RE: Popularity/influence/etc.

["Liebig, Steuart A." <Steuart.Liebig@maritz.com>]

>All of this was said after I'd already done my solo EDP thing.  And
there were similar points of view expressed by people in the audience. 
Not everyone was of this opinion, of course, but my feeling (which may
not necessarily be terribly accurate - I'd be interested if Richard or
Stig had a different take) was that the consensus there was basically:
software is the way to go. < 

** well okay, my take was that most of these guys were really not 
"improvisors," per se - - i could be wrong about that. the other things is 
maybe that's just their modus operandi - - they are not necessarily into 
inputting live notes into the devices (or maybe they are, i don't really 
know each person's history). carl stone doesn'ty play anything into his 
laptop - - it's all there to begin with and he does real-times 
manipulation of that material; if you use that as a paradigm, yeah you 
probably don't need something like an edp with a footswitch set-up, you 
just need a laptop with a large hard drive to hold sampled material and a 
fast enough processor to do all the groovy calculations. for me 
personally, it is not a very interesting methodolgy. i've seen and heard 
and played with people who who used laptops to manipulate live samples of 
people they were playing with and felt it was more interesting and 
satifsying for me - - but this is more of an aesthetic observation/bias 
than anything. 

further, i left really wondering about where these people really came down 
on improv . . . i frankly feel that carl stone is doing improvisation, not 
composition - - but there is that thing in western classical music (the 
tradition he seems to have come from) that looks askance at improvisation, 
so it might be easier for him to label himself a composer rather than an 
improvisor. 

>Jazz is improvised music, and while it certainly doesn't burn up the
sales charts, there's nothing "non-mainstream" about it - you can walk
into any Starbucks in the world and buy their name-brand jazz
compilations.  Keith Jarrett and Bobby McFerrin would improvise entire
solo concerts, and these are some of the most widely-heard,
biggest-selling (relatively speaking) musicians around.<

** hmmm. yeah, you can hear it in those places, but . . . i think i heard 
somewhere that jazz as a percentage of the marketplace ("product sold") is 
way down the list - - way down. i can't remember, but i think it was 4% or 
less . . . and classical? forget about it (maybe 1%?). so, for those of us 
do *really* non-mainstream music (and there are a fair amount of us on 
this list), we are in a *distinct* minority. (can you say one tenth of 1%?)

stig


<font size="1">Confidentiality Warning:  This e-mail contains information 
intended only for the use of the individual or entity named above.  If the 
reader of this e-mail is not the intended recipient or the employee or 
agent responsible for delivering it to the intended recipient, any 
dissemination, publication or copying of this e-mail is strictly 
prohibited. The sender does not accept any responsibility for any loss, 
disruption or damage to your data or computer system that may occur while 
using data contained in, or transmitted with, this e-mail.   If you have 
received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify us by return 
e-mail.  Thank you.