Stand and Deliver!

Like Health Care systems everywhere, New Music suffers from a poor delivery system. The route from composer to performer to listener is often capricious, improvised, and instable, and more often a product of repertorial lethargy and personal relationships than an open market in matching musical interests.  

The web ought to be a perfect route for moving our scores to performers and attracting listeners to performances, but the low-level of web activity for new music — I keep track of 35 or 40 new music oriented blogs via bloglines and sometimes several days will pass without new messages — suggests that the new music community has a far-from-optimal approach to the web as a resource.   (It is surprising to me that  the largest traditional music publishers  and the license-collecting agencies — who have an immediate financial interest in making their wares public — do such a very bad job of it;  title searches at these sites are slow and miserable, and I'm someone who actually enjoys doing library research.) 

Here is one small proposal to help remedy this situation:  How about a blog or site dedicated to publicly registring new scores?  With probably several thousand active "serious" composers in the US alone, if only a couple hundred were to join such a registry, announcing each of their new title immediately upon composition, detailing and cross-indexing the resources required and how to obtain performance materials, one would presumably have a web page with many daily updates, thus both offering a useful way of matching performers with new scores and better mirroring the liveliness of our community.

 

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