Symphony Of A Thousand (Facebook Friends)
Who says social networking is just a way to waste time when we should all be working? Atlanta music critic Pierre Ruhe noticed a fascinating exchange on composer John Mackey's Facebook page the other day...
"Mackey, a fine composer who writes high-energy music for wind ensemble and lives in Austin, Texas, is writing a trombone concerto. He's got the New York Philharmonic's Joseph Alessi as soloist and a New Jersey concert band for the premiere, but he wants to give the concerto a shelf life. Deadline is November. Already several weeks into it, he's been posting updates to his Facebook friends.
Early this afternoon, he posted a new status update:
John Mackey can't decide whether to put saxes in the Trombone Concerto. Was going to score it for "orchestral winds," but I'm missing the sax section in the quiet sections."
Now, as it happens, I'm Facebook friends with Mackey (he wrote a fantastic bluegrass-inspired piece for string trio that I've played,) so I noticed the status, too. It didn't occur to me to offer an opinion on the sax or no sax issue, but apparently, plenty of others did, and the "conversation" that ensued actually seems to have helped John make a decision. So clearly some people are actually using Facebook for productive purposes! Just, um, not me.
"Mackey, a fine composer who writes high-energy music for wind ensemble and lives in Austin, Texas, is writing a trombone concerto. He's got the New York Philharmonic's Joseph Alessi as soloist and a New Jersey concert band for the premiere, but he wants to give the concerto a shelf life. Deadline is November. Already several weeks into it, he's been posting updates to his Facebook friends.
Early this afternoon, he posted a new status update:
John Mackey can't decide whether to put saxes in the Trombone Concerto. Was going to score it for "orchestral winds," but I'm missing the sax section in the quiet sections."
Now, as it happens, I'm Facebook friends with Mackey (he wrote a fantastic bluegrass-inspired piece for string trio that I've played,) so I noticed the status, too. It didn't occur to me to offer an opinion on the sax or no sax issue, but apparently, plenty of others did, and the "conversation" that ensued actually seems to have helped John make a decision. So clearly some people are actually using Facebook for productive purposes! Just, um, not me.
Labels: composers, music and technology
posted by Sam at
2:01 PM
4 Comments:
So clearly some people are actually using Facebook for productive purposes! Just, um, not me
What are you talking about? We scheduled our annual trip to see the Wild over Facebook.
Facebook = TOTALLY USEFUL
Excellent point. We did do that. Speaking of which, I should probably already be in line to get those tickets tomorrow...
I shared this story with some friends. One of whom has definite opinions replied...
"And you'll notice the decision was made on financial considerations and not aesthetic ones. That's why there is so much crummy wind band music too."
I had to share.
GLM4, while your friend isn't wrong that there is, in fact, an awful lot of crummy wind band music, reading my blog entry about my decision (not the Facebook thread, where my comments are often much more in jest), you'll see that the decision was based largely on attempting to increase the number of performance opportunities, which for a not-dead composer, are awfully hard to come by. Those few extra performances I might get because there are no saxes (and the piece is therefore playable by an orchestra) will be tiny in number compared to the amount of performances the piece will receive by college "bands." It's really not an economic consideration; there's no money in orchestra performances.
The biggest reasoning was the different color. As I said on my blog, I've written nearly a dozen pieces back-to-back with the same scoring, and I was dying to work with a slightly different color.
I will say that I went with triple winds instead of quad-winds entirely because of financial considerations -- but not my own finances. A college band can have quad winds, but no orchestra is ever going to hire those extra players for me.
Can I just add how crazy it is that this blog is linking to my blog mentioning Pierre's blog about a Facebook thread?
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home