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huh....well j8ear, i have to confess that i dont remember what i meant by that.
i suspect i had in mind something like the canadian arts council funding system. music could be seen as type of art-making that has enough benefits to merit state support--why not?---hell, i'd settle for even a federal directive that organizes or prompts private foundations to increase the amounts and types of grants that are available. in this respect, i dont particularly care about the sources--you can do the same things with public or private dollars.
the arguments for it would run something like music is an important cultural resource, an index of the space (level, i suppose, but i hate that terminology) attained by a collectivity. like architecture but smaller.
and it is also the case that you find some of the best most innovative players working in forms that not alot of people know about, and they should have more options (rather than fewer) for acquiring funding to carry out projects.
projects could be anything from recordings to building new instruments to commissions for large-scale works that include the possibility of the composer's actually hearing the piece (i know ALOT of composers who have never heard the large-format pieces they have written...it's kinda sad.) there could be underwriting for tours, backing for the formation of new small labels that distribute music in forms that aren't really commodified (it seems to me that one of the main things we're seeing with the collapse of the old music industry is a decommodification of music--outside the mainstream of course, which it itself a commodity--one result of that is now even fewer people can make a living...)---mostly, though, i would support a radical decentralization of music, the proliferation of performance venues and sources of recordings, more new music rather than less.
as it stands in the states, there are not a whole lot of options, particularly not for emerging artists in non-commercial genres, to get funding...and so far as i can see, there's no reason for it.
music markets are not rational. never were: demand has been structured by the main audio media and related print media almost from point where audio reproduction technologies became widely available. and conservatism in music programming is not a new phenomenon. generally, in the states folk who are doing new things wait until they are dead to get their music heard. even then, it doesn't work as it could.
but that's only trying to fill in what i think i meant.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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