----- Original Message -----
From: Keith Hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Ray Evans Harrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>;
Harry Pollard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2002 3:25
AM
Subject: Re: Intellectual Property (was Re: Fish
and Chips)
> Hi Ray.
>
> (REH)
> <<<<
> I would suggest that you Keith have an incentive to argue that music is
> dead for
> your own business.
> >>>>
>
> Not at all, Ray. No skin off my nose. I'd be delighted if modern 'serious'
> music had a big future. If so, I would have started an additional
> publishing business on the net and be raking in the cash. Quite a few
> desperate contemporary composers write to me already.
>
> (REH)
> <<<<
> I would suggest that you Keith have an incentive to argue that music is
> dead for
> your own business.
> >>>>
>
> Not at all, Ray. No skin off my nose. I'd be delighted if modern 'serious'
> music had a big future. If so, I would have started an additional
> publishing business on the net and be raking in the cash. Quite a few
> desperate contemporary composers write to me already.
REH
I would never judge your inner soul on this
Keith but your actions and statements do not connect with your stated intent.
First of all, you stated the "problem" with patents and
copyrights. Royalties based upon copyrights are THE
issue. Yesterday's NYTimes had an article about Napster again which
you can take a look at on the site. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/18/technology/18SONG.html
If copyrights are upheld on this issue then it
certainly will be more than the skin off your nose. I speak as a
promoter who works constantly with new music and putting on my Flamenco Carmen
didn't cost a dime in royalties because it is in the public domain.
So yours is a gratuitous statement. Publishing has
had the same problems as the internet since the invention of the copy
machine. Finally they gave up and charged a large fee for the first
copy and assumed that you would make your own copies
thereafter. That has started to happen on CDs.
Beginning cuts on singles already cost more than a complete album did not
so long ago. Do not compare that to how much they cost at the end of
a successful run when the public has moved on. Movie
videos and expensive books all cost less on the remainder
table.
You may believe your statement but beneath it all
there is another reality at work here.
Keith
> As you know (in case new FWers don't), I
think that most of the medieval
> arts -- music, art, linguistic philosophy, poetry, sculpture, clog dancing
> -- came to the end of their essential development sometime between the
> beginning and the middle of the last century.
> arts -- music, art, linguistic philosophy, poetry, sculpture, clog dancing
> -- came to the end of their essential development sometime between the
> beginning and the middle of the last century.
REH
No, the only thing that came to a close was the
economic viability of new music as the new "art" of advertisement used the
yardstick of the least common denominator for the taste of the new middle and
lower class generations coming up.
Remember the story about the factory whistle told
by Edward T. Hall? I think either I or Mike Hollinshead posted
it years ago. It also relates to the bird story that you put on
the list a couple of days ago. When the first factories were
built, they couldn't get steady labor because the Fathers would work until they
had enough money and then go spend time off with their
families. As a result the factory owners came up with the
strategy of hiring the whole family to keep the father at
work. When the parents died they found that the children had
entrained on the factory whistle, like birds, and that the factory had become
their "home". Much like that Human Japanese Whooping
Crane dancer is the "mate" to a female Whooping Crane. As a result
of "entrainment" today's out of work factory workers have been kicked "out of
their homes" by an uncaring economic "parent." Is it any
wonder that psycho-therapy is the answer of the day for so many middle and even
class Americans? We even have the Mafia in Therapy.
In the case of advertising, the clever use of bits
and pieces of great works along with a slowly simplified and "catchy" or should
I say "kitschy" musical product has created a generation that is entrained on
the simple acoustical facts of the overtone series and away from the
complexities of the chromatic harmonies of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. The simple repetition has also diminished the
ability of the current middle and lower class audience to think in long
sequences. (Might this not have something to do with your complaint
about why traditional education no longer works on these
classes?) That is commerce and commerce today has
captured even the "news" media and turned real wars into entertainment rather
than "fake" ones on the stage or movie screen. They even call it
"reality" TV. Europe has been hooked on the excitement of mass
warfare since Columbus opened up the New World "Theater" and it has expanded, as
Orwell said it would, into the middle and lower class homes as Media has
truly become all inclusive.
But where is the great music? It still
exists. As I have endlessly typed and pointed this out to you and
the list. The great American historian Lawrence W. Levine has
written a couple of books on this aspect of it as well. I
would suggest that you check out Amazon.com and purchase his Massey Lectures at
Harvard entitled "Highbrow/Lowbrow, the Emergence of the Cultural Hierarchy in
America." Levine shows how the modern upper class has become,
once again, the aristocracy that defines high culture as there exclusive
domain. There is a reason that the upper class Republicans feel
at home with fundamentalists here in the US and it is not about the
"Right to Life." Fundamentalists have excellent music schools
and a considerable program for music of all genres in their
churches. Culturally they have the same taste as the
Wealthy. And they do not want the government to develop a
secular competitor either.
Rather than paying for it as the Germans and
Viennese do, through the government and having it available to all, they refuse
to allow government funding and control it as their exclusive
domain. They fund it and fly around the world to enjoy it just as
most people go to McDonalds. I've seen wealthy people walk out of my
fundraisers simply because they saw someone of a different class in the
room. They are not interested in mingling, if you get my
drift. This is life in the real separate class world here in the US
and I wonder if when I speak of Art as jobs and everyone else speaks of
factories as jobs if this isn't that same mechanism at work.
Am I in the wrong room? I know and like you folks and I am
from the Indian Reservation where we were dirt poor, starving and suffered from
lead poisoning, but my work and the future of my work is the Arts and culture
and I resent its being hogged by the elite. Relative to what I
make I give more than any corporation would ever dream of giving to
culture. And I gave more than Enron literally gave to the Houston
Ballet, the Chamber Music Society and half of what they gave to the Houston
Opera last year. But I am not wealthy and I fund the Arts
because I believe in their worth and importance for my child and my
people. I ask again. Am I wasting my time
here?
Keith
> Mind you, there's hope for me yet and my reactionary old brain. The other
> day I heard a fantastic song on the radio and I had to make quite a number
> of phone calls to friends in order to identify what it was. It turned out
> to be from "Midsummer Night's Dream" by Benjamin Britten -- hitherto one
> of my b�te noires. I actually bought a CD as a result. (The rest is pretty
> weird though.)
> Mind you, there's hope for me yet and my reactionary old brain. The other
> day I heard a fantastic song on the radio and I had to make quite a number
> of phone calls to friends in order to identify what it was. It turned out
> to be from "Midsummer Night's Dream" by Benjamin Britten -- hitherto one
> of my b�te noires. I actually bought a CD as a result. (The rest is pretty
> weird though.)
REH
If the kids from the ghetto can learn it, you can
too Keith.
> Instead, the background music I'm currently playing as I plod through my
> daily routine is Handel's oratorio, "Israel in Egypt". Now there's singing
> for you! Oh for the days of such religious certainties! Oh for those great
> massed choirs! Oh for the exciting development of music that was going on
> in those days! Especially Handel -- giddy with excitement after returning
> from Italy where the music world was exploding with innovations.
The masses, the masses, sing sweetly for
armies, choruses and the masses.
Handel said upon writing "See the conquering Hero
come" from Judas M. give the
English a stirring march with chorus and they will
follow you anywhere.
I would as well. I was entrained
marching behind a drum majorette in short
skirt as I played the trombone behind
her. Now that is "entrainment." But in
the Army's Basic Training, I learned that Art is
far superior to life when it comes
to marching and war. Better that
we have real Art so that we can be wise in
life.
Ray Evans Harrell
P.S. if you look up the considerable Baroque
catalogue on Newport Classic CDs you will find that my old student John
Ostendorf, who I gave a scholarship to for 15 years so that he would have
the money to do develop his repertory of over 50 Baroque
recordings, is one of the world's premier baroque CD
producers. This includes the first recording ever of such
wonderful works as Imeneo, Seroe, Muzio and Ezio to mention but four of the huge
catalogue. This was done in the years after Vietnam and the advent
of AIDs. If you want to hear some wonderful singing listen to his
cuts on the recording "Where E're You Walk" on Newport where both John and
another student Peter Castaldi present fine performances although the supreme is
John. His voice and coloratura will take your ears
off. You can also find our recordings of Ned Rorem and Kurt
Vonnegutt at that same record label. Just look up the Magic Circle Opera
Repertory Ensemble. REH
