has more music than any music store. Given that choice, music fans took it. Today, not only have listeners stopped buying as many CDs, they're also losing their taste for the blockbuster hits that used to make them throng those stores on release day. Given the option to pick a boy band or find something new, more and more people are opting for exploration, and are typically more satisfied with what they find. [p. 33]

As they wander farther from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a hit-centric culture, and simply a lack of alternatives). [p.16]

[A]s... companies offered more and more... they found that demand actually followed supply. The act of vastly increasing choice seemed to unlock demand for that choice. [p.24]

"More and more people are opting for exploration." I don't remember the 20th century very well, but I do seem to recall that that what 20th-century composers used to dream about most was that, someday, more and more people would opt for exploration. All my life I've lived in the Long Tail, without exactly recognizing that's where I was. And it turns out they decided to build the information superhighway right through the middle of it. (I can imagine how excited Canadian composers are by this news, since they evidently see their entire music scene as inhabiting the Long Tail.)

And so, very recently, the internet has been turning me from a pessimist into an optimist. Of course, our global climate change is submerging tropical islands, while turning some frigid wastelands into new tropical paradises. Likewise, our intellectual climate change will doubtless destroy as well as create. Some things are bound to be lost, and we don't know yet what will replace them. One thing that's been lost, most notably, is the ancient practice of getting paid. Most of the work I do on the internet I do without compensation, and no one's quite figured out what to do about that yet.

Secondly, I have trouble seeing what's going to replace editing. Back in my old ex cathedra days, I used to spend 90 minutes a week going over my Village Voice column with a brilliant editor, Doug Simmons, who had studied classical rhetoric in college. Of course, I was being edited for the arrogant, magisterial idiom, but some of that training still carries over into the humble, conversational style I am careful to use today. As I look through internet discourse, much of the writing I read, even when it reveals taste and intelligence, falls into cliches, common syllogisms, academic obfuscation, and a general lack of specificity and clarity. My own apprenticeship in this area was arduous if exhilarating, and took seven years, and I don't see where the pressure to improve the level of the discourse is going to come from.

There's an analogy I often take from the field of piano tuning. Piano tuners tell me that if you know how to tune pianos traditionally, then the new electronic tuning machines make it easier; but that if you can't do it traditionally, and start out relying on the electronic tuner, your pianos will never stay in tune for very long. I sometimes apply this to composition: that if you know how to compose on paper with a pencil, you can make the transition to composing directly in music software, but that if you don't, you'll always have issues with continuity and timbre. Some poets say something similar about writing poetry on a word processor. And it may apply to many other transitions to digital technology.

One change I haven't figured out yet is who my new audience is. Going from the altMSM to the blogosphere created an illusion that I was addressing a vastly larger crowd. My statistics page tells me that 55 percent of my readership is in the East Coast time zone, 10 percent on the West Coast, 12 or 15 percent in Western Europe, and now and then 1 or 2 percent in the time zones that include India or Australia. My blog can be read from anywhere in the world, which gives me a heady feeling of addressing the planet.

At the same time, I notice that I get comments mostly from the same 75 or 100 people who leave comments at New Music Box and Sequenza 21, and that they all seem to be composers. When I wrote for the Voice, anyone who wanted to read the political news or the pop record reviews, or look through the sex ads, at least had my column under their arm, and was likely to flip past it, perhaps notice it. Now it seems that I am read by a small, if widely dispersed, crowd of internet-obsessed composers who all frequent the same web sites and comment on each other's blogs. A lot of the work I have always done has been advocacy for composers, and it makes no sense to advocate composers to other composers. It seems to primarily piss off the composers you're not doing advocacy for. Advocacy for composers only works when directed to the music-loving public, or to power-brokers who arrange performances and recordings, and we composers are all reading each other. Ironically, our ability to reach out to the entire world may have led, for now, to a kind of hermetic professional parochialism.

How these issues will work themselves out, we don't know yet. It's difficult to give a keynote address in the dead center of a large cultural transition, especially one that has done away with the concept of expertise. But all that's speaking as a writer, as a former expert, as a filter on the navigation layer. Speaking as a composer, I used to despair that the older I got, the more the traditional needs of the composer - publication, performance, recording, distribution, publicity - seemed to be becoming more and more elusive. But now that the internet has ushered the world into the Long Tail, it's not so lonely down here anymore, and I've come to feel optimistic. I now trust that some 98 percent of you will share my optimism - at least once a quarter.

COMMENTS:

Dan Rabin says: February 11, 2007 at 1:48 am - I just thought I'd stick my hand up and let you know that there's at least one non-composer reading your blog. I'm here reading courtesy of the World Wide Web and the Long Tail. About six years ago I typed "Conlon Nancarrow" into Amazon.com's book search, and your out-of-print book turned up. I ordered it, remembered your name, and recognized it again when the weekly e-mail newsletter from Downtown Music Gallery offered one of your CDs for sale. I ordered it, enjoyed it, and a while later typed "Kyle Gann" into Google, found your web site, downloaded some more music, found the blog, read a couple of entries, and subscribed. When I first became acquainted with the music of Conlon Nancarrow around 1980, I would never have thought to wonder whether there were any books about his music: answering such questions often required a face-to-face chat with a music reference librarian. And now I can find interesting new music to listen basically just by wishing.
KG replies: Thanks for making yourself known. It helps to know who's out there.

Nancy Ruth says: February 11, 2007 at 7:54 am - I know precious little about new music, but I find your blog fascinating. Part of the long tail, I suppose.

Seth Rothberg says: February 11, 2007 at 10:12 am - Hi Kyle, I'm another non-composer, non-musician reader. I loved your book about 20th Century American music. It turned me on to composers like Partch and Feldman and Cage and Johnston. Don't always agree with everything you say, or think everyone you recommend is as interesting as you think they are, but always and first I admire your love for the music you advance. And, besides, what the hell do I know?

Samuel Vriezen says: February 11, 2007 at 11:02 am - In fact, the fact that you can't all immediately post comments disagreeing with me after I finish speaking today fills me with a certain sense of nostalgia. No it doesn't! Anyway, a great post Kyle. Two thoughts here: Re: readership. Indeed, the tendency will be for the composers - who are professionally invested in the things you write about - to respond. It's great to have a blogger say things that help you respond and gradually formulate your own thoughts, and the ones who professionally have thought about those things a lot will be most likely the ones to respond. The other readers are hidden, and I would say they're hidden in more ways than one. In addition to readers who don't have points of their own to add, there's the fact that the kind of discussion you present on a blog among composers can be accessed later. Blogs are more than a new form of criticism - they make a totally different form of art reception possible. They facilitate something that Ron Silliman (who more or less is to Language Poetry what you are to Postminimalism) on his blog has termed "deep gossip" (I'm not sure where he got the term from - he put it in quotations marks as well). The idea is that the really valid reception of poetry (and in your case, new music) is done by poets themselves first of all. This Deep Gossip used to happen in bars and now it also happens online and is accessible for not only the whole world partaking in the discussion as such, but later readers as well. Re: money. Yes, it would be great if you could get money for blogging. My take on it is a bit more radical and perhqps absurd though. In my view, the true economy of art is never about money, and we should all be activists promoting a kind of society in which people do not maximize gross domestic product and personal salary, but in which they maximize the time they can spend on things that are actually worth spending time on. A world where everybody is doing a little bit of paid work to keep the essential things going, and then they spend the rest of their time doing quality music and quality criticism and all that, or other meaningful things like political activism or helping those in need, will be a much better world with much less resources, time and energy being wasted. I have no idea how to bring this about, but it seems to me that the "climate change" you speak of really is in line with such a world. Bloggers of the world, unite! You have but your money to lose!

Alfred says: February 12, 2007 at 1:33 am - I mostly agree with your contentions regarding music, but highly disagree with your contentions regarding writing. Unlike music, "conversational" tends to be a crude way of referring to writing or speaking that imitates speech, which is more excessive and simplified; with simplicity of language one loses detail. Speech should aspire to writing, not the contrary, primarily because writing has the advantage of extensive time to be written and edited. Language should not, for the best interests of those who speak it, be egalitarian, as human intelligence is not distributed in an egalitarian manner.
KG replies: How do you feel about irony?

Steve Hicken says: February 12, 2007 at 9:46 am - That's a fine talk, Kyle. Lots to chew on.

Merwin says: February 12, 2007 at 9:50 am - I'm a symphonic musician and administrator who plays a traditional instrument (the old-fashioned violin), still worships Beethoven, discovered Paul Moravec's new tonality works because he won a Pulitzer, and enthusiastically plays string quartets in the living rooms of wealthy patrons. I found your blog because I was fascinated by Morton Feldman, and continue to revisit it because it provides extraordinary perspective. While it's hard for me to imagine venturing into a musical world sans health insurance, A-440, and neatly parsed concert experiences, it's heartening to know that it exists and that there are musicians who bridge that gap.

Greg says: February 12, 2007 at 1:21 pm - Kyle, I'd emailed you once before about your online book, which is a fascinating topic and something I think about almost daily. I am one of those composers out there reading stuff like this and, if anything, am feeling comfort in knowing there are others out there at least thinking about, analyzing, dissecting, and discussing these issues rather than looking for a proverbial axe to grind or someone to beat-up on. Intelligent discourse on these issues seems rare (or maybe I'm just ignorant of many others), and I'd love to pound this out more with like-minded people as yourself on a more regular basis. All this prelude here is leading up to one burning question, which is likely the Holy Grail we all seek in today's "classical" world: Is there a way to attract a sustainably large audience for new classical music, or - as you pointed out - are we so fragmented and niched now that there's no hope for the mass (or at least large minority) appeal anymore?
KG replies: Too big a question for me. Any takers?

kac attac says: February 12, 2007 at 5:49 pm - One of the best ways to learn to deal with continuity and timbre is to learn to play an instrument well enough to play in an ensemble. It seems to me that there are far too many student composers writing for orchestra who have never played in an orchestra. I once had an awkward exchange with a comp professor over this issue. His somewhat curt response: "Our graduate composers don't play in ensembles….[awkward silence/glaring]….and that's too bad.[phew! someone actually agrees with me.]"

John Shaw says: February 12, 2007 at 9:46 pm - "Deep gossip" is a quote from Allen Ginsberg's heartfelt elegy for Frank O'Hara. I lament the demise of the old Voice. What a treat it was to have my favorite rock critic (Christgau), my favorite living jazz critic (Giddins), and my favorite new music critic (you) all in the same pages. A sidebar in the current Pazz & Jop poll misspells Giddins's name. The death of editing isn't only being felt in Blogville. Beautiful talk, Kyle.

Paul H. Muller says: February 13, 2007 at 11:46 am - "Is there a way to attract a sustainably large audience for new classical music, or - as you pointed out - are we so fragmented and niched now that there's no hope for the mass (or at least large minority) appeal anymore?" - Greg I think part of what Kyle is saying is that mass appeal as a measurement of artistic achievement is becoming less relevant. But to those of us who grew up with network television, movies and hit records, it still seems to be the gold-plated ideal. Perhaps the Internet, with its ability to create clusters of interest around small niches, will become the normative experience for artists similar to the coffee houses and bars of years past. My own hope is that music will return to something it once was: a way for friends to share ideas and experiences. If the Internet cannot provide mass appeal, it may yet provide something more important to the artist: a sense of community.

Peter says: February 13, 2007 at 12:19 pm - Alfred wrote: "Speech should aspire to writing, not the contrary, primarily because writing has the advantage of extensive time to be written and edited. Language should not, for the best interests of those who speak it, be egalitarian, as human intelligence is not distributed in an egalitarian manner." As a non-composer, non-musician, and non-American who enjoys reading this blog immensely, I have to take issue with Alfred's absurd comment here. Why on earth should speech aspire to be like writing? The skills involved in good oratory are very different from the skills involved in good writing. A good orator needs to be able to sense the mood of his/her audience, speak extemperaneously, temper length and pace to changing circumstances, respond well and quickly to questions and interjections, and listen well to what others say, and do all this on-the-fly, as computer scientists say (ie, on his or her feet, in real-time, and without opportunity for preparation). None of these skills are needed for good writing. Since the mid-18th century, western culture has unfortunately placed greater emphasis on written over oral communication, but this was not always the case. In Shakespeare's time, a University graduate would have learnt to orate, to recite poetry, to speak in public, to improvise, to engage in dialogue and dialectic, and even to do mathematical problems orally. (The Cambridge mathematics tripos examination only switched to written examinations in the mid-18th century, and over strong opposition from the Cambridge University faculty. In Russia, University degrees in mathematics are still examined orally.) Our culture has lost much by ignoring and neglecting these skills, although there are still some professions where such oratorical skills are required and rewarded - eg, politics, management consulting, and the law. To say that speech aspires to writing is comparable to saying that jazz musicians or baroque organists should only ever play fully-written-through music. What a loss to our culture were that to be the case! "Down with writing!", I am shouting loudly as I type this!

Alfred says: February 13, 2007 at 9:16 pm - Why on earth should speech aspire to be like writing? Because, regardless of how it is spoken or the manner in which it is spoken, the content of what is said remains the same. Writing allows greater time, editing, and thought to improve on such content before it enters the mind of another. It is with your following statement, "on his or her feet, in real-time, and without opportunity for preparation", that I feel strengthens my contention. The opportunity for preparation is precisely what I believe makes the written word superior than the spoken word. Human achievement does not advance according to what products, technologies or discoveries can be made in the shortest time or with the least amount of preparation, but rather to the final quality of such products, technologies or discoveries. Music is different. With music, one does not have to specify, explain concepts, or analyze objectively. One could argue that the first two are done with music, but such musical functions are in relation to music itself, which would be akin to a language which can explain itself and no more. The function words are not the same as the function of music. Such is why I agree with Gann's perspectives on music but disagree with his perspectives on writing - words dictate lives, while music improves lives. There are likely to be few on the Earth that can admit honestly to a disliking of music; its role in culture is benign. One can be sentenced to death, but not trilled to death; it is unlikely for there ever to be a death sentence made by music.

Julian Day says: February 13, 2007 at 10:45 pm - As one of the 1-2 percent reading this in India and/or Australia, may I thank you for your fantastic speech & blog. Oh, and for the record I've noticed your "Downtown Music" book in at least three or four bookstores here in my hometown down under, so the word does get through (mind you, I bought my copy on Amazon meaning you'd never know where its being bought). Of course my next dream is to come across a "Downunder Music" somewhere ..

David Irwin says: February 13, 2007 at 10:59 pm - Kyle, This is an excellent address, and one that sets out some important ideas for composers and artists to think about. The niche and the long tail are full of opportunity, but daunting and threatening to those acclimated to the mass appeal/broadcast audience syndrome. I can't help but remember my friend Wayne descrbing his first composition consultation with Penderecki. Penderecki asked him whom he composed for and Wayne said that he composed things on tape for his friends to listen to. Penderecki objected vehemently, "Oh, you must compose for yourself, for yourself." Wayne said, "No, I just want to compose for a few frends that might be interested in what I write." "You must compose for yourself!" etc, etc.
KG replies: That "You must compose for yourself" line is one of those I hear from so many different people that I start to suspect it's some kind of neurosis. It gives me the creeps.

Peter says: February 14, 2007 at 6:31 am - Apologies, Kyle, for using your blog this way, but it is clear that Alfred and I disagree profoundly on something fundamental. I don't believe that the written word is superior to the spoken word. I do believe that this is an absurd claim to make. The two are different, and each has its own, unique features, strengths and requirements. As a consequence, a person may be skilled at one of these and poor at the other. Lee Harvey Oswald is a good example: he was a very good speaker and debater, and quick on his feet, as you can tell by listening to his radio broadcasts, but a very poor writer. To assert that writing is superior to speaking is to assert the primacy of one mode of representation over another, which is just silly in our age of multiple representations (image, sound, video, in addition to text). As I said before, our western culture has favoured written text over speech these last 250 years, but this was not always the case, and I expect it will not always be the case. Saying that writing is superior to speech would have had your audience laughing in the aisles in Elizabethan England.

Samuel Vriezen says: February 14, 2007 at 6:43 am - "I compose for myself" is an opinion I've always interpreted as basically defeatist, an impotent attempt to make a virtue out of neglect, and in no way inspiring. It's really much more a capitulation to the "realities" of the free market yadda yadda than some beautiful ideal of ascesis - if you're so ascetic, don't go around telling people about it. (I'd perhaps buy the line from the likes of Scelsi and Ustvolskaja)

andrea says: February 14, 2007 at 11:04 am - "One can be sentenced to death, but not trilled to death" clearly, alfred manages to avoid flutists and coloraturas.

Alfred says: February 14, 2007 at 5:35 pm - I will agree with Peter with regards to the contention that open philosophical debate on Kyle's blog is not the medium for such a philosophical debate, and will thus cease my comments out of respect. I apologize to any parties that were disrupted.
KG replies: No problem.

Frank Hecker says: February 16, 2007 at 12:21 am - One more comment from someone who's neither a composer nor a performer, but rather is simply interested in hearing new music (in both senses): I suspect you may have lots of readers like me who read but don't comment, in my case because I don't have the knowledge and experience to contribute anything more to the discussion than "I like that". In my case I discovered PostClassic Radio first and then found my way to your blog and (eventually) to your book ("Downtown Music"). I wanted to make one other comment on your observation about new music moving from formal releases to informal distribution. This is a very important point in my opinion. I'm a big fan of the eMusic digital music store, and even created a "PostClassic Picks" page of works played on PostClassic Radio that were also available on eMusic. However even though eMusic touts itself as a site for "independent music", I'm noticing more and more new music that in an ideal world would be on eMusic but is not. I think this is a major missed opportunity: There is great value in being able to go to a single place for digital music (as one can go to Amazon for CDs), and I really wish sites like eMusic would work with new music composers to find ways to make music available without the overhead associated with traditional releases.
KG replies: Thanks for the tip. Maybe some of those reading will get on it. And thanks for reading.

andrea says: February 16, 2007 at 9:58 am - i work for one of those teeny, independent, post-classic labels. i'm the "half" in our one-and-a-half employees. the one employee also manages the careers of four or five intense artists in various fields. in short, there's just not enough money and time to do a full force push into the digital market. it's not that my boss doesn't want to do it; it just can't always be a priority. people often email saying we should re-release this or that, but again: we'd love to, but it just can't be prioritized at the moment. it's frustrating. i hope that within the next year or so, we can get the old vinyl stuff into a digital-only release format, just so it can be there. we'll see what happens. also, i think most labels don't actually deal with itunes or emusic (for example) directly. we use a digital distribution service, who get our music into a slew of download sites, ringtones, web radios, etc. it takes about nine weeks between sending the cds to the distributor and actually seeing them show up on the sites. having spent this past week at work processing the fifteen cds i sent them two weeks ago and not actually finishing, i can tell you it's a ridiculously long and boring task! so, take heart and be patient - the indie minions are slowly working on the job.

Ali Marcus says: February 16, 2007 at 2:18 pm - Kyle- As a composer of the "songwriter" ilk, and deeply entrenched in the long tail, in the belief that it has to be there in such force, I find all of this stuff both intellectually and practically important. As I imagine the Post Classic crowd does as well. For me it's probably due to a childhood of serious classical training and a music degree, even though the ways in which I've gone to use those experiences have landed me in the folkster category.
But your words about composition, and these comments as well, are 100% relevant. And your ideas about survival of the critical media among the masses are too.
So I'm thinking, maybe the long tail separates all these little niches, but it unites a few who traditionally have been separated by genre alone.

Will Diamond says: February 17, 2007 at 6:58 pm - Kyle, Because you say you're suprised how few people comment on your blog, I feel like I might as well give it a shot. Because I'm just 17, I haven't really seen the world you mentioned where new music was regularly in the press. As a result, I think this blog system is fantastic. Although I rarely feel qualified enough to comment, I love having blogs around like yours, sequenza 21, alex ross's blog, and all the others. Part of the reason I decided not to apply to conservatories (for composition) is that your blogs explained to me just how petty music can be in academia. While I certainly think good music does come from universites sometimes, the internet has taught me to cast a much wider net when searching for good music. While I had known for a good while that interesting, avant-garde music exists on the net, I thought the break between "classical" music written today and, say, "intelligent" dance music was much larger than it actually is. Furthurmore, seeing musicians I admire exchanging thoughts on your blog is a lot more enlightening that a response-free arcticle in a newspaper could be. One post that I particularly loved was the one where you discussed what genre John Luther Adams fits into, and he responded to your post. Where else but the internet can I listen to frank conversations between two composers whose music I really like?
KG replies: Thanks, Will, that's a really wonderful testimonial, to me and even more to this wonderful new playground, the internet. Best of luck with your studies, and congratulations on educating yourself and being ahead of the game.

pgena says: February 18, 2007 at 2:49 pm - The Long Tail was for years a Long Tale - nice that it's regaining respect and currency. See George Kingsley Zipf, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort (Addison-Wesley, 1949). It's also suitable for writing music.

pgena says: February 18, 2007 at 3:05 pm - Oh, and terrific keynote too!

Teju says: February 22, 2007 at 9:08 pm - Yet another non-composer non-musician nodding in agreement here. We live in the era of both mass taste (due to broadcasting) and cultivated leisure (due to narrowcast media like the internet). So, the chance that a concert of music by Harry Partch would be broadcast to 30 million people (American Idols) is vanishingly small. On the other hand, the small fanatically devoted band of his music's admirers have everything in place to keep that love alive–interaction with fellow believers, easy access to recordings, etc. Many things will thrive in these small dimensions, refusing to die out, indeed unkillable (knock on wood), and yet with no likelihood of becoming big in the so-called free-market. All things considered, it's a tolerable situation.

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