(2011-03-01) Art Audience Mass Sweet Spot

Mark Bernstein fears we tend to use Crowd Sourcing for our evaluation of arts (incl Performing Art-s) while expecting perfection/polish in it. We don't trust our judgment and we don't trust art to be itself: we insist on that everything be a world-class, once in a lifetime marvel... Because we want every museum visit and every concert to be perfect, we've grown conservative and timid. We don't hear new music or see new plays, and most of us don't read a lot of new media. It's a blunder: famous names, costly tickets, and huge crowds can't always get you what you want... Less focus on best-sellers and more focus on connection would reward us all.

Mark links to a the transcript of a talk by Tom Service which focuses on "new Classical Music" composition. The expectation and even the desire on the part of the audience is that the new piece won't be any good. That's because the audience are often the composer's competition, since the majority of people who attend contemporary classical concerts are also composers, performers, or even writers... This non-enjoyment has an aesthetic dimension as well, since to enjoy yourself in any case probably means the music had too much of the things that most people value in other kinds of music – tunes, recognisable harmonies, maybe a bit of a groove, all things that for complex and often absurd cultural-historical reasons are deemed to be beyond the pale for contemporary classical music – which means that how much you didn't enjoy yourself is a badge of a new piece of music's potential value... My sense is that many young composers now realise that the game is up, that the conventional paths to fame and, er, fortune in contemporary classical culture just aren't worth the candle. Instead, they're better off on their own, not least because their music doesn't fit the line-ups of an orchestra, or even the 1 to a part ensembles of the Sinfonietta, or the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, or Liverpool's Ensemble 10:10, or Manchester's Psappha – a line-up and repertoire whose time has probably also come, has also become a living history more than something genuinely contemporary. Composers still need to make choices, of course; being open to the rest of the world does not guarantee the creation of great, or even good art in an of itself, and they will have to find their own limitations, draw their own lines in the shifting sands of musical culture. But composing without the fear of traducing the absurd unwritten laws of modernist composition will only be a good thing. Like Reich and Glass before them, today's composers have the chance to build their own communities of listeners and audiences – whether in the flesh or on-line – and make the music that matters to them for people who care about it – and actually enjoy it. This reminds me of 2010-12-01-HarbachMfaVsPublishing.

Challenges to a more experimental attitude:

• If ticket will cost $40, I'm less likely to take a risk.
• If travel time is over 30min each way door-to-door, I'm less likely to take a risk
• Experimental pieces tend to have short-LifeCycle, so greater risk to producer.
• Pieces requiring multiple performers have greater risk.
  • hmm, will we have a model of composing first for electronic recording (samplers), then revise/perform-live only if "accepted", perhaps via KickStarter? Publish Then Filter Then Package?
    • a sort-of-example: Frank Zappa wrote G Spot Tornado for Syn Clavier so he wouldn't have to deal with live musicians. Later, Ensemble Moderne recorded it.