Fighting for crumbs
As the Endarkenment continues apace, composers are getting desperate for attention. Tuesday the Cleveland Composers Guild put on a wonderful concert by the Cleveland Duo & James Umble. Not a word about it beforehand in any of the print media that we've seen, despite having been double-sent the press release, and we got the customary 50 or so bodies. My symphony is on Sunday, and there's nothing in the two weekly bourgeois-Marxist papers. Any publicity out there is hit-or-miss Internet stuff, or paid for (spots are running on WCLV). Meanwhile, funders want to measure RoI by audience size. I can't think of any other objective way to do it, but I've seen it lead to aesthetically wrongheaded decisions. There is too much happening, and too few interested, to make for big audiences. And new music is stylistically fragmented; there is no one new-music audience, but many. I'm even seeing beginning signs of an Uptown-Downtown split, as if Cleveland once again were a NYC wannabe.
We've got a local composer griping because not enough other composers show up to new music events (meaning in this case the new music events he shows up to, generally performances by recently-dead European males). He's retired, and he's got the time to go. But what are the rest of us supposed to do, who are balancing career, family, non-career composition and running an arts organization? Yes, we should support each other. But if I have the right to tell other people how to apportion their time, I'm their slavemaster.
We are the real indie/alternative music, and had might as well accept it and act accordingly. Rock clubs are for others; new music is for YOU.
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