Tangent

Another creation between Evan Mazunik and myself.

Tangent (Nathan Pape & Evan Mazunik) by Nathan Alexander Pape

Over the River, Through the Woods

Evan Mazunik and I had a fruitful afternoon yesterday. Hope you enjoy.

Over the River, Through the Woods (Nathan Pape & Evan Mazunik) by Nathan Alexander Pape

There is more music from yesterday posted on my Soundcloud page.

Pare This Down to Something

It is a typical and logical view to see the composer as creator, the one who makes something from nothing – fills the void that was with content, knowledge, purpose. This model lends itself to the soundscape of old, the silent vastness of the farmland where true reflection can be done. The romantic ideal of the isolated genius only immersed in their own thoughts and creations, the outside world is not permitted into this process.

The practitioners of music now, and the listeners as well, are mostly surrounded by the opposite. The loud abrasive city is all around, even in solitude it is heard. The noise of media, advertisements, promotion – even the imagery is noisy. All of this noise is the potential. With all sound as music, music making is no longer creating but editing. No longer is something coming out of nothing. The potential for anything is always present. Even to carry on a tradition is to scrape away to reveal a form. There is the potential for everything, but we look for those that pare this down to something of seeming purpose.

Okkyung Lee video

Thought I'd share this.

Economics and Culture

I'm greatly interested in the influence that economic environments have on cultural stimulation. Naomi Klein has a very insightful point concerning the dependence of cultural institutions on the free labor of interns. This is from her book No Logo.

One thing you can say about the retail and service industries: at least they pay their workers a little something for their trouble. Not so for some other industries that have liberated themselves from the chains of social-security forms with such free-market gusto that many young workers receive no pay from them at all. Perhaps predictably, the culture industry has led the way in the blossoming of unpaid work, blithely turning a blind eye to the unglamorous fact that many people under thirty are saddled with the mundane responsibility of actually having to support themselves.

Writing about his former job, which involved hiring unpaid interns to send faxes and run errands for Men's Journal magazine, Jim Frederick notes that many of his applicants had already worked for nothing at Interview, CBS News, MTV, The Village Voice and so on. "'Very impressive,' I would say. By my quick calculations they had contributed, conservatively, five or six thousand dollars' worth of uncompensated work to various media conglomerates." Of course, the media conglomerates – the broadcasters, magazines, and book publishers – insist that they are generously offering young people precious experience in a hard employment market – a foot in the door on the old-fashioned "apprenticeship" model. Besides, they say, sounding suspiciously like McDonald's managers the world over, the interns are just kids – they don't really need the money.

And getting two "unreal" jobs for the price of one, most interns subsidize their unpaid day job by working in the service industry at night and on weekends, as well as by living at home to a later age. But in the U.S. – where it has become commonplace to hop from one unpaid culture job to the next for a year or two – a disproportionate number of interns, as Frederick observes, appear to be living off trust funds, seemingly without any immediate concerns about earning a living. But just as the service-sector employers will not admit that the youthfulness of their workforce might have something to do with the wages they pay and the security they fail to offer, you will never catch a television network or a publisher confessing that the absence of remuneration for internships might also have something to do with the relative privilege of those applying for these positions at their companies. This racket is not only exploitative in the classic sense, it also has some very real implications for the future of cultural production: today's interns are tomorrow's managers, producers, and editors and, as Frederick writes, "If you can't get a job unless you've had an internship, and you can't take an internship unless you can get supported by daddy for a couple of months, then the system guarantees an applicant pool that is decidedly privileged."

Music video stations such as MTV have been among the more liberal users of the unpaid internship system. When it was first introduced, the music video channel represented a managerial coup in low-cost, high-profit broadcasting since the stations primarily play videos that are produced out of house and supplied by record labels. While some stations, including Canada's MuchMusic, now play licensing and royalty fees to broadcast videos, these pale in comparison to the production costs of the videos in a single top 30 countdown. Inside the stations, on air-hosts, producers, and technicians work alongside unpaid, mostly student, interns who sometimes are rewarded with jobs and sometimes stay at the station for many months, hoping for their big break. Which is where the legendary success stories come in – the famous V.J. who started off answering phones, or the greatest success story of them all: the tale of Rick the Temp. In 1996, Rick won the annual "Be a Temp at MuchMusic Contest" and was welcomed to the station with cross promotional fanfare and branded giveaways. One year later, Rick was on the air in his new job as V.J., but the kicker was that even after he became a big star, he kept the moniker Rick the Temp. There was Rick on TV, interviewing the Backstreet Boys, and although he was always paid for his work, for would-be interns, his success served a daily advertisement for the glory and glamor that awaits if you donate your labor as a gift to a major media company.

Some of the references feel a little dated even though it was only written ten years ago. For example, MTV doesn't seem to play music videos anymore. But her point about only the privileged being able to afford taking part in the economics of cultural institutions is very persuasive to me.

For Satie

Simple sketch for a solo guitar piece. Dedicated to Erik Satie for obvious reasons.

For Satie by Nathan Alexander Pape

The Contradictory Nature of the Free Market and the Creative

I've been thinking over the annoyance that so many appreciators, myself included, of music have with the current hierarchy of the music industry. Though it tends to be the first point that people grasp onto, it is not the profit off of music by organizations that is the issue. If they were truly pushing the art form forward and keeping it abundant as part of our culture while making money, we should have no issue with it.

The issue, however, is linked to the profit making (though said profit is apparently shrinking this century). It is the age old tale of capitalism, to maximize profit one must be able to create a product for less while selling it for more. The idea behind this system is that an entity must conform to the expectations of the public in order to sell a product while simultaneously competing with organizations in the same field. Therefore, quality is upheld by public demand...right?

Well, if the public represents a well informed group of people, then yes, it will all balance out. But if the public is unaware of what actual quality is or has not been taught how to differentiate the many intricacies of a given topic, then it is up to the producers themselves to teach the public, to tell them what is good and what isn't, to show them the many possibilities. This goes for any field, medium, type of product.

Apply this model to music, or any art form for that matter. Consumption of music by the public is dependent upon taste. In a society where art and music are taught less and less in schools, it is up to other sources to generate interest and invariably shape the judgment of potential consumers. Who's influence will ultimately be able to reach more: one who holds a cultural tradition and the continuance of an art form dear or one who stands to profit of the same art form through public consumption? (No these two sides are not exclusive of one another, but stay with me for a second.)

With enough economic backing to support a great marketing campaign, either side could win, but money typically follows paths that lead to more money. Money moving towards cultural stimulation is like pumping water uphill.

So we have a ripe public full of consumers with little knowledge on the possibilities of the art form. What does an organization concerned with its profits produce in order to satiate the public hunger?

1. A cornucopia of options?
2. Or many variations of the same idea that can be marketed to appear as if they represent the spectrum of possibilities within the art form, thus shaping what consumers know to be possible and accept as appropriate?

The analogies to the food industry are plentiful, pun intended. Corn products have been disguised to create the appearance of an abundance of choices. The music industry isn't much different in its tactics, except that it doesn't have poorly designed government subsidies to spur its means of production.

For decades, bad music has been unleashed on the public through the record industry. It is easier to produce much of the same than it is to produce a wide variety.

This has shaped us as listeners in so many ways. For example, live acoustic performance of music has become a novelty in so many ways. It is not the only way to perform music. But it is a marvelously beautiful and important method. David Byrne explained the influence of architecture on music in a very clear presentation for TED.

There are musicians, record companies, and publishers that are expanding musical practices. We should be thankful for their push forward. But, as far as I can see it, this will always be an uphill battle.