thoughts on electroacoustic music presentation?

[carey dodge]

Hi all,

I just read an article in the New York Times and it touched on some ideas I've been thinking about and have thought about for a long time:

Is it a disservice to electroacoustic music to have a whole bunch of music one after the other?
Or, should electroacoustic music concerts be limited to 1/2 hour chunks or the like?
Or, is most electroacoustic music like a main course meal and we only need one in an evening, preluded with appies and followed by dessert?

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/arts/music/review-a-mix-of-sounds-at-the-new-york-city-electroacoustic-music-festival.html?_r=2&referrer=

[Michael Gogins]

I thought the review (I assume you are talking about the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival) was not so bad. Not sympathetic to the genre, but not unsympathetic. The reviewer found two problems: a repetitive hearkening back to an older style and, implicitly, a lack of quality in the pieces as whole (the reviewer did like some of the pieces). I would point out that the reviewer came on Tuesday. This was a favor to the festival as it might alert people to the possibility of coming on the weekend, but I think the quality of the pieces on the weekend might possibly be higher.

I would ascribe the hearkening back to an older style as being, indeed, a feature of electroacoustic music that is associated in some ways with the academy. This of course does not mean that the music is bad. I felt that the festival organizers (of whom I am one, but by no means the most active!) made real and successful efforts to solicit and present a wider variety of styles, but this might not be so apparent to the reviewer.

As to the quality level, a festival like this can only exist because it convinces a few hundred musicians that they have a chance to present their work. it is more or less a self-funding proposition. Indeed the audience consists mostly of composers and performers. (Though not entirely.) Currently only a very few "electroacoustic musicians" make enough money from their work to live on. This is a sign that the public for this art is small. That being so, crossing the divide from self-funding with a lower bar for entry, and funding from ticket sales or grants with more winnowing, is difficult.

I'm hard to please, and on Wednesday afternoon I enjoyed about half the pieces I heard, and I heard two or three that I would very much like to hear again. So I'm happy. I recognize that I am not the general public.

To address your specific points, I do not think it is a disservice to electroacoustic music to have a whole bunch of music, one after other other, or otherwise.

I do not think concerts should be limited to chunks.

I sort of agree with your third question (or point), fewer concerts should mean a higher level of quality. But they we are back to the self funding and, for that matter, the self audience.

Finally, a review from the New York Times is good to have. If it is possible to enlarge the audience, this can only help.

Regards,

Mike Gogins

-----------------------------------------------------

Michael Gogins
Irreducible Productions
http://michaelgogins.tumblr.com
Michael dot Gogins at gmail dot com

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[Kevin Austin]

Thanks.

IMV - start

Many of these points I have pondered for a couple of decades. In some ways it was easier before the major technological developments of the past 15-20 years. There was less competition, that is, fewer practitioners of the discipline, the creation of exceptional sound was more difficult, and the presence of so much high quality cinematic/gaming sound design was significantly less.

There was a time when to hear new work the listener had to travel to a center, be it local, national or international, or get a CD delivered to the door. There might be a couple of hundreds of practitioners, but these were whittled down to the tens and twenties by a system where hearing lots of new work was simply very difficult, and very expensive.

Twenty years ago the transitions began in earnest. Software became easier to use, computers faster, more speakers, and slowly pop musicians were integrating ea technologies more frequently. Funding began to shift things. Centers with money began to answer the funding bodies’ new mantra of outreach and audience development. Sound events with 25 people spending an afternoon on the grass cooking hotdogs didn’t get much attention. In Montreal, concerts with 50 or fewer in the audience were artistic events. Concerts with 600 people were loud, or very loud, or very very loud, and had budgets which reflected the social importance of the event.

The audience is the under-30 generation; it is a social event, an atmosphere, a vibe, an entraining experience; big screens, big lights, big buzz, big bucks; the model is the stadium concert – very hot, not the reflective chamber music roots of ea as an art.

Carey asks whether the concert presentation should be limited in length, and treated like a restaurant meal. I go to conferences where the technical staff is two people, with 20 minutes of rehearsal for a seven minute piece. And an audience of 40 or 50. Or fewer.

This is not S.A.T.

This: http://sat.qc.ca/en is la SAT. Gaming, food, education, conferences, video, tech, DJs, VJs, beats . . This is where the action is, and this is where the younger generation [read: 13 to 24 year old [males]] are headed.

IMV - end

Kevin

[Michael Gogins]

Thanks for the information about S.A.T, I knew there was some sort of scene like this but not much more than that.

Regards,

Mike

-----------------------------------------------------

Michael Gogins
Irreducible Productions
http://michaelgogins.tumblr.com
Michael dot Gogins at gmail dot com

[jef chippewa]

i don't think the problem is the concert length at all. the article
almost touches on the "sameness" of so many pieces without committing
to discussing it (1). and the writing in the article is quite banal,
descriptive more than informative. so it is hard to judge if the
problem was the programme/programming or rather the author's aural
exhaustion and his standard and simplistic description of the pieces
programmed (1).

since last year i have presented a curated concert of miniatures in
several venues and it works really well, because (in my opinion)
there was choice in not only the pieces to be presented but also in
the order. there is a large variety of aesthetics in the programme
but i managed to find a very effective flow that offers the listener
a kind of narrative dramaturgy that has a natural and inviting ebb
and flow of differing artistic intentions, aesthetics, sounds and
materials.

if i presented a concert where all works on the programme were of the
standard acousmatic, standard sounds, standard plugins, standard
formal processes and standard length bent, then yeah the concert
would very quickly seem too long to me... like after the 2nd piece.

when there are "27 concerts over eight days" one way to avoid
exhaustion is to simply skip a large number of the concerts. instead
of complaining about there being too much to listen to, be more
selective as a listener. we do hit a point of exhaustion in
listening, after all, and once we pass that point, our experience of
just about any piece is going to be slightly to very negative.

1) "... a uniformly creeping, creaking, popping, shimmering
soundscape familiar to aficionados of classic horror and sci-fi film."

keep on rocking in the free world
jef