A (Digital) Hymn to Eric Whitacre

Eric Whitacre is that remarkable thing: a composer able to write classical music that is at once completely contemporary and totally approachable even at the first hearing.

Just as, er, noteworthy is his total ease with modern technology. His website is undoubtedly one of the most attractive ever created for a composer, and uses the full panoply of the latest Internet technologies to support his music and to interact with his audience, including a blog with embedded YouTube videos, and links to Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Perhaps the best place to get a feel for his music and his amazing facility with technology is the performance of his piece "Lux Aurumque" by a "virtual choir" that he put together on YouTube (there's another video where the composer explains some of the details and how this came about.)

Against that background, it should perhaps be no surprise that on his website he has links to pages about most (maybe all?) of his compositions that include not only fascinating background material but complete embedded recordings of the pieces.

Clearly, Whitacre has no qualms about people being able to hear his music for free, since he knows that this is by far the best way to get the message out about it and to encourage people to perform it for themselves. The countless comments on these pages are testimony to the success of that approach: time and again people speak of being entranced when they heard the music on his web site - and then badgering local choirs to sing the pieces themselves.

It's really good to see a contemporary composer that really gets what digital music is about - seeding live performances - and understands that making it available online can only increase his audience, not diminish it. And so against that background, the story behind one of his very best pieces, and probably my current favourite, "Sleep", is truly dispiriting.

Originally, it was to have been a setting of Robert Frost’s "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening". The composition went well:

I took my time with the piece, crafting it note by note until I felt that it was exactly the way I wanted it. The poem is perfect, truly a gem, and my general approach was to try to get out of the way of the words and let them work their magic.

But then something terrible happened:

And here was my tragic mistake: I never secured permission to use the poem. Robert Frost’s poetry has been under tight control from his estate since his death, and until a few years ago only Randall Thompson (Frostiana) had been given permission to set his poetry. In 1997, out of the blue, the estate released a number of titles, and at least twenty composers set and published Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening for chorus. When I looked online and saw all of these new and different settings, I naturally (and naively) assumed that it was open to anyone. Little did I know that the Robert Frost Estate had shut down ANY use of the poem just months before, ostensibly because of this plethora of new settings.

Thanks to copyright law, this is the prospect that Whitacre faced:

the estate of Robert Frost and their publisher, Henry Holt Inc., sternly and formally forbid me from using the poem for publication or performance until the poem became public domain in 2038.

I was crushed. The piece was dead, and would sit under my bed for the next 37 years because of some ridiculous ruling by heirs and lawyers.

Fortunately for him - and for us - he came up with an ingenious way of rescuing his work:

After many discussions with my wife, I decided that I would ask my friend and brilliant poet Charles Anthony Silvestri (Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine, Lux Aurumque, Nox Aurumque, Her Sacred Spirit Soars) to set new words to the music I had already written. This was an enormous task, because I was asking him to not only write a poem that had the exact structure of the Frost, but that would even incorporate key words from “Stopping”, like ‘sleep’. Tony wrote an absolutely exquisite poem, finding a completely different (but equally beautiful) message in the music I had already written. I actually prefer Tony’s poem now…

Not only that:

My setting of Robert Frost’s Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening no longer exists. And I won’t use that poem ever again, not even when it becomes public domain in 2038.

So, thanks to a disproportionate copyright term, a fine poem will never be married with sublime music that was originally written specially for it. This is the modern-day reality of copyright, originally devised for "the encouragement of learning", but now a real obstacle to the creation of new masterpieces.

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Chinese As She Is Writ

The poem was originally published in the June 6 issue of Qilu Evening News, a newspaper circulated mainly in Shandong province. In the poem, Wang impersonated a dead victim expressing his gratitude to the government from his grave.

"天灾难避死何诉，主席唤，总理呼，党疼国爱，声声入废墟。十三亿人共一哭，纵做鬼，也幸福。银鹰战车救雏犊，左军叔，右警姑，民族大爱，亲历死也足。只盼坟前有屏幕，看奥运，共欢呼。“

Here is rather literal translation:
"Natural disaster is inevitable, so what should I complain about my death? The president calls, the Premier asks, the Party cares, the country is concerned, the voice goes into the rubbles. One billion and thirty million people shed tears, I felt happy even as a ghost. Silver eagles and army vehicles came to rescue, soldiers, police officers - the great love! I am satisfied to die. I only wish I could have a TV set so I could watch the Olympic Games and cheer with others."

Ah, yes, TV sets....

The Problem Isn't Infringement, it's Indifference

One of the interesting side-effects of the increasing number of artists making their work freely available with great success is that it demonstrates a deep and hitherto unappreciated facet of creativity: that the main problem is never "infringement" but simply indifference. That's why artists should be making it as easy as possible for people to access and share their work.

If any domain needed to understand this, it's poetry. Now don't get me, wrong, I love poetry: I am probably one of the few human beings alive who has read all of Spencer's The Faerie Queene, Byron's Don Juan and Wordworth's The Prelude (don't ask), but the sad fact is practically nobody reads poetry today. So what's the solution? Why, making it freely available:

By now, Poetree.coop has probably been shut down.

While it lasted, it was the best-designed, richest source of p2p poetry sharing available online. Only a typical lunk-headed heavy-handed ploy by the inner circle of poets was able to shut it down.

All the classics were there: Rod McKuen, Roald Dahl, even the Dr. (Seuss) himself. In addition, you could find the complete poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and even Thomas Moore.

So, amidst all of these gems, what happened? Why the controversy?

Alisha Grant, spokesperson for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, had this to say, "We applaud the work of the FBI in shutting down this travesty of copyright. If we want great poetry, America, we're going to have to pay for it."

Oh, of course, it doesn't matter whether anyone *reads* your poetry, so long as you get paid for it. The idea that a real poet might be more concerned with the latter - and worry about the dosh later - is clearly an outmoded idea.

Maybe that's why nobody reads poetry.

Update: OK, so apparently this was an April Fool's Day joke: shame on me. What I *really* meant to write about was this, where the above comments still apply.

Some is Rotten in the State of Copyright

Nicely put:

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges).50 There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer—a veritable grand larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.

(Via Boing Boing.)

The Poetry of Splogs

After the poetry of spam, the poetry of splogs.

Don't ask how, but I ended up here a few minutes ago:

They were all old and once besondern, and all of a fishermanship of moss-green days. This morning, the recessess of the apsara, while I was whisking the drawing-room, I went to the isoude, which was wide open, to shake out my duster, and there, vestito by the gate, stoop'd Accomplish.

etc.

It may not be poetry, but it has a certain charm. Or maybe it's just me.