The Friday Informer: Love and War

Photo of the Week: Gifts from Julius “Painting with notes” made by Julius Eastman and given to Piotr Sierakowski in 1984.

We all love music, but giving it away, whether it’s yours to legally give or not, may not be the secret to success we’ve been thinking it was. So how to give the people what they want—especially when what they want makes us think of Cher?

In these crazy post-rock times, Reich parties with the hipsters of indie rock next week at SXSW. Meanwhile, in case you think you’ve died and awoken in art music heaven, iTunes has rolled out an application that allows you to make ringtones out of over half-a-million tracks. Well, it’ll sure be avant-garde if nothing else, but the cacophony of that much irritating sound may mean war.

On the diplomatic front, the New York Phil dropped in on Korea and Maazel has been making the rounds diffusing the post-Korea political criticism ever since. Christopher Hitchens isn’t buying the benefit of the “idiot conductor” [7 minutes in] making overtures to help thaw relations (in Korean!), but Colbert cuts him a bit more slack, even if he did share our “philharmony technology.”

Elsewhere, Dudamel is a hotter ticket than Hannah Montana, and people are basking in the glow of their new Philip Glass scores in all sorts of compelling ways. Due to a recent incident on American Idol, Leonard Cohen is getting a little more love as well.

Just as I was contemplating the challenges of my profession, news of plagiarism in the arts press put another, if thought-provoking, hole in the boat. Bloggers, however, got a big thumbs up and a free tape recorder. But what does the future of music hold? Hard to say if it will be computers singing us to sleep or robots pelting us with ping pong balls, and despite our fears it may even be Serialism II. But if live concerts survive and we still gather to share our humanity, mind your wallet.