josh kopeček

I just read about the Open Letter to Sound & Music and Arts Council England from a large group of irate composers in Britain.

The situation is thus: a few years ago, the Arts Council England merged all the constituent parts of the ‘New Music’ scene into one organisation which covered everything from jazz, rock, and pop to contemporary composition. Previously these constituent organisations were principally responsible for the welfare and upkeep of contemporary composition. Society for the Promotion of New Music for contemporary (classical) composition, the British Music Information Centre for scores and recordings of the British contemporary (classical) scene, Sonic Arts Network for sound art (acousmatic composition, electronic music, musique concrete), and the Contemporary Music Network for the members of the above scenes. You might be forgiven for thinking these organisations were rather narrowly focused, but they had all existed for quite a substantial length of time, and represented the interests of a generation which still considered classical music and pop music as distinct, separate strains of development. They set out to provide mainly emerging classical composers with opportunities to have their (mainly scored) works performed by (at that time) healthy and well-supported contemporary classical music ensembles and orchestras.

Cue Sound and Music, and its shakeup of the music scene in Britain. In 2008 Sound and Music set out to support the British contemporary music scene from a different angle, not one centred directly on contemporary (classical) composition. They changed their focus from providing opportunities for emerging composers to supporting performing musicians, becoming a ‘producer’, as Norman Lebrecht terms it. I wholeheartedly, with the rest of the composition fraternity, jumped on this bandwagon, and Sound and Music kept up promoting opportunities for composers, as well as now making more of highlighting concerts outside London (which was always a huge beef for ‘regional’), and they supported the leading acts of the moment (as they saw fit), stalwart composers of the old school, and championed emerging composers. Unfortunately, what got lost in the meantime was the SPNM Shortlist, and the New Voices and Contemporary Voices schemes, replaced by the in-house Embedded scheme. However, you could say these opportunities were too contemporary (classical) composer specific, and given the new Sound and Music remit, only providing opportunities for a niche doesn’t particularly seem fair. So they were cut altogether.

A quick look over the Sound and Music website shows that there are plenty of opportunities for composers, and the composers I do know haven’t rested on their laurels waiting for the SPNM Shortlist to reappear. I, personally, don’t think it’s right to ask Sound and Music to reinstate an outdated, atavistic call for scores or apprenticeship programs. They need to be supporting both a range of contemporary schemes, most of which are already out there, and schemes across all of the musics which Sound and Music supports: ‘Electronic and Improvised; Noise and Art Rock; Notated and Modern Composition; Sonic Art; Multimedia and Cross Art Form; Jazz, World and Folk; and Alternative Rock & Dance’. So, I say ACE should ignore the Open Letter, as I have made clear in my explanation above that the people representing Notated and Modern Composition should have come to terms with the fact that they would get a smaller slice of the pie, both in these austere times and with the new Sound and Music remit.

Sound and Music got going at a particularly tricky economic time, and the funding cuts hit last year, with the government announcing it would cut ACE’s subsidy by 29.6%, and they passed on 15% of this to arts organisations, promising to taper the remaining deficit over the coming years. It subsequently announced it would be cutting core funding (arts organisations with 100% ACE funding) to 206 organisations. The Stage newspaper, as reported by the BBC, carried out a study on those organisations, finding that of the 206, 24 had closed or were in the process of doing so. This isn’t the whole picture, though. ACE subsequently funded 110 new organisations, and 182 of those who lost 100% of their funding are still surviving. Overall that’s an increase of 86 arts organisations in the UK who received support from ACE. Surely that’s something to be lauded?

This brings us back to Sound and Music. They’re advertising for a new Chief Executive, salary £50,000-£60,000. That seems a reasonable salary, considering the ACE Chief Executive is on £150,000+. With the current cuts going through, Sound and Music are likely to end up with a bunch of administrators minding the website, and not much more.

What this group of composers are lobbying for is precisely a website, as the ‘Provision for new music’ study, written by Eve O’Kelly and commissioned by the Holst Foundation, states. They want something that links together all the composers’, performers’, and organisations’ websites, and acts as the ‘first point of contact on everything to do with new British music. Online directories are a thing of the past, as Yahoo can testify, and Sound and Music is precisely there to provide a portal for new British music.

I don’t intend to provide an exhaustive analysis of the full debate that is going on, nor have I commented on the contentious issue of the composers wanting a venue in central London for performances and meeting, a view which is not shared by performers or organisations. Composers can discover their own opportunities, even without an umbrella body such as Sound and Music, and it is increasingly becoming the responsibility of the individual to make decisions for himself regarding a ‘career’ in new music. Help is still at hand, and Britain is still undoubtedly in one of the most privileged positions in the world with regards to support for the arts.

Arts Journal article on the Open Letter to Sound and Music and Arts Council England http://goo.gl/uwhTG
BBC article on the Stage newspaper’s report on arts funding cuts http://goo.gl/GI7Xw
Vacancy for Chief Executive of Sound and Music (deadline passed) http://goo.gl/2Wn1o
Holst Foundation commissioned studies on the Provision for New Music http://goo.gl/M2zxJ

My band Xeomistas played at Cinematheque on the 24th March 2012. Here’s an excerpt of ‘Assanhado’, by the great Jacob do Bandolim.

We Don’t Care About Music Anyway screened last night at ATK Cama bar in Hanoi. A few dozen people had turned out, looking sheepish while Trí Minh played, waiting for the film to begin. The event is sandwiched each night by live experimental music drummed up for the cause, obviously meant to complement the documentary itself. Trí Minh’s distorted post-techno sample-and-hold mashed-up beats assaulted the ears of the waiting crowd, unsure whether to stroke their beards, jive around like a child in a tantrum or plonk themselves down and wait for the feature. Most opted for the latter, when the chairs finally arranged themselves.

The film was a journey through the lives of eight different experimental musicians in the Tokyo scene. However, that doesn’t even come close to doing justice to what the film, and the music itself was. It took you on a journey through each of their mentalities, giving you an insight into what made each musician tick (or grind), but not simply from one perspective. Each musician had a chance to explain their philosophy, eloquently and in discussion, to play their music, in intimate, personal surroundings and on stage in wild abandon. At the same time the film examined the sound-world of Tokyo itself, interlacing common scenes of urban life, drawing attention to the very things which the musicians obviously incorporate into their performance, both rejecting, assimilating and regurgitating it at the same time.

It was an inspiring film, and I challenge anyone not to be moved by its eloquence and transparency. The music is at times lyrical, abrasive, shocking, powerful, quiet and funny, but above all the reason for all of it is intertwined into the narrative of the film. Trí Minh’s post-film performance almost seemed unnecessary, but he’s showing us that in Hanoi they know what’s going on, and although the scene is a world away from Tokyo, it knows where it’s going, and it has a voice.

It’s screening tonight and tomorrow night again in Hanoi at ATK Cama bar, 73A Mai Hắc Đế, and in HCMC/Saigon on Friday. Get down and see it, and hear the music.

I’m going to go ahead and criticise the Eigenharp alpha, after I just read this post on createdigitalmusic. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing step forward for digital instruments, away from the predominantly keyboard-based synthesisers of the 80s and 90s. The key + knob + slider combination has been going stale for a long time. There have been a huge number of experiments to date on different formats for new digital instruments, and there are more ideas out there than there is time to learn properly. It’s definitely the subject of another post to list a few major  developments in that field. However, it’s been discussed frequently that there are a number of factors which a digital instrument needs in order to have staying power.

Learnability:
Beginner to Advanced – There has to be a learning curve in the instrument, tending towards virtuosity. By this I mean anyone should be able to pick it up and make a sound out of it, but it should also provide reward for someone playing it. The Eigenharp provides this, something which, arguably, the Monome doesn’t.

Intuition:
Did I just play that? – Both beginners and professionals use intuition every time they play an instrument. Violinists ‘just know’ where their hands are, they don’t need to look, but there’s no restive state for a rotary encoder, it’s in the position you left it last… which was? Eigenharp has a restive state, which makes it easy to be intuitive, but it has a shortcoming, which I’ll come to later.

Repeatability:
Where’s that note? – You have to be able to repeat that sound that you made earlier. Simple, but it’s amazing on how many new digital instruments that’s (near) impossible. Take hacked wiimotes, for example. Try playing a tune, it’s more difficult than on an Ondes Martenot. The Eigenharp solves this by having individual keys for each ‘note’.

Stage presence:
Get ready to rock! – Most digital instruments aren’t pretty. Check out the Buchla Series IIe. Looks like a working station from a 1970s nuclear power station. Is that really what you want to look like on stage? Keytars nearly solved this problem, but you’re… a keyboardist who wants so desperately to be a guitarist. Eigenharp is an instrument in its own right, looking a bit like a bassoon shafted on to an electric upright bass, with a number pad glued on the front, but a bit sexier.

Ensemble playing:
Collaboration for geeks – You have to be able to play with other people, and them know what you’re doing. It’s often the case that a so-called ‘laptop performer’ has no place being on stage, since he has zero interaction with the audience, as in this example. You might be mistaken for thinking the laptop performer on the right was booking his return flights. With the Eigenharp you can see everything the player is doing. The performer action—sound connection is immediately apparent, and makes it a viable and flexible ensemble instrument.

Criticism:
You might be wondering why I’ve just praised the Eigenharp so far, when I stated at the beginning that I was going to criticise it. That’s because it goes so much further than other attempts at performer interaction, and it’s a valiant attempt at creating a new way at expressing your musical intentions that has never existed before. Also, the possibilities of sound control and manipulation are ten-fold what you’d have in a key-knob-slider configuration, without losing the repeatability discussed above.

The major shortcoming is the grid-style keypad. If I close my eyes, how do I know where I am without looking at the lights on the keyboard? I don’t! What acoustic instrument has a regular grid-like arrangement of keys? Shape is everything on a tactile instrument, like the width of a guitar neck is subtly different the further up you get. The piano has a distinct arrangement of black and white keys so you know what note your hand’s on before you play. You should be able to play a real instrument blind-folded, and this is where the Eigenharp is not worth its $4000 price tag.

True, this isn’t a major shortcoming, and I expect to see virtuoso Eigenharp players very soon. I truly respect and admire the desire to create a genuine musical heritage for digital music performance, and this development really expands the possibilities for live music performance. However, this isn’t the holy grail of New Interfaces for Musical Expression, but it is a very large stepping stone on the way.

Eigenlabs page for the Eigenharp Alpha
New Interfaces for Music Expression

You can now access and download my music easily via music.joshkopecek.co.uk

There will be scores and other media available there soon.

Two articles have come to my attention:

The first from the Economist on the necessity of doctorates. Being a doctoral student myself, many of the points of the article ring true. Read it here.

The second is a speech by Tom Service (of the Guardian) at the Sound festival, regarding the necessity of ‘contemporary classical music’. Being uncomfortably wedged into a spot that one might (with some clenching of teeth) call ‘contemporary classical’, this also rang particularly true for me. Read it here, plus a quick quote below:

“The problem I’m dealing with is that there are still some composers, institutions, and ideologies out there who are labouring under the misapprehension that what they’re doing is the single true path, the way of the future, the sole route to enlightenment, and the real reflection of our times – and I think that those ways of thinking can perniciously permeate contemporary classical musical culture.”

Comments on how the two articles may give a clue to the future of extended research into ‘new music’ are welcome.

The title of this recalls Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture. I have been working on this for quite some time.

A writeup of methods for calculating dissonance.

I wrote, as part of my Masters, an extended essay on the subject of dissonance. The proposal was that dissonance could be objectified, and subsequently used as a musical parameter. At the time I did not have at my disposal the means to be able to investigate this further, and as a result the findings were more theoretical in nature.

Rationale

I have always felt that dissonance was as strong a musical parameter as timbre, register or even harmony. However, it has always been approached from a traditional point of view, that is to say, subjectively: with precedence given to the ear (hegemony of the ear). “The introduction of polyphony was regarded as dissonant a millennium ago”, clearly suggesting that the boundaries for what is considered dissonant have moved considerably in the intervening years. Dissonance, from composition to the appraisal of music, has been subjectively assessed; other areas of music have been heavily academicised, harmony being the obvious example, and subjected to heavy scrutiny and intellectual rigor from the outset of musical notation. So why not dissonance?

Read more »

I read Sir Nick Serota’s article a couple of days ago in the Guardian with some interest. What particularly struck me was his mention of an “inevitable … savage reduction in support for individual writers, artists and composers”.

It strikes me this is not the best climate to be a composer, and his bleak picture of the future of the arts over the next few years compares well with what I have read elsewhere. He talks of a “discouragement of innovation”, things which Britain has been particularly good at, especially in sustaining the smaller art entities that actually contribute to a thriving scene. With the Arts Council taking massive cuts (possibly up to 30%) it may be time to either put away the score paper or do something radically different.

Finally I got around to changing The Monk’s Lesson recording to the version recorded with Christine Clancy at EMS earlier this year. You can listen to the stereo mix here (the original is quadrophonic). I strongly recommend you listen on headphones or with decent monitoring. I recorded all the samples for the electronics (and the recorded flute part) in 192khz at 24bit and did all my processing at full resolution. The result was a clarity and precision which I hadn’t achieved with previous works.

The Monk’s Lesson by joshkopecek

I’m currently working on a new large scale piece, hence the silence.

There will be, at some point, a post on the method used to generate some of the pitches for this piece. For this I used an (shock, horror) algorithm.

The instrumentation is:
string quartet
brass quintet
piano, laptop, soprano, electric guitar, and drum kit