Tag: 01.05

Gioia – The Businessman Poet

Where did NEA chairman Dana Gioia get his education? Business school. “Gioia’s self-description has always been more voluminous than the Poet-Businessman shorthand. He is, he says, Latin (of Italian and Mexican lineage), Catholic, and a Californian with working-class roots. He came from East Los Angeles, born in 1950 to a taxi driver father and a telephone operator mother. His youth was spent crisscrossing Los Angeles, in search of new music, and art, and anything else that caught his imagination. He studied the piano, and Latin, and availed himself of the book and record collection left by an uncle killed in a plane crash.”

Why Is The Book Business So Badly Run?

“There are some really smart people in the book business, which is why it’s such a mystery that so little is known about the basics, such as why anybody buys a book. Wal-Mart can predict with great specificity that hurricanes in Florida will mean increased demand for batteries and flashlights, but also, based on past correlations, beer and pop-tarts. (Beer, understood, but pop-tarts? Don’t they need toasters for that? Wouldn’t the electricity be out?) The book business has nowhere near this forecasting expertise.”

Who Owns What (It’s Very Complicated)

“While it was once believed that Marxism would overhaul notions of ownership, the combination of capitalism and the Internet has transformed our ideas of property to an extent far beyond the dreams of even the most fervent revolutionary. Which is not to say that anything resembling a collectivist utopia has come to pass. Quite the opposite. In fact, the laws regulating property—and intellectual property, in particular—have never before been so complex, onerous, and rigid.”

How Podcasting Will Change Radio

“Radio executives can afford to write off podcasters now because there just aren’t enough listeners to make it a worthwhile. But when 20,000 “high-value demographic” listeners regularly tune into a show, that show will attract advertisers. And advertisers will attract radio stations. It’s a trend I call “program backdooring” — where the show will develop enough of an audience to make a ‘real’ radio station take notice.”

Haydn – Admired From Afar

“Today, nearly all of Haydn’s music is available on CD—but he remains a composer who is more admired than played, at least in the concert hall. No celebrated conductor or instrumentalist champions him; no stylishly written English-language narrative biography has yet been published. The absence of such a biography from the extensive Haydn literature helps to explain one reason for his comparative obscurity, which is that his life, though interesting, was not notably eventful.”

What’s Wrong With The Way We Teach Music?

“In the music education of our young, listening—truly active processing and internalizing of sound—is not valued. And we are paying the price for this when audiences—and the composers they all too often come to dread—are not able to hear what is before them. In its passive stead, audiences seem more tuned out than in, experiencing a general wash of comfort or discomfort seemingly tied neither to thought nor feeling, process nor program.”