Art Simon wrote:
> Really, I'm shocked. It doesn't seem like the US right now is really
> flowering with interest in contemporary music. I thought with IRCAM's
> rich history, not the least of which is that it's the origin of MAX,
> France was the mecca for contemporary music. I guess I'm out of touch.
IRCAM has certainly been an amazing resource for talented french (and
other)
composers and producers.
Because I live here in Santa Cruz, where Creative Labs and Emu Systems
have been
for a long time, I know that Creative has continually hired the best
and brightest
spacialization experts straight out of IRCAM. I've met so many brilliant
spacialization experts and , indeed, one woman, Veronique Larcher was like
Gertrude Stein in this area because she was so invested in producing new
music
events and connecting different musicians together. She was a godsend
to our
area, culturally and it was tragic to me, when she was forced to leave
the area for
economic reasons.
But that's the rub: a lot of people coming out of new music programs
everywhere
either have possibilities to teach (which are diminishing rapidly at
least in the US)
or to take on high paying jobs like all the spacialization experts who
came from
France to our area, straight out of IRCAM.
The same phenomenon can also be seen in Northern California, which
really has a tendency
to produce forward thinking and innovative artists (probably due to not
only it's extremeley
liberal and artistic intellectual climate but also due to the extreme
wealth that existed here for
so long with the Dot Com boom). By the way, paranthetically, I'm not
saying that other countries
or regions don't also have tons of creativity..........I'm not that
insular...........lol
There has been an astonishing brain drain of young musicians out of both
the San Francisco and
Monterey Bay areas because of economic hardships and how expensive it is
to live here.
Hundreds have moved to Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Washington, Austin,
Texas, New York City, New York
and out of the country to avoid how expensive and hard to exist that is
for a typical Northern California
artist.
But you can't completely kill the French spirit any more than you can
kill the Northern California
spirit.............those composers are still creating amazing things and
they are still French......
they just may feel that they can't afford to live in France any longer.
It's happening all over the world, which is why we need to be vigilant
as artists and we need
to be focused on building community to counter the economic trends of a
world that is working
with increasingly diminishing resources with a population that is still
swelling rapidly.