The Business of Music

Reading Norman Lebrecht's blog this morning--the place to go for the latest music news--I see an item about the fate of EMI. This gets me thinking about the intersection of music and business. I wrote one post about the economics of composition here. But there are other interesting questions. Why, for example, do so many musicians have so much trouble with the business side of things? Leonard Cohen is a well-known example. He has had a successful and multi-faceted career for many decades. He retired in 1994 to a Zen monastery in California where he spent the next five years. In 2005 the story broke that his management had allegedly misappropriated nearly all the money from his retirement account. Cohen says this is why he went back on the road for his 2008-2010 world tour. Many famous musicians have ended up broke.

Here is why I think that the business world and the music don't co-exist very well. It actually relates a bit to my last post on the interrupted Mahler adagio. The modern world, which is pretty much the world of business, is interrupt-driven. You have to respond to investors, clients, partners, suppliers, employees and so on and do so in a timely fashion. The world of music, which is a time-art, requires focus. In order to do musical work, you need time and a space where you will not be interrupted. The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius gives us an example. On the website associated with his home Ainola, now a museum, we read this comment on his working environment:

Daily life at Ainola revolved in all respects around the composing and other work of Jean Sibelius. Silence was an absolute necessity for this work, upon which Sibelius often focused at his writing desk. It was only at the finishing stages that he would take his manuscript to the grand piano, and so for much of the time Ainola remained a place of great silence.

Piano practice was a source of problems at Ainola. When Katarina received permission to practice for a couple of hours at home, Jean Sibelius made a special note of this in his diary. Often the girls would go to a neighbour’s home to play...

Musicians of all kinds seem to seek out a secluded environment where they can work free from interruption. In the 19th century the possibilities of interruption were a lot less than they are now. But even then Wagner complained that with his rented apartment being across the street from an iron-monger he didn't see how he could finish an opera. The multitude of electronic devices we have now makes the 19th century seem like a peaceful time. In order to shield themselves from the constant interruptions of the business of music musicians like Leonard Cohen rely on management. This, of course, leaves them open to being taken advantage of by their management.

But the alternative, closely monitoring your own career and being responsive in all the ways this requires, seems problematic. Not for everyone, perhaps, but for many. I suspect that there are certain kinds of work, ones that delve deeply into certain kinds of aesthetic problems, that absolutely require isolation. The great pianist Arthur Rubenstein withdrew from concert life for several months in 1932 when he felt the need to completely rebuild his technique. As for composers, as every important new piece is, in a sense, a rebuilding, a delving down to the foundations, it may also require real isolation.

Music that is transcendent in some way, that tries to evoke the sensations of eternity (and, ironically, does this by shaping and manipulating time) is crafted in silence and tranquility. The full reception of this music may also require a silent backdrop, as, for example, the Mahler adagio that was interrupted by the iPhone alarm.

So that's why I think many musicians have trouble with the business world: their most important work, the music itself, often requires that they separate themselves from the usual interactions of daily life in order to focus completely on the music. But business requires instant responsiveness and communication. The two worlds are really at odds with one another.

Here is whole of the 2nd Symphony of Sibelius. Imagine, if you will, the kind of concentration it took to assemble this composition:

Silence

As I write this, it is early enough in the morning for silence to prevail. This is my favorite time of the day because the phone never rings, there is no sound of traffic, no dogs are barking...

Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, whom I almost never read (or the paper either) has a column with a promising beginning. She quotes Max Picard as saying “Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence.” But then, alas, the column turns into a review of a movie. Picard, a Swiss philosopher and theologian, wrote an entire book on silence titled The World of Silence.


Of course John Cage also wrote a book titled Silence, published in 1961. Thomas Merton, the Catholic mystic, wrote a book about his conversion and life called The Seven Storey Mountain. He joined the Order of Cistercians who are particularly known for speaking as little as possible, living in an atmosphere of silence.


What is the appeal of silence? Well, what is the attraction of noise, I answer! We live in a noisy world which sometimes gives a rhythm, a sense of engagement, of excitement to our lives. But often, it's just noise. The Industrial Revolution brought the sounds of machinery into our lives. We live with the roar of motorcycles, the whine of jets, and everywhere, like a synthesized carpet of syncopation, the sound of recorded music.


A British study informs us that living in an "interrupt-driven" environment where the phone rings, a beep indicates the arrival of a text message, new emails are constantly popping up on the screen and so on, being in this kind of environment knocks as much as ten points off one's IQ, or more than having smoked marijuana. I suspect that a lot of people like, or at least, don't mind, this sort of environment. It's typical of most jobs.


But the thing is, that you can't really think, can you? You can't really read anything and follow the thread of the ideas because you are always being interrupted--hang on, just let me get the phone. Ok, I'm back. What were we talking about? Oh, right! You can't really think and you can't really listen. If you really want to hear a piece of music, you need uninterrupted time so you can focus. A big part of the training of musicians is ear training, part of which is called 'dictation'. One listens to a brief excerpt of melody, harmony or counterpoint and writes it down in notation. This involves listening very closely indeed. I was in an office once where one of the employees was listening to some annoying pop music. I wanted to say "please turn that off". I imagined a dialogue: "no, I'm listening to it!" "Oh yeah? Well, write out the bass line then!"


But back to silence. I think silence is the necessary ground in which music unfolds, especially for a composer. Richard Wagner had rented a room across from an ironmonger at one point and despaired of ever finishing the opera he was working on because of the noise. As a composer I often have some kind of music floating around in my head--usually the most mundane of sequences or some sort of earworm--but I prefer that to the chance music one hears in public spaces. Last night I had dinner with a friend in an Argentinian restaurant and had to suffer through tango music for a couple of hours. Nothing against tango, but I really would have preferred silence.


I like to listen to music. Specific music at specific times and I always prefer to listen to it with the score. Other than that, I really prefer silence, or as a friend of mine once called it, "God's music".