Reblogged from meg's new music blog:

I always applaud music organizations that program concerts full of fresh pieces by young composers. Thus, though they may have overshot the mark a bit by programming no less than eleven pieces on Friday, I give due credit to NYC-based Quiet City for an ambitious, eclectic performance of new music.

The evening began with "No Hipster Hats" for trumpet and tape by…

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Really happy, then really angry.

I found that when I led off with the Ewazen upper, I was too happy to be angry with Linkin Park, and instead just found myself enjoying the band’s sound. The Ewazen gave me a more detailed emotional narrative so that when I came to Linkin Park, the emotions were not affecting me in any way, yet I still find the literal sound interesting enough to listen on.

The two pieces fulfilled two different functions: Ewazen was entertainment for my heart and brain, which like to be stimulated by finer textures, interesting or unique harmonies and tonalities, more specific emotional material.

LP was entertainment for my [soul?], which likes to hear music and sound purely for the aesthetic qualities.

So, two very different pieces of music performing entirely different functions.

For what functions do you listen to music?

For what functions do you write music?

This is my first project/prototype in the way of variable-length electronic landscapes. The piece functions by giving the player the freedom to progress through the music via advancing through a long series of “stopping points” constructed inside the music’s infrastructure. At any given point in the music, the performer can stop, decide, “I like the groove here, I think I’ll hang out here for 2 minutes,” and make it so. Or, “I’m not feeling this spot here as much as yesterday; I’ll only spend half the time I spent here last performance,” and make that so as well. Some places are a little more strict in how they must be played through, but assembling the score with multiple sorts of notation systems interwoven with each other. It’s still very much a prototype, which makes it exciting, because I already like where it’s heading and there’s so much more to do.

In Kanye West’s studio, there is a sign on the wall filled with rules to stay focused. Some of the signs read, “no tweeting”, “no negative blog viewing”, and “no hipster hats”. I used a photo of this motivation wall as my desktop background while working on this, and the working title sort of stuck. But what’s in a title anyway, besides an opportunity to hook someone into listening?

Built in Ableton Live’s session view from sounds crafted in Live’s arrangement view, performed with a Yamaha 8310z trumpet amped with a modified Silent Brass System.

Hatsune Miku, the explosively popular pop singer who is literally a synth.

Downtempo/chill beat: (with some awesome Chinese violin)

Pop/rock ballad form:

And my favorite setting for Miku, trance:

Composed with electronic samples both recorded and synthesized, pop melodies are presented in a sonic palette about as wide as YouTube is big, with the common ground in the singer, Hatsune Miku （初音ミク）: a synthesizer in Yamaha’s VOCALOID software with an associative anime character as an avatar.

What this means is that the people who write electronica have an instrument that can, with sometimes startling accuracy, synthesize a human voice singing with human emotion in a more relatable human way.  It only works accurately with Japanese lyrics (at least, English Miku songs sound ineffective to me), but the part that fascinates me is that electronic musicians have access, at the software level, to a pop-star voice with a pop-star image and large and international audience.

Mark Stewart has been quoted to me in advising to “spend a lot of time playing music people like, some time playing music some people like, and a little time playing music people don’t like.”  It leads me to question how large (and more importantly, how perceptive) an audience could be reached with the help of the Hatsune Miku name.  I wonder what the possibilities are of more skilled electronic musicians, or dare I ask, “classical” composers writing more experimental music with a frontline role by the world-famous animated pop idol?  Or even more interesting, just how experimental could you get with your Miku music and still pull in Miku’s fans?  One of these days, I’d like to do a call for works  and get some awesome composers to write with Miku.

The breadth of styles brings to mind Maroon 5, whose each subsequent album seems to be their best interpretation of the immediately current trends of pop music.  As a result of staying as current as possible in the widest public ear (which some would call “selling out”) they’re being known as a funky pop rock band, who now does hip-hop collaborations and clubbable songs.  Imagine then that as a composer, you had instant access to  compose with Adam Levine’s voice, and anything you wrote that was sung by Adam Levine could be posted onto the internet legally free and considered by the general audience to be “just the next Maroon 5 song”.  Of course Miku isn’t quite on popularity par with Maroon 5, but that’s the model we’re dealing with here.

I should also note that hearing what Hatsune Miku is capable of creating gives me a renewed appreciation of the nuances of a classically trained singer that can’t be recreated by technology [yet].

Reblogged from MARKETING THE ARTS TO DEATH:

I mentioned two posts ago that good marketing is based on a logical formula that looks like this:

We know you want x

We offer x

Thus we can reasonably project that you will do y

The x is the product you sell, of course, and y is the behavior you expect from your customers, i. e. "We know you want a great night out featuring dining, socializing and high quality artful entertainment.

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The speed at which we are sometimes required to compose.

This past summer I was required to create remixes of tunes I never heard because another composer missed their deadline. I had to have four remixes done for a dance performance in two day. This put me in quite the creative quandary. How was I going to keep this creative project from crashing 120 miles per hour into a concrete wall? I decided that the easiest solution was to dig into my hard drive and remix some of my old tunes. This approach worked for two of the remixes, but I became troubled when the remixes just sounded stereotypically like me. To avoid this performance turning into an obvious self-love fest , I decided that I needed to find somebody else’s music to remix.

I solved this problem by asking Adam to send me one of his electronic pieces and I could remix the tune right in the original Ableton Live set. I was forwarded this unreleased bizarre mash up of a spoken word chant by Adam and David Lang’s electo-violin face melting shred fest known as Killer. Adam sampled Killer and created a polyrhythmic industrial beat to emphasize the rhythms on his text about trees and leaves. I decided for my remix I would keep all of his clips the same, pitch the text, replace the killer samples with drum samples and increase the tempo to ludicrous speed. The result is this off-kilter drum beat that sounds like a full tool box in a broken washing machine with quantization.

For most of my music school training, I was taught to recreate the music as it existed on the page for best result. I don’t know if this process always results in the best musical product. I find myself more interested in taking the music on the page and mangling, transforming and wringing it into something completely alien. For now the meandering path is more interesting than the straight and narrow.

Reblogged from Musicuratum:

Official poster for S16 Luna Nera

Stylistically, it’s brought me to a weird territory – the music’s objective was to paint a landscape of a cold, claustrophobic subterranean world, in which kids slave inside caves mining for sulfur in turn of the century Sicily. When I first came to Manhattan, my room was barely a habitable size, with not a moment of sunlight through the lone window (I found a certain irony in this). As a recent transplant, I didn’t know many performers and didn’t have much in terms of audio gear, so I used what I had. The result was that I found a lot of sound design angles through necessity; processing my horn and voice through any and all available recording devices and software, recording background noise at Starbucks and turning it into compositional material, chopping and clustering and consolidating, and building.

The result is something I consider to be some of my best work ever.

I do hope you can join us for one of the twelve performances. Show list and preview clip below.

La Mama – La Galleria – 6 East 1st Street (btw Bowery and 2nd Avenue)
Nov. 15, 16 and 17 * at 8pm
Nov. 18 at 5.30pm
Nov. 20 and 24 at 8pm
Nov. 25 at 5.30pm
Nov. 27, 29, 30*, and Dec 1 at 8pm
Dec. 2 at 5.30pm

*w/ Italian Gala

Tickets $15/$10 (stdnts/snrs): CASH ONLY at the door, or available at the box office (located at 74 E 4th Street), by calling 212/475-7710, and online at http://www.lamama.org, or by clicking HERE