Sunday, October 10, 2010

yesterday i had an interesting conversation with chris kallmyer at the little william theater. i generally do. he said something thats been resonating with me. he said that he thought contemporary composing was beginning to cycle back to the days when composers like mozart not only wrote the music but they brought it all the way through to production and finally also conducted and performed the work. we were talking at the time about "classical" contemporary (whatever that really means) but i think that the same thing applies to music in general. through the confluence of a few different things, artists do alot more these days than just write or perform music. and this applies to bands and djs and solo artists et cetera. the rise in frequency of the multi instrumentalists, the rise of home studio recording, the increased quality of the affordable home studio, the drop in available recording budgets large enough to live and produce on with the accompanying drop in royalty monies; the list goes on. whether or not that is a good thing i dont know. thats a discussion topic for another day but i do think we can all agree that artists are increasingly more involved in most parts of the process. there will of course still be big acts, christina aguilera or some other mouseketeer types, that are performers in the previous sense. but the rest of us in the creative middle and lower classes are clearly wearing many more hats. personally, it was a conscious decision, a few years ago, to learn more about the technical side of music making. i couldnt make mortgage payments waiting for bands in need of a bass player to come calling. i had a really good run of that but it was neither interesting nor sustainable. then more recently my goal became even more refined and ambitious, i wanted to see if i could get to the point that i could record my work well enough to drop it directly onto the net. i think it was survival instinct that brought this about but thankfully i have ultimately found it fascinating and inspiring. it intersects nicely between my interests in science, tech, design and art. so in summation, i have no summation. i will disregard the dictates of formal essay form and just end a damn post. thats what i was thinking about. have a nice day.

5 comments:

matt volpe said...

Hey Eric - Interesting observation that is probably taken for granted in today's day and age. Any child growing up now and involved in music composition will never really know no other way but to be fully immersed and involved in most if not all the aspects of music making. I am personally at the a similar stage to where you were some years ago, being a bass player who's called upon to perform. I do dabble in recording and posting songs on the net, but not nearly as much as someone as yourself or many others out there. But I can certainly see how that would be hard to make a living, just being strictly a player. Fortunately in my case, I have a day job that pays the bills, and playing bass is labor of love and a severe passion of mine. Speaking to your observation, it is similar to how in my field of work (making television promos) the trend now is not to be just a writer and producer of promos, but to be the writer, producer and editor and sometimes even the composer of promos. I edit on Final Cut pro and sometimes even compose music for my spots as well. Occasionally I'll even distribute promos on the net, when the network I work for does not air them enough (in my opinion). All of this is very parallel to what you are saying about music. Interesting. Have a good day. Matt

Semiramis said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Semiramis said...

Cummon just say the dabbling is over and RELEASE something haunting and folkish and atomospheric. Am glad you quit working at the fruity accounting firm of Navarro, Perkins & Farrell.

Tanya said...

I think, to a certain extent, this is happening in general, not just in artistic endeavors. With the technology, and economic realities in play, there are opportunites wide open, if we want them.
Btw, thanks for the little peeks behind the curtain, so to speak.

Anonymous said...

I'd like to hear thoughts on whether it's a good thing for a musician to wear all the hats. Or any other profession. If nothing else you have a better idea how to communicate what you want if you decide to use a producer, etc. in the future.

Are you sure a log is supposed to use a formal structure? I thought it was just a cataloging of a days actions and thoughts. So you can go back and see where you were at in a certain point in time. Or in the case of ideas, to get the initial idea down, then mull it over later. (Later being whenever you've got time and have had a bit of space so you can look at the idea more objectively.)