At 10am (CT) Co-Artistic Director Marcia Kamper will appear on Omaha Living on Fox Channel 42 (KPTM), and at 11:30am (CT) she’ll appear on the midday news broadcast with John Oakey on ABC Channel 7 (KETV).

Then at 4:30pm (CT), Co-Artistic Director Joe Drew will appear on the Tom Bekka show on NewsRadio1110 AM (KFAB).

Co-Artistic Director Joe Drew dispells the myths surrounding the ‘riotous’ premieres of The Rite of Spring and Ballet Mecanique in this podcast.

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I speak to all performers of new music who have ever had the experience of dealing with antiquated publishers whose ways remain unchanged since the days of quill and parchment! 

 When a great living composer has a premiere in some metropolitan center and your

How much $ has John Harbison already lost?

interest is piqued, rare is the publisher who can actually show you the score without weeks, if not months, of wrangling and miscommunication. If you are a clarinetist, and you see that a new piece has been written by a German composer for your instrument, good luck to you on securing a copy of the score for performance the next month. You will have an easier time imagining what the piece might sound like and writing it down yourself. 

I have, at times, waited half a year for publishers to respond to my requests for scores, and it’s not as if I requested a block of cheese from a cobbler. These pieces are listed in the publishers’ catalogues, clearly advertised for sale! Why then should it take a publisher six months just to figure out if they can actually sell it to you? 

The technology exists to send a score across the world instantaneously, but rare is the publisher who could even fathom the notion, let alone put it into practice! 

George Gershwin used to sit in a window and plug his latest tunes so that you could walk in off the street and buy it on the spot. Woe to the composer who advertises his latest work on his blog. Unless he’s self-published, that fellow turns his readers over to the incompetents in charge of his canon. 

It’s been a decade since Amazon, and half that since iTunes. Why the music publishers cannot adjust to the modern age should be a cause for concern for every musician. How many dollars have composers lost because their publisher bungled their catalogue? How many performances of new works have been abandoned because of the demoralizing morass that is the music publishing industry? 

We demand: 

1. Digital delivery of any score in a publishers catalogue
2. Instantaneous access to new musical works through online previews
3. For composers to demand better representation from their publishers!

‘I’m not a futurologist, but when I think about the future I do have the feeling that I have, in a certain sense, a responsibility for which direction I would like music to move in. History has proved that the way society develops tells you how music will develop, and basically it’s very clear that it develops where the money is - we’ve seen that in Dijon in 1400, in Florence later, and so on. I consider specifically American culture, with its incredibly important influence from different cultures on one another. A composer like Morton Subotnick grew up in San Francisco, and by the time he was about 23 he had heard hundreds of Chinese operas but never a single Beethoven symphony. I suppose - and this is also to do with communications - that this interchangeable influence will become more and more important. I think we will be very happy when we can get rid of all nationalist feelings. I think states are totally old-fashioned, one of the last remains of the middle ages, and the sooner we can get rid of all borders the better.  (more)

Two of ARTSaha! 2007’s biggest contributors are Kyle Gann and Yamaha.

Kyle has been a huge help in tracking down Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies in MIDI form, and we are excited to be presenting his Unquiet Night on September 8.

Yamaha is one of the festival’s corporate sponsors, and it is their disklavier that is making the entire 9/8 concert possible. On their website, they’ve published a nice profile of Kyle and his groundbreaking work with their instruments.

BUENA PARK, Calif. — Acclaimed composer, author, Village Voice new music critic and educator Kyle Gann first encountered a Yamaha Disklavier^® in the early ’90s at Bucknell University, when a colleague employed one in rehearsals for singers. “I was working on my book, “The Music of Conlon Nancarrow” (Cambridge University Press, 1995),” says Gann. “He wrote three-quarters of his music for player piano, and his compositions are considered to be among the most rhythmically complex pieces ever written; no human could ever play them. Even if you had a player piano, you couldn’t write for it without a hole-punching machine (which Nancarrow had someone invent for him).”

“the day of the ’school’ has, since that of Darmstadt, finished and given way to an oral tradition which depends on the personal school of the single pupil” — Franco Donatoni

Although not part of the Marinetti camp in Italy, H. Lyman Sayen was an American inventor and artist that took every advantage of the new modern ideas.  His paintings exhibited qualities of Fauvism, Futurism and Post-Impressionism.

Marinetti viewed war as ‘the world’s only hygiene’, but this was no youthful fantasy. Until the end of his life, he employed the same kind of breathless rhetoric, as seen in this illuminating article from The New York Times, published on December 5, 1940.

“Signor Marinetti’s Audience”

It is not news that an Italian Futurist poet, major Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, defended “the aesthetics and beauty of war” in an address delivered this week before a Roman audience. It is news, and good news, that a part of the audience audibly signified before the lecture was over that enough was enough. Such an incident could hardly occur in Berlin, where war is taken seriously as Hitler’s great gift to mankind. In Italy there seems to be some survival of the sense of irony.

The sense of irony may reveal to many Italians that Mussolini’s warlike activities since last June, however beautiful in conception, have brought small rewards to his country. They had little enough to eat in May, they have less now. They had lost sons, brothers and husbands in the Ethiopian and Spanish adventures; they are losing more now in Greece and Egypt. They have helped to bomb Britain, but many of their planes did not return. Coffee, butter, peace and honor have been bartered for glory, and there isn’t as yet any glory.

Mussolini taught Hitler how to dictate, with some help from the uncommunicative Stalin. Now if any dictating is to be done in Europe, Hitler does it. The beauty of war is tanks in the mud, Greeks coming [home] at the point of the ignoble bayonet, civilians blown to bits in Corfu, and, at home, dismay, forebodings and telegrams to the next of kin.

No wonder Signor Marinetti’s audience grew restive. The wonder is that they threw off the Fascist hypnotism long enough to show it. Perhaps behind the brutal fantasy something of the lovely, lazy, humorous, creative old Italy survives.

“Music is losing its currency; I feel that very strongly. It’s become absolutely devalued through popular culture.” — Harrison Birtwistle

The Nebraska Humanities Council has just announced funding for the pre-concert talks at all ARTSaha! 2007 events. The talks will be given by ANALOG arts ensemble members Ken Bales, Joe Drew, and Dolf Kamper and will range from demonstrations of modern player piano technology to discussions of competing visions of tomorrow outlined by Futurists of every era.

Full schedule information will be announced soon.