A funny thing happened yesterday.
No crisis.
Weird.
It has felt like my life has been a series of unpredictable crises lately. So yesterday was a welcome reprieve. I met with the Sunday accompanist before staff meeting. Staff meeting was more relaxed than usual. After lunch I submitted all the music info for the Holy Week bulletins. This is basically preludes, postludes and choral lyrics. Then I walked over church and practiced organ for a bit.
Correction from yesterdays blog (god forbid you should use my rantings as a source for accurate info anyway), “Le Verbe” from Messiaen’s Nativity does NOT quote the Pentecost Hymn, Veni Creator. Instead it paraphrases the Easter Sequence chant, Victimae Paschali Laudes. This means it’s not that pertinent to the Pentecost feast. I could still play it because it sounds so mystical. But I probably won’t. I have thought about walking over to the college library and browsing Messiaen’s organ works for a piece to learn for Pentecost. I have a feeling I won’t get to that today.
I was listening to the NPR fund drive.
The local U of M announcers seems to get dumber every year. This year one of them had taped a testimonial that talked about being fascinated with the ongoing media struggle to get consumers to pay for content.
Good grief.
There’s more to life than transactions, isn’t there?
What about the free exchange of ideas? Not to mention the need and right of every human of access to the parts of life that make it worthwhile (this includes quite a bit of content stuff for me: ideas, music, poetry, novels, other books.
It seems to me that the information based economy will need to shift away from solely relying on pay per view approaches. And the more people understand that ideas like music and poetry are not objects that one can purchase and own. I always factor into my radical understandings my own ethics that everyone deserves to be remunerated for their efforts or at the least taken care of by the community if they cannot muster a contribution to the common good.
For me the primary recipients of remuneration should not be people who distribute, but people who produce. But what do I know? I’m just a dang musician and not a rich one by U.S. standards. Of course by any real standard I am rich.
