Free music - so what's new?

'Music industry finds the solution to its pirate troubles - give everything away' - screams a Guardian headline. Sorry folks, but the classical sector has been giving away music for years. Here from my current Visa bill are the prices I paid for CDs online recently including delivery: Messiaen Des canyons aux étoiles (2CDs) - £4.00, Dallapiccola choral works - £3.41, Stockhausen piano works - £4.22, Elgar Dream of Gerontius (2CDs) - £5.67.

It actually gets worse in the stores. Just last week I bought 10CDs of Thomas Tallis' complete works in recordings made as recently as 2004 for £3 a CD, and that wasn't discounted. In HMV stores you can currently pick up 14CDs of the complete Mahler symphonies by classical music's premium brands, Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, for £1.79 a disc. That means a Mahler CD from our industry's most prestigous band now costs less than a cappuccino, and it's not expanding the market for classical music or filling concert halls at all.

So with prices already at rock-bottom what will be the impact of free downloads from Qtrax and others? Classical music will become just another disposable commodity. Download it, give it a quick listen, it doesn't appeal on first hearing? No problem, delete it and try again. Contemporary composers had better start thinking catchy, and record companies (if any survive) had better start thinking instant gratification.

Benjamin Britten had it nailed when he wrote 'Music demands more from a listener than simply the possession of a tape-machine or a transistor radio. It demands some preparation, some effort, a journey to a special place, saving up for a ticket, some homework on the programme perhaps, some clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts. It demands as much effort on the listener's part as the other two corners of the triangle, this holy composer, performer and listener'

So what does a dead composer (European to boot) know about today's market with its MP3s and iTunes? The answer is a lot. Britten wasn't just a composer, he was a musical polymath whose vision created one of the few successful, and growing, classical music communities in the world. Last year Aldeburgh Music sold 91,000 tickets. I wonder how many bargain basement Berlin Philharmonic Mahler boxes EMI has sold in the UK - 5000 perhaps? The solution for the music industry isn't to give everything away. It's the opposite. Think added value, think Glossa, think Soli deo Gloria, but above all think Alia Vox.

Now playing is Jordi Savall's newly released Francisco Javier 1506-1553, the Route to the Orient on Alia Vox. Yes, it comes with 2CDs of lovingly researched and performed music, but there is much more in the form of a 273 page colour book (cover above) which is a work of art in itself. In it there are fascinating and scholarly articles ranging from early music performance, to Erasmus of Rotterdam, Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas More, and Martin Luther, as well as Francisco Xavier, who was an early Jesuit missionary, himself. And the whole package is worth far more than the sum of the parts. I paid £30 for it in Prelude Records in Norwich, and that is the best £30 I have spent on recorded music for a long time. I didn't get two CDs for my money, I got a unique musical experience. And that is what will rejuvenate the market, not giveaways.

Britten would have approved. The Route to the Orient is about as far from instant gratification as you can go. It demands preparation by reading the book, and it also demands effort to understand the non-Western music that it explores. You must leave your computer and take a journey to a special place called an independent record store to buy it, and you will also need to save up as it is not available online at a discount or as a download. The thoughtfully planned multi-cultural programme needs to be understood, and clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts are definitely needed for close encounters with instruments such as the shinobue, nokan, sarod and shakuhachi.

Are added value projects like Francisco Javier, the Route to the Orient and Christopher Columbus, Lost Paradises (below) the future of classical music? Or are they just small ripples in a big pond? Only time will tell. But I haven't heard Alia Vox talking about mass redundancies, and their 2008 release schedule looks pretty healthy. Which is more than can be said for EMI.


It was Philip Glass who said world music is the new classical.
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Found - thousands of happy new ears

In only six weeks more than a thousand people have visited the Overgrown Path podcast page on iTunes, and this week James Weeks talking about the music of Elisabeth Lutyens has been added to my David Munrow and Alvin Curran podcasts. Doesn't that level of interest in music from the long tail tell us something?

Elsewhere there has been some good humoured discussion of Angela Hewitt world Bach tour T-shirts, with one defender of the Bach world tour marketing machine writing - 'I think you are missing the point here, which is trying to get new people interested in her, giving her profile in the press and recognition ... every interview, every talk show appearance is promotion.'

Every talk show appearance may be promotion. But all promotion is not good promotion. And promoting serious music to mass markets is a risky business. There are very few examples of large, and loyal, new audiences being created by mass marketing. But there are numerous examples that ended in tears, where mass marketing failed to attract a new audiences, but instead drove away the core audience. The most obvious example is BBC Radio 3, where going mass market has failed to attract Classic FM listeners, but has instead, literally, switched-off the network's core audience and resulted in a net loss of listeners.

New audiences are essential for the health of serious music, but so is being realistic. We live in an age of instant gratification, and today's arts administrators and broadcasters want immediate access to new mass audiences. This is not only unrealistic, it also often achieves the opposite result to that intended. New audiences can be reached, but we need to be less greedy and more adventurous to reach them.

As always on this blog these are my personal views. But they are based on real world experience. Yes, the sample size may be small, but, as I have pointed out before, the samples are larger than the focus groups used by the BBC and others. And before the cynics sniff at a few thousand listeners for David Munrow and Alvin Curran they should remember that it was revealed recently that Rupert Murdoch's new satellite Fox Business Network is attracting an average of only 6,000 daytime viewers.

The new audience for serious music is in the receptive long tail, not in the mass market short head. The long tail of classical music has received much attention recently. But there are many other long tails - for literature, for the visual arts, for the cinema, for techno and electronic music, and others. There is overlap, but there is also a sizeable new audience for serious music waiting in those other long tails. These are people who have been driven away from classical music by BBC TV's Classical Star and Classic FM's music for dinner parties. They see serious music today as being unexciting. They don't want to be talked down to by chummy radio presenters. They want the adventurousness of Boulez in the 1970s at the Round House and Proms in London, and at the Rug Concerts in New York. But, with a few notable exceptions, we are not giving them what they want.

I have talked to some of the new audience that my internet radio programmes and blog have reached. They told me they bought CDs and downloads of music by Guillaume Connesson, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Conlon Nancarrow and others after discovering them On An Overgrown Path. These new listeners are well educated, have disposable incomes, are interested in the media, travel extensively, have expensive stereo systems, watch art films, and read contemporary fiction. But they listen to non-classical music because they find it more exciting and challenging. They are the long-tail dwellers, they are a receptive new audience for serious classical music, but we need to be a lot more adventurous to reach them.

Sir Brian McMaster arrives at the same conclusion in his controversial and brave report on funding in the UK arts which was published last week. In the report he recommends 'that cultural organisations stop exploiting the tendency of many audiences to accept a superficial experience and foster a relationship founded on innovative, exciting and challenging work'. Or, as that great arts administrator and BBC Radio 3 controller John Drummond wrote "the arts are as much about controversy as about achievement".

We need to be more adventurous and controversial. We already have the exciting music. We should stop apologising for it.

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New music premiere for internet radio

Inner Cities are where you go to get debriefed, to watch Trisha Brown levitate on Bach in San Francisco; to help Cage squeeze lemons into his fresh taboule on 18th Street and watch David Tudor mix chili peppers and lasers at the Grand Hotel des Palmes; to play the Sydney Harbour like a bandoneon; to teach advanced-orchestration in the Greek Theater at Mills College with Pauline Oliveros and the ghost of Harry Partch; to shake Stravinsky's hand in the American Sector-Berlin and Varese’s in New Haven; to watch Kosugi dance his electric violin around Marcus Aurelius; to get thrown off stage in London as a warmup act for the Pink Floyd; to meet Stockhausen at a strobe-light show in Düsseldorf; to open windows on Cage’s cue for adding real cold air to his Winter Music; to camp out with Teitelbaum and Rzewski for Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point; to hear Terry and LaMonte’s landmark concerts at the Attico in Rome ...

Inner Cities is a twelve part cycle for solo piano that lasts for four hours twenty-four minutes and twenty-two seconds. Its composer Alvin Curran studied with Elliott Carter, and founded Musica Elettronica Viva with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum. The notes above and below are by Alvin Curran.

Inner Cities 10 is dedicated to the Belgian pianist Daan Vandewalle. His repertoire includes Ives, Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Cage and Clarence Barlow, and he has had works written for him by Fred Frith, Chris Newman, and Frederic Rzewski as well as Alvin Curran. Daan has played Inner Cities complete in concert, and has recorded it on the Long Distance label.

Inner Cities has never been broadcast complete to our knowledge. But on December 5th Future Radio is letting me go where others fear to tread. The four and a half hour cycle will be broadcast complete on that day without any announcements or advertisements, and Daan Vanderwalle will be introducing the performance with me. The programme starts at 12.01am on Wednesday December 5th, which is afternoon or evening the previous day in North and South America. Convert to your local time zone here.

Inner Cities described by Daan Vandewalle can be heard as a podcast from iTunes. If you do not have iTunes installed click here to download it. With iTunes you can subscribe to future On An Overgrown Path podcasts.

Inner Cities photographs are by me, and show the Cité du Livre and the Pavillon Noir in the Avenue Mozart in that most musical of cities, Aix en Provence. Alvin Curran has the last words ...

Inner Cities contain no "drive-by" anything; there’s merely back alleys, empty lots full of stubborn weeds and clear sky, trails of memory which may or may not lead anywhere or even have relevance to the music at hand. The bottom line: these pieces are a set of contradictory etudes - studies in liberation and attachment, cryptic itineraries to the old fountain on the town square whence flows all artistic divination and groping for meaning in the dark.

Inner Cities complete continues the proud tradition established by WHRB's classical music 0rgies. Yet more confirmation of the importance of the long tail of radio
Photos (c) On An Overgrown Path 2007. Listen by launching the Radeo internet player from the right side-bar, or via the audio stream, on Wednesday December 5 at 12.01am UK time. Convert time to your local time zone using this link. Windows Media Player doesn't like the audio stream very much and takes ages to buffer. WinAmp or iTunes handle it best. Unfortunately the royalty license doesn't permit on-demand replay, so you have to listen in real time. If you are in the Norwich, UK area tune to 96.9FM. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk