Heart-warmed By My Fans

There was a post recently on reddit.com. Someone mentioned something about Civilization IV's music, and then all these people started chiming in about the new album. I had a nice boost in sales that evening. All in all, a happy moment for me.

But what I really found heartwarming was the fact that there was a genuine, concerted effort on the behalf of all those people to help support my music by buying my album, and encouraging others to buy it as well. There was actually one person who posted an illegal filesharing download link of my album--and when I saw that, I have to admit, my heart broke a little bit. But then his post was quickly deleted, and he was shouted down by several other posters who came in and suggested that people support my music.

I was touched. (Thanks Kardionoc, RedSnt, APeacefulWarrior and petawb.)

Many music fans don't realize this, but a lot of artists are severely emotionally attached to the work they do--myself included. And when people just post an album that you spent four years of your life perfecting onto some pirate site, it just kills us.

Thoughts On Instrumentation

It dawned on me the other day about the importance of instrumentation to the promotion of music. Many times the instrumentation that you select for a song--whether it be solo piano, orchestral, or pop--will make your listener decide immediately whether they want to continue to listen to your music. Here's what I mean...

If you're flipping through radio stations, catch a quick ad on TV, or even stumble across a user's MySpace page on the internet, the first thing that you'll hear when a piece of music starts playing is its instrumentation. Even before you hear lyrics, even before you hear a melody, even before you can figure out how fast a piece of music is, you'll immediately identify what's playing it. You may not know the specifics--is that an oboe or English horn? Nylon string guitar or finger-picked acoustic?--but you'll immediately get a rough sense of what's producing the sounds that you hear. And based on that snap judgment, chances are you'll immediately know what genre of music it is, and based on your existing biases, make a decision whether you'll want to keep listening or not.

In this day and age, most music is stumbled upon--that is, you casually came across it in an iPod commercial, or an episode of Grey's Anatomy, or even a video game. So what if the choices that you make in instrumentation are SO powerful, and SO compelling, that the moment someone hears the combination of instruments that you use, they're compelled to keep listening? That would be a powerful tool.

There's not a lot of music out there with instrumentation this compelling, however. If you work within a specific genre, a lot of times your instrumental choices will be made for you--acoustic instruments for country, electronic for electronica, beats for hip hop, orchestra for classical, etc. So to find stuff like this, one probably has to turn to more crossover artists. To give you a few examples, the first time I heard Bjork was a revelation. The way she would mix delicate timbres like a music box with heavy electronic beats in 'Pagan Poetry' was inspired:

I was not a huge Sting fan, but the first ever single I bought of his was his duet with Cheb Mami on the song 'Desert Rose', which I first heard in a Jaguar commercial. The mix of commercial production with Arabic vocals grabbed my attention, and I went and bought the track:

Peter Gabriel's 'Passion' soundtrack was a huge inspiration for me. Talk about fusing world music elements with synths... Peter Gabriel rewrote the rule book on this one.

My friends the On Ensemble do great work like this as well--fusing traditional Japanese music with hip hop and electronica:

And let's not forget all the excellent African music/pop fusion that's been done out there, by the likes of Paul Simon in Graceland and Hans Zimmer for The Lion King, perhaps the music that 'Baba Yetu' gets compared to most often. (Personally, while I love Hans' music and admire him as a composer, I don't think Baba Yetu and The Lion King are really all that similar. Most people make the comparison because it's the closest cultural reference they have to anything that's an African choral hybrid, but neither of us were the first to fuse African choral music with orchestral writing, and hopefully neither of us will be the last.)

Thoughts On Paris

I spent last week in Paris.

If you ask me, it's a very introspective city for artists of all types. It's not just the fact that there are seemingly hundreds of museums, galleries and concert halls scattered across the city; it's the fact that people *talk* about art over lunches, dinners and coffees. (Well, at least the people I was hanging out with do.) But apart from that, it's a city that, over the centuries, was not just a mecca for artists and musicians, but also found itself at the center of many of the major turning points of artistic evolution. So suffice to say, there's a certain mystique here that you don't get in your typical American city.

The trend during much of the 20th-century was for artists and musicians to identify themselves very strongly with movements. Everyone was an 'ist' of sorts... a cubist, a surrealist, an abstract expressionist. Composers were serialists, brutalists, impressionists, minimalists. Where are the 'ists' now? Gone. Fallen out of favor with the idea of post-modernism; that we can freely mix and match styles and approaches at our whim... that we no longer have to belong to a school, that there no longer has to be a schism between academic and populist, Uptown and Downtown. But there's part of me that thinks that it certainly would have been nice to identify oneself with a movement. To, say, have a manifesto like the Futurists did, laying claim to an artistic identity. Maybe I'm romanticizing it; after all, my own music (and in fact my own cultural identity) is certainly a mix of various influences.

While we're at it, what happened to the idea of artists and musicians being aware of the social, political and aesthetic world that they live in, and responding to it through their art? Futurism was the celebration of speed; an artistic reaction to the emergence of a world where humans could suddenly travel great distances at great velocities via trains. Post-war expressionism emerged out of the horrors of the first World War, in which a newfound fear of death--by explosions tearing bodies apart, clouds of mustard gas, etc--manifested itself in the works produced. The last time I can think of an era manifesting itself in the works produced would have been the Vietnam War era, through protest songs and the like. That was 40 years ago. What happened to artists responding to the ages in which they live? Has this been killed by consumer culture?

I spent a full day at the Centre Pompidou, checking out their permanent collection, as well as shows of Calder and Kandinsky. The building itself is pretty photogenic. It gave me ample opportunity to play with my new Canon wide-angle lens (10-22mm). (I'm still new to wide-angle photography, so I'm still trying to figure out how to keep things visually interesting... heck, I'm still working on how not to underexpose all the images, as the wide angle allows so much light that it's throwing off my light meter.)

A funny thing seen inside one of the restroom stalls in the museum:

I immediately recognized this as a coy reference to Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain'--a seminal work of art, and one of his Readymades--a series of common, everyday objects that were placed in a museum to challenge the public's perception of what art is. I.e., if you stick a toilet in a museum and call it art, is it art?

I walked upstairs, and lo and behold, there was the original.

So now the question becomes, if you stick a reference to a work of art on a toilet, is the toilet now a clever bit of post-modern referential art? And does it challenge our perceptions of what a toilet is?

No. Not really.