Tech, Philanthropy, Composing
This year I gave my fifth annual talk at the Fresh Inc. Festival for young musicians. I love helping artists. As usual, I spoke about the role of crowdfunding in the life of a young musician. But I tried to take classical music’s privilege a bit more seriously this year, and to address the differences …
Continue reading “Acknowledging Privilege for Classical Arts”
Today Melody Kramer (who is awesome) published this essay on public media. She talks about how public media serves a public, and how a lot of the current fight over “traditional NPR” vs. “podcasts” misses the point of what’s happening. Linda Holmes also wrote a great re-framing of that debate. I’ve been following a lot …
Continue reading “The News and The Arts Have Similar Problems”
Next week I’m joining a really interesting conference that Sydney Skybetter has put together at Brown University. It’s a conference on the future of gestural interfaces. But Sydney calls them, I think rightly, choreographic interfaces. Sydney’s a choreographer, not a sensor designer or any kind of engineer. He’s looking at a serious set of problems …
The inaugural New Music Gathering just announced its line-up, and it’s really fun. I’m pretty excited to be speaking on some issues related to careers in the arts, and also to be doing what they’re billing as “therapy”, which is mostly “career therapy”. Given how much stress there is associated with being an artist, and …
There’s been a lot of great discussion of arts entrepreneurship on NewMusicBox recently. There’s a lot of good stuff there, and also plenty I disagree with. The emphasis on arts entrepreneurship in education in particular has come under some fire. Teaching young artists this stuff is about helping them to survive in an unfair world. …
Continue reading “Arts Entrepreneurship is a Resistance Movement”
At New Music USA, where I work, we publish NewMusicBox. Coincidentally, NewMusicBox is turning 15 years old this month, and there’s a great series of posts examining the site’s history (in related news, you should make a donation to keep the site going for another 15 years). Occasionally I’ll contribute an article to the site, …
There’s a fascinating discussion going on right now. It’s about what the arts sector will look like for the next couple of generations. The most recent chapter was started by Michael Kaiser, picked up by Diane Ragsdale, and then continued by Adam Huttler. Basically, Michael is arguing for increased efficiency in our organizations (better marketing …
Continue reading “The Met in HD, MOOCs, and the Distributors of the Future”
I’ve been saying it a lot recently: Ruckus NYC is a one-day conference and concert about art and the internet, happening on September 29th at Cooper Union. It’s going to be awesome. But something else has been bubbling up in my head, about why we’re doing this, and why it’s important. Neil Gaiman was right …
Which means that yes, I am asking you for money. It’s been about a year and a half, but finally, instead of writing about Kickstarter I am once again using Kickstarter. RUCKUS NYC means a lot to me, and I hope you’ll want to be a part of it. It’s the next step in work …
Apple has a ton of money. As their business grew, they kept a lot of it as a long term investment. They didn’t invest it in hedge funds or anything like that. They held onto it partly because Steve Jobs was kinda weird, but partly because all that money gave them safety and flexibility. They …
I entered this discussion from the point where it causes me personal discomfort: when discussing my career, my art and my work with more quantitative people, I sometimes confront the opinion that what I do is easy, or that I am missing something because I’m on the artsy side of the arts/science divide. (Matt Dunnam …
My last post, about the weird prejudice in technical fields that the arts are easy and artists lacking intelligence, got a great response. It’s a difficult issue to talk about, and I’m glad that what I wrote hit home with some people. If I’m very lucky it’ll make it a little easier for a few …
Continue reading “May I revise and extend my prior remarks?”
