The Collapsible Institution

For One or More Reader(s)

Instructions: A Text on the Tangential Overlappings of Economics and Music to be read silently or aloud, as a whole or in parts, in locations private or public. If performed live, use broken, faulty, or ineffective means of amplification.

James E. Klopfleisch August 12, 2011 The Gulf of Mexico

Prelude:
I am not an economist. I am not really a scholar. I have no credentials in philosophy, beyond my own paltry readings, and I am certainly no scientist. What I do consider myself is someone who strives to work inside a new art, something I believe has just come into this world and is still in an early stage of development. What I hope to do with this essay is to address possible explanations, from the view of an artist attempting to work, for why the systems with which we are enmeshed work as they do, and what improvements can be made to better their functioning and fulfill their purpose. Perhaps people smarter then I am will be able to answer more fully the questions I have left alone.
{Thanks to: Casey Anderson, John Hastings, and Scott Cazan; Maya Erdelyi, Emilie Sabath, Colin Wambsgans, James
Rees, Charles McLeod, Sara Teate, Luke Gullickson, Mike Winter, Michael Pisaro, Chris Kallmyer, and Anne LeBaron.}

There is a marvelous story about Duchamp and an art student in San Francisco many years ago. Duchamp goes to this art school and he sees this kind of though, macho San Francisco painter and Duchamp looks at this picture he doesnt know. He says to the fellow, What are you doing? And the painter says, I dont know what the fuck Im doing. Duchamp pats him on the back and says, Keep up the good work! And the military formula is this: You make a small circle to exclude me, Ill make a larger circle to include you. And essentially, this is a dynamic in history. And then after three hundred years we look at it, we refine it and we start all over again. - Morton Feldman The Future of Local Music

Statement:
An art institution is a catalyst, the purpose of which is to facilitate a dialectic between an art and a community. In the end, the community consumes the art as a mimetic fuel source (to curate). The Collapsible Institution is an attempt to prolong this process; not to build a bulwark against the excesses of the current economic system (cannibalism) but to reestablish the original length of the process, to more fully recognize the mobile geography inherent in present day creating communities, and to reestablish the ecological balance between the means of production and the means of consumption in the art-community dialectic.

AIntroduction my limits, my goals Institution versus tradition A mad scramble for crumbs1
It is that mechanism that really is the focus. It becomes a way of realizing an idea, or an urge, a sudden
excitement, object, or an impulse (its that flitter out of the corner of your eye, you saw once as a child, but youve

How does one make secondary their sense of hunger? You see, listening has a cycle to it, always escaping your grasp; but if you wait
forgotten about (that)).

Infinite Music

See you can carry everything as baggage, but then there are some people who decide they dont want to buy cheese, but that they would rather make it themselves. On the intersection of Economics and
long enough it will always come back around. And what about convenience?

Experimental Sound Arts.

hitch a ride?

Access means, to a large degree, context. Or did it merely

But how can a cannibal know the source of anything, unless to know the means to consume whole? Who are the young consumables? Unfortunately my

knowledge of economies in other parts of the world is limited, and even though there is terrific experimental activity there, I will attempt to temper my comments to what I am more familiar with.
In order to know our world by taste, we need to take a bite, and we can only bite indiscriminately. The cannibals will have their meal, but maybe they wont be so hungry

But then of course we live in a free society; I can go buy milk whenever I want, and throw it in the garbage whenever I want. I can drink milk. And thats kind of what money is, baggage. What are the issues that need to be addressed? No baggage, no win? But this is because sound is a multiple, it exists in more
if they let the children grow large and fat. than one place at one time, more than one form at one time. Hanging-jaw. And who are the Cannibals? In order to make music, we must hear sound; when this becomes the subject, that is the rabbit who swallows his own ears. We have listening, and we now know how to listen, or at least how to keep trying.

This is the question of originality, because an inheritance mask will wear out, and then all you are left with is dust in the
Prelude:

eyes.

And that is a lot of fucking baggage.

Does that

mean the art is a failure?

frankly, I cant tell which.

Process as object, Demystification without language, only action. This

is especially true for people involved in the full development of new art forms. Oblique Notesa sound should be savored, even on a
national level. Hang language as a separate aspect of the piece, perhaps like a

geographic marker, a name that gives a reference only to place and not to

The objective is to construct a nonintrusive interface so information from realm1 (art) can flow to realm2 (the public) freely, and so material support (money) can flow from realm2 to realm1 freely. Then it is uncorrupted.
identity.

Economics: the system through which societies assign value.

for that we need adults, and doctors, and undertakers, and gravediggers.

And

The

artist knows what they are doing.

It is just that we do not have a space of memory equal to that of the space of history. But this is not a lax hoard; convenience these days is not at your convenience. And what is necessary to maintain a lineage? It seems that the motto of the cannibal nation is Consumption Through Convenience. Cannibals, first I should define my terms. But the original is risky too, because you need skill to build a real mask, and when there is no time to develop skill, talent and chance make a go of it. An economy of bubbles. Sound is always escaping, rushing from our reach; a perfect place to hide from the cannibals of consumption. Anyways, it seems unavoidable. This is where we come from, not this is what we were given. Sound is as curious about you as you are about it.

But is this a

good thing?
the mouth, as a bite. what speed?

This is the larger circle, the sweep of history approached through

Kill The Orchestra Is classical music becoming the Liechtenstein of the arts? The question is not to consume or not, but in what manner, at

It is a question of lineage, and of whether the focus of the musical practice is on extending something that has come before hand, or exploring something that may not exist yet. The
cannibal does not know this, they have forgotten, mistaking lineage for inheritance. It is the shortest path, and there is always a hand to lift the short step. This seems obvious, that
the way we live now is markedly different than the way we lived when much of our art was

Talk about how these two things overlap; where they meet, how they interact, and what can and should be done on our part, the live agents in the equation
conceived. Even when applied to arts that are only 50 to 100 years old, such as the blues and rocknroll, we live differently. But access does not simply mean a wider availability. The Collapsible Institution is an attempt to develop an interface between these two worlds/like a highly reflective window. The difficulty with consumption is

Prelude/Intro

But as all artists know, the quality of ones work and the ability to profit off of it do not necessarily go hand in hand. Engage yourself in an exterior machine. Ever marching hordes seeking out fresh produce, related by birth. How does their development proceed?
it is a blind sort of seeking.
Now, more than 20 years later, the orchestra is either not dead or un-dead.
A New Economics For A New Art

Theyre the circular squares, the trends, the next big things, the always-one-step-aheads. An accurate assessment can only be made through careful observation, minimizing the effect your presence has on the natives. More people doing it, less work,
so you would think that a glut of music lovers would be a boon for the economy, but somehow we seem worse off than ever. Do not define, expose bare. If every sound

has a birth, a life, and a death, then there is nothing unnatural with its consumption. We want, we need, and then we want what we need. This is basically any art

practice, with the focus on sound, that does not fit within any of the major established traditions (classical music, pop, jazz, film music, Hindustani, Qawwali, traditional Persian music, or any other traditional music anywhere in the world). When we create, are we looking to the past, the present, or the future?

The
Let us avoid

new economic model for the new art

the linearity of convenience; eating too fast is never a healthy thing.

The Young Consumable

And what do we have today? We expect much more ability to choose how we consume our media, and we expect the ability to broadcast our opinions to the whole world. this is a basic instinct, to feed, and we must recognize that it cannot be avoided. But

Experimental Sound Practices: This is the current tradition that includes people referring to themselves as experimental musicians, sound artists, perhaps even a few new music composers. The young consumable is what grows in the ground; it is part of nature.
A machine is the most physically real way of extending yourself into beyond yourself. Less then a century of continuous history, many marks beforehand protruding from the dusty ground. Our eyes will never see out the back of our head, but our ears hear sounds all around even if we dont recognize them; this is not something that should be written

off. No expectations of expectations, do this by listening to listening. Is it an inheritance? To expose the workings without explaining how it

This no longer works, because now technology companies (which are more powerful) are profiting off of making those same methods available to everyone (the magic is gone) therefore new art should display the process, the methods of production are one of the most interesting things about the new art and help explain it (acts as a Rosetta Stone). We
works
lead with our mouths, an organ that cannot extend a sense beyond itself. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous, not to mention highly destructive. There seem to be gluts of
press describing decline, be it in record sales, concert attendance, the closing of many fine orchestras or the inability of freelance musicians to maintain their standard of living. What the hell is the problem with music today? Not sound, which exists despite us.

What is uncorrupted art? This is not a safe time to be raising an art. This is something that is significant. But I dont have to. And then it becomes a
nuisance, a debilitating moment of stress and panic (none of this is in any particular order) and then it becomes what we do for a living (though others may call it barely a living). There were all those performance art pieces

that involved no permanent object.

Why is the Collapsible Institution Necessary?

In this essay I will:
not a businessman *Note: I am

What is a lineage, and when does it become a tradition?

What is

local music?
different disciplines.

It is near impossible to live a musical life and be comfortable in

this day and age. A relationship between these arts and the rest of the world is what we must
initiate, and we can only do that by cobbling together disparate structural elements from many

The interface must be as flexible as possible and serve both realms equally (because if the art is properly realized (without interference) the public receives the best possible product). And that is economics,
Its not as though we shouldnt remember. a buried machine, the source of which is obscured by the explanation. There has

always been talk about the death of classical music. What should the geography of our consumption be? ladies and gentlemen, the symphony orchestra is dead long live the Community of Musicians! 2 To gain access to this new music is to know that listening is continuous

It was also aided by the fact that many of the most artful musicians of the twentieth century were pop (including jazz) players. What is convenience to a multiple? Once part of the
AND cyclical, and to prepare yourself as such.
mighty Austro-Hungarian Empire, now just 61.7 square miles in size and doubly landlocked? I may contradict myself, but only if knowing the whole may be the only way to

know the source. Meanwhile, for the past 50 75 years, art forms have been developing that dont quite fit the established mold. What crop is more immediately available then the young?

What is local music?

Pop benefited from this by playing up its rebellious, ant-legit street-cred, taking on the air of being for the common man; this appealed to traditionally oppressed peoples (including teenagers and the impoverished), and played to traditional American values of independence.
Exposing the machinery, not as a violent art but as a happy means of world-worship.

Hide the process: like magic because they obscured the methods of production. That is why it is a multiple; it is something we always have;
yet it also is continually leaving and returning. There are significant aural grey areas, already being developed for the consumption of a new music. We cannot help ourselves; it seems
to happen whether we want it or not. Strange musics, written by those who only a few decades before

would have written like Debussy, never really became comfortable in the concert hall. This is the fate of the cannibal, a broken jaw mistaken for a satisfied smile. These arts require high skill, and have fascinating things to say about the world around us and the ways we do, and can, live our lives. Ernest Fleishmann, then Executive Director of the Los Angeles

Philharmonic, pronounced it dead on May 16th, 1987.

And I can go further

How does IT function in relation to socio-economics? With one motion a child is consumed, buried in a
then that.

mountain of definitions, a pile of words so high there is no escape, no room for air to reach the bottom. Well they remember the 60s; but memory doesnt remember them all the time, thats why we have paper and pen (but they dont read very well). Is consumption something that must be avoided, or is it a necessary part of the life of a sound, something that needs to be measured out in sensible doses rather then in one massive binge, the rabbit who swallows his own ears?

Maybe I can make

cheese.

This is usually done with physical units, most often with currency (precious metals, paper, digital counts) though there are other methods, such as livestock or very large stones. Then you

have it all to yourself. And this is one of the failures of our time, is people have forgotten how to win again, or lose again, or not care about winning. Somehow it
keeps happening.

Now it either must grow up, into the real or fade away. It is built into the

I like cheese. The problem then becomes how do we know if we have won or not? But at the moment we are a dusty outcrop, a
form. Or did the young consumable make it themselves, out of found material? used up set for space battles.

Classical was the legitimate art, a hold over from 19th century values and early twentieth century attempts to educate/legitimize formerly downtrodden peoples (ex: Black Swans focus on classical music as uplift while ignoring jazz and blues). And the best thing to eat is the young.
The command to eat comes because we need to eat, and it is how we mediate the urge that makes the difference. The specific system I am referring to is

the laissez-faire capitalist system in use today in the U.S.

What this means is that it is a multiple, and to view a multiple one needs to make secondary their sense of hunger (the urge). It seems we cannot help ourselves. Is the world we create

with our music separate from that of the systems the society we are born into use to assign Value? Now, sound is an invisible means of
consumption, difficult to define: as opposed to the eyes, we hear sounds all around us, even if our ears focus in a general direction. What is there left to do? But how do we grow a sound? Remember, you are a stranger in a strange land; return every year and

over a lifetime you will see part of a lifetime.

and for good reason)

(In this document I intend to leave much unanswered,

At the beginning it is both mirage and real, both at the same time.

But

I could also buy cheese if I wanted.

Even though this may be the habit, I cannot believe this to be the best way to know the whole, if there is any whole at all. In other words, what is the relation between the world of our art

We have this system hanging over our heads, this system to assign value.
and that of the current version of capitalism in vogue today?

The object is not to redefine the art or the artist.

The problem is that this modus operandi cannot extend beyond itself; that is why the relationship with

The two dominant sound worlds and their places/methods of survival Listening is the focus of our art. Paper cuts are nasty things.
sound is so tricky.
If it survives, it must play some part in our human evolution.

It is a performance space, gallery, studio and workshop all in one; more than that, it is a singular creation in-between all of these things, adept at acting like the skin of a bubble. How can you

Or are they inextricably linked, different aspects of the same function, different parts of a universe? Is it possible to have a good art that is not recognized in the capitalist system? Or does that mean that its value, which is already there, has just not yet been realized? Consumption of the young as a way of digesting the source. We live in different times than that of our traditions. The issue of whether or not what defines them will make them money is not really in question; they do what they do and if they do it well they make money off of it. The two worlds I am talking about, I will refer to as Experimental Sound Practices and Economics. Is that what they are doing? This is often the question that defines someones identity; they make a living as a doctor, or a lawyer, or a mechanic.
be discerning with your teeth?

So we have this sense of accomplishment, but no memory of doing the deed, no scars to remind us of being stabbed, no fucking Nazi helmet. Predators seek out the
young, they seek the easy, and when being is no longer a continuum but a point: eat your

How do these two industries control the national dialogue on art? How to address the legit-debate: side step it, focus on material factors, DO NOT attempt to tether the new art to the old, it will only make the new look illegitimate.
own. If you engage yourself in a machine, you take a step from convenient consumption (the cannibal nation) into the realm of the multiple-receiver.

Define what I mean by a system to assign value, and how it is not necessarily the same thing as value (economics)
But they left much behind, so my question is, was it brought? And there were films that didnt tell stories, or

What about the purest form of music, things that rise from minority communities? For years people on the
didnt fit into the Hollywood format, more moving pictures than cinema. fringes of the establishment have pursued these creative avenues, developed them, grown and shaped them. It appears to be the most convenient thing, immediate, coming then leaving

At some point in everyones life people are asked the question How do you earn a living? And to do that they
immediately.

have to put down their baggage.

The world is full of cannibals. Not pleasure, nor welfare, nor any form of sustenance, but the act itself, the verb now a noun, swallowing to swallow as fast as you can. We know it came from across the ocean, came with
our ancestors (along with pox-blankets and other such diseases). There must be a reason; it must be necessary (somehow). Perhaps this is the art of listening. There are cannibals everywhere, hungry

for

Define what I mean by value in terms of the creation of a new sound based art The best
consumption, stalking the shadows.

Every form needs a place; how that place defines that form, and how that form defines that place The pop world: place (recordings); method of survival (collect small amounts of money from many people/industrialized)
way to see a dim star is to look for it out of the corner of your eye

Well our parents won, or our grandparents, and then we inherited their winnings.
Too many today thieve from the grave.

How do Economics and Experimental Art mix; are they completely separate worlds, developing on their own, independent of one another? This is the consumer-based society we live in today, the object of

Maybe its because I didnt grow up around here, so I carry a bit of baggage wherever I go. Also, agreement on legitimacy
which is convenient consumption.

helped keep the balance between the two super powers (pop and classical). If it is to become real, it must gain a face, and a mask. Classical exists in relation to the tradition, pop exists in relation to the present (more akin to modern art practices) Were
born into a society and all societies have currency, and currency is just shorthand to assign value. It is machinery we have attempted to rebury. And most of you reading live in the West, and most of you reading live in America, and we won, didnt we? There is no clear function, nothing
straightaway straight ahead obvious.

As time grows it becomes one or the other, but when it is

This is a terrific time to be making art, because no one knows what is happening. The problem with
young it is both. this is that if you are always looking for what is just up ahead but probably out of site, you are subject to a series of mirages. As far as I can tell, there are more than 9,600 other years also worth remembering. The urge is the driving mechanism. The urge must be

People have certain expectations when they enter a specific place

mediated.

All anyone is concerned with is whether we HAVE won. Maybe something that exists despite us can be

the object of our affection, but if so it is only a mirror for which we see the mediating mechanism. But this is its strength. The mask is the mark of the real. The young consumable is without mark, and can only be observed through partial nudity. Sound is

The art is to find a way to connect the art with the people who want to see/hear/know about it.
economically multi-dimensional. The face is always an original point, but the mask is the real question.

The classical world: place (the concert hall); method of survival (patronage/the endowment, or a lot of money from a few people) and sound as a
medium is inherently slippery, something without a look or a taste, it seems to die as soon

Focus on how the new art is dynamic and community-based, or how ridiculous attacks on it are in the current conditions. And a lot of people
as it is born.

get carried away with this; we have inherited something great, we are America, we are the best. If no one even believes you can make anything, they have absolutely no interest when you do make something. These exist in relation to pop,

which then exploits these organic art forms, assimilating them (except for Rap, kind of)
Immediacy, hunger as known from the tip of the brain, the Cyclops has only one eye and we call it his mouth. This is a large-scale project that cannot be addressed directly, especially by someone so enmeshed. We have all experienced it before: the art

opens a hole through which all that is buried, or trapped, or even lying on the surface but invisibly tethered to our flesh can exit and simply float weightless and timeless in a void.

BThey mistake the system for the actual value, and often they get it right but, lets be honest, there are whole fields where they get it wrong.
How do we let people respond as an extension of listening?
Most art forms derive profit by limiting access; you need to buy a CD in order to hear the music, or if you hear it on the radio you then have to listen to a string of advertisements. By displaying the art in this way, people can encounter it in a neutral space, somewhere that is not already dominated by another art.

We are not trying to do something new.

Making

music, that is the pure act of creating it, has become easier than ever. After establishing
the geography of our vehicle, the next step is to establish a financial relationship with the wider

This can be done through means of paypal, and maybe could also be used to track the popularity of different exhibits (though this can not define us we need vision as well as common sense). That should be the aim of every presentation
world.

The Collapsible Institution does. Sound is like the exterior machine, and you
become a machine-built receiver; what I mean to say is that sound is only a way of gaining access to music, not music only being the means to control sound. This also gives
people the ability to approach it on their own terms, so that they can spend as much time or as little time with the work as they like. When dealing with something so new, it is important to be cautious and to treat people as individuals who may have wildly differing reactions. The pain of the crisis is economic. To put the art in a common space that any one has access to, i.e. in public or semi-public/semi-private.

The role of the audience: outsiders? Nature Vs. The Cannibal?

stability. More people, less jobs, much less

There will of course be firm guidelines for aspects of The Collapsible Institution, but every exhibition should have the aim of destroying our own rules, of eviscerating them.

But most people just arent that interested.

Another example of this is the

release of albums (see Radiohead) to be bought for any price you like. Sound is about listening,
how do we let people listen? The oldest institution in Western
music is The Orchestra. The new place(s) The two rivers flow through dry land; peopled with those who know when to plant, how to fish, what is good to get from the river. The
defining characteristic of The Collapsible Institution will be the physical flexibility of its place.

a theoretical method for the exhibition of process as object

Or is

the actual act we are engaged in that of observing?

By using a mobile cloud network (need to learn more about this but I believe it is fully possible; also good for advertising), passersby will be able to immediately throw money into the hat, of any amount, in order to support the work.
Or should they attempt to combine the rivers, betting on a possible future that is in no way guaranteed? And while people were still interested in
classical music, and many were somewhat unnerved by jazz (even if they liked it deep down), a simple co-opting of symbols would do to calm those disturbed nerves. If you

can manage to engage yourself with a machine while passing over one of these spots, you may be prepared to see the young multiple.

Support/Advance for other institutions Performing artists for decades have survived by performing on the street and accepting contributions from passersby.
We do not have a history enshrined in institution, but the event has occurred and we are now in the throes of recognizing it. It is a robot tutor, made of elements of the economy, drawing out loose
threads from ragged dolls to build a doll web.
Some think it is flourishing; I for one am afraid we are

Every instance should aim to be personal; the only aim is to make it possible for someone to gain an experience from the art that is personal. Others are wary of this; life may be difficult now, but it is
simply touring Jeremy Bentham.

very rewarding. Everyone is dependent on the two rivers, but distance makes things difficult. No one really makes a

decision in art on when to let something die.

Everyone wants to feel that they have a choice in the matter, and everyone deserves a choice in the matter.

And something different is to be had from each river; say there are plenty of fish in one, and large stones used to build shelter in another. Protecting the art: curation as a

form of destruction, its relation to the presentation of timebased media But this is a rouse.
Unless you can land a high paying gig with a major orchestra, many of which only have open spots when a player dies, youre forced to fight for an ever contracting pool of freelance work and teaching gigs. I digress. You contradict yourself by avoiding

contradiction. Our art is not new; it has a history, though history only in the

sense of individually remembered events that have moved past their original owners.

Selling coffee/beverages.
Imagine two large rivers.

Make sure everyone

wears a tux.

More people in general played music

This is perhaps a moment when we are separated from other humans, perhaps even separated from ourselves. What is the initial
among the older generation.

requirement from you (the machine will not engage you on its own)? You cant watch a
film without either going to a theater, buying a physical copy of the film, or buying into an Internet streaming service. My question is: how do we link the two? And it has grown since. Some of us have

taken it upon ourselves to invent our way out of stagnation: there are growing numbers of composers orchestras, and quite a few concert series which expand the definition of the performance space.

Of course ideas develop better in a

community. Preservation as a Form of Institutional Cannibalism But lets be honest, those people are in denial. It should become part of their landscape, like other works of public art or
architecture. And these are just the performance majors. The space of display also invests

You can only tell if you are in another sector of the galaxy by visiting a world. You cant shoot an
people with a sense of ownership.

idea in the head; it will always be there, waiting. The preservation of things that deserve to be preserved.

But of course not everyone makes it through. Make sure the faces are white. Machine-Built Receiver What I mean to say is that an exterior
machine attaches you (cannibal or otherwise) to something outside yourself through a series of steps, a linear multiple. We have a natural process through which we can observe the young consumable through a series of points and machines. I dont mind Jeremy

The physical structure should embed itself in a location; say on a street corner, near a business plaza, at a farmers market, in a parking lot. The revenue of this new system will derive from multiple places; Digital Busking. And you can spend your entire
Bentham, I quite like Jeremy Bentham, but corpse-worship is not what Im talking about.

life in denial; you can have a very successful career in denial. Empty space looks basically the same everywhere. Our ancestors left the old world and were transformed, and our dim star left with them and grew anew. And often thats a problem for those who are not interested, and especially those who think it is impossible to start all over again. What we need is a concerted
effort to prove that there is a demand, that a whole generation of young people is

Make connections between local artists and the local community; if they know who you are, they are more likely to feel connected to your work.
enthralled by music, and that people are willing to support it.
To give the art a wider ability to define the context it is experienced in, and the art world limits access by making art ridiculously expensive, and it controls expense by making art rare. It does us no good to trap people and force them into appreciate. I believe that way is by

Make musicians carry out non-performing work, like making the coffee There are hundreds of different ways demand is
pairing with coffee and baked goods shops that share our aesthetic.

This is where the tangents of sound and the economy overlap, for a sound is like this as well
created and then exploited for profit, and we have very limited access to all of these.

(especially the new music). You can only hear this music by being prepared, but you cannot be prepared by preparing yourself. We
know there is already a necessary connection buried deep within the soil ((evolution) provides us with answers).

They are feeling you out.

Private events
What is an exterior machine and where do you become

I had initially considered writing this essay in question form; I thought this might yield more clarity when talking about the confluence of economics and experimental music. See
engaged in one?

everyone has a value. And the economy is there to hang a number around your neck. And I meet very few people who want to start all over again. But how can a dead
body sit in a vase on your table and brighten the room? But I feel loathe to interfere with the process; the gardener

Like Morton Feldman says, this is a military formula, And then after three hundred years we look at it, we refine it and we start all over again. Among the various peoples, there are some
needs different tools when digging in the sidewalk.

who think the rivers should be combined; this would increase the yield, allowing for larger families. Well, what characteristics do the new carriers and the
concrete flowers have in common? Also, our goal should not be profit, but providing a new avenue to

experience and sustain new and experimental arts; therefore we must find another means of

This should be used in determining exhibition routes; also need to make connections with local community organizations. You may
support.

only become engaged at a certain type of point, where tangents connect. It should

Some people have, though; they have started all over again. However, it should
predominately be located not in a building, but in a truck. never try and establish a dominion over the space by forcefully intruding into peoples lives.

The new economic structure (The Collapsible Institution)

Mix of traveling and being at events (become a semi-regular part of peoples lives and appear at special events) Support comes from it being community based/local This serves two purposes:
but thats the thing, you see: you cant kill a sound.

This product is cheap and easily made, with the added positive that it is addictive. It is a way to learn
how to turn your focus to the internal machinery, by extending yourself out beyond

A flexible, physically mobile space that allows performance to be situated outside, in the physical community itself. The objective is to shift the discussion away from the idea of funding to the idea of an artistic platform that provides access to liquid pools of capital (away from begging and towards growing our own food, or why we need to discover farming) This
yourself. description may seem a complex description of something intuition provides naturally, but cannibals do not follow the rules of nature. Things keep growing in the ground, but only a minority
of gardeners grow concrete flowers; and many even name them corpse-rose, dead-lily, and point to the pedals and say look how many new limbs we have grown for Jeremy Bentham! You are extended beyond yourself

through steps, from one point to another, as though in a series of black film shots, sensing

The main economic focus of The Collapsible Institution will be selling coffee and other beverages. This will allow the art to come to the customer rather then the customer coming to the art.
the movement of every frame but seeing the whole.
What if your degree is in composition? They even often called them orchestras.

It is something nearly universally consumed, and it matches well with the aesthetic of the target demographic (artsy types and hipsters interested in authenticity. More on that later.). Are the
Thats the real purgatory.
Manifesto. communities more well off in their current state?
engaged, and who does the engaging? How does one become

Also you can curtail exhibits for specific communities (Latin artists for East L.A., Nam June Paik style for Korea Town) / act as art ambassador between different parts of the city (hi Korea Town, this is whats happening in East L.A.) And with that name you would never think to eat
The land is dry and yields enough for only a few, so the population is small. He has progeny, you know/but the name is different, and they no longer look alike. There is clear overlap in some aspects, but neither is wholly dependent on the other. It has
the fruit!

This is an act of recognition, a sudden bolt of clarity.

become easier to record music (dont all Macs now come with Garage Band and a built in microphone?). Contrast this to the economy of the Cannibal: Consumption Through Convenience. It even rings true among the elderly: most of the blue hairs that fill the seats used to be violinists or play flute. This process is a natural combination of multiple

The rivers are a fair distance apart, so some people have easier access to fish, and some people have better shelter. The exterior machine is a device, beyond
elements overlapping, an elegant convergence of senseless mass. oneself, that exists in the economy as a flat transit point. Many of the musicians I talk to
today feel aimless, and have little hope for an economically secure future; many are

Who gets to decide what is preserved and what is left to die? It will also allow for
increasingly desperate.

maximum flexibility in exhibiting pieces that are based in time and space. How can we show this demand? And lets
face it, thats the same crowd and then some who would have had access in the olden days.

Sometimes they run in parallel, but let us not

make the mistake of believing they are the same thing. We need to keep costs low and raise the

profile of the music/if we can raise the profile and create an interface through which material support can be received, we wont need to rely on state support or grants (move from dependence on a small number of money sources to a medium number of money sources based in the community) at some point in your
life some one is going to ask you how you make a living. This point must be approached in an essential manner, but one can never
know where the point is, one can never prepare, always only be prepared by achieving a natural state of immediate awareness (that is preparedness void of any preparation).

But ideas quickly die in a society, or are swallowed up and consumed by something else. When recording
companies discovered that people actually liked jazz (it was in the mid-20s), they had a choice: either keep pushing classical records that would never really become cheaper to make, or exploit a newer medium that was already popular as well as cheaper to make.

What is the issue here?

Near opposites inhabiting an infinite line, the conflict between cannibalism and nature is clear in our economy today. Its easier to get a
degree in music (thank you Sallie Mae), which of course means that everyone knows something even when no one really agrees with each other (just dont put them in the

This means in the actual places where people gather, either for recreation, transit, or business. While these efforts are more than just noteworthy, Im not sure its
same room). going to be enough to revitalize what people are perpetually complaining is a dying art.

This is not a manifesto.

It takes as many people to play a Hayden symphony today as it did in Haydens time; therefore the cost has stayed the same. A friend of mine pointed out something interesting: most people who go to the orchestra on any sort

You make a small circle to exclude me, Ill make a larger circle to include you.
of regular basis used to play music.

The rabbit that swallows his own ears hears the world through his body.

What is the

There are whole institutions that will support you; sometimes its called classical music, sometimes - just academia. I meet very few people who even believe that we can start all over again. But by deciding to preserve something, you let many other things drop off. The
question? What is an institution? world may be an infinite series of overlapping circles. Let us not make this mistake; there are too many obvious examples. And so it
was that the vast masses were weaned off classical music, and on to something that

Let us consider an institution like a wormhole between two worlds. Why has it become so difficult to
could be produced cheaper and more quickly. make a living making music? These are visibly banal situations that are actually points of

serious exposure, ordinary spots where the tangents of you, sound, and economy

But just like in music, the system is not the same as the actual value.
coincide, some sort of triple eclipse involving the viewer.
What are we to do? And is this the reason no one can land a fucking gig? The idea used to be that the more people who were interested in music, the more people would

If they do not pay, they cannot enter the wormhole. Listening to the music is the way of exiting the wormhole. What is
invest in music.

How you make a living is in fact a way of looking at that number around your neck. So why should we be afraid to kill something if it cant die? This connects the
required to increase the visibility of music, and to allow people to support it?

worlds of economics and the tradition of western classical music.

It has also become incredibly easy to make your music available to anyone, anywhere, who has a computer. O.K., so I should back up and qualify some of my past statements.

There is no point if you just stay in your space ship. Too many people with music degrees, too many idiot kids with electric guitars. I will have made my decision by the end of the essay. Let us consider economics as one of these circles, and music as another. It is getting harder and harder to be a
musician, and it has become extremely difficult to be a classical musician. Where does

People enter the wormhole by participating in an economic activity; they pay to hear the music. They were involved, they acquired the knowledge, and now they frequent the
music stand in the day and age of flood and glut?

orchestra. Also at some point other forms of music became much cheaper to produce.

I have not decided yet as whether to pursue this course or not.

Meanwhile, the labor market is becoming ever more flooded with highly skilled musicians.

CShapes are constantly coming in and out of clarity, in a fluid motion (everything is osmosis); little brilliant slips of paper passing freely from one to another, from being to being and environment to being; what I mean is there is a constant exchange of value, and everything exists either moving towards or away from it.

How

should we make the coffee?:

institution as a parasite. Is this inevitable?

Consider the

Coffee and tea are very cheap, and by supplying baked goods from already established shops we avoid the need of a commissary, eliminating an expensive cost.

Institution versus tradition

We must realize that there will always be a distance between how we are and how the world of economics is; that these worlds only overlap, and do not spring from the same point or have the same trajectory. The incredible explosion of jazz and blues recordings, as
A dim star is the corner of your eye

well as other popular idioms, made more sense economically: you had smaller ensembles, which means you had to pay fewer people, and the realization of complete pieces became much shorter.
fabric of life is the skin of a bubble.

That is our problem right now.

A mad scramble for crumbs
Financial self-reliance should be our goal.

The

When is a sound not a sound?

Build a collapsible institution.

Partner with

some boutique coffee maker?

There will always be a wall between our art and economics, or the systems people use of assigning value. Staying local allows us to explore a depth of quality we would not have with a wider
performance area. This means that, while the truck would tour, it would work on developing relationships locally, in regards to patrons, artists, and partners. Limits should not be

approached as a means of control for The Collapsible Institution, but rather as viable areas of exploration, or an indeterminate method to let the wind drop us in the correct spot. The corpse-rose is not that different: but the value (This is seen in their similar attitudes towards water and

music; people can be convinced to buy fancy bottled water, but they still expect everyone to have green lawns in the desert. Likewise, since the air is filled with music, and really all you need is a radio (or to go out driving), music seems to exist in a free state like water. If I can hear that song for free a thousand times on the radio, in a restaurant, and on

And our event is not one of economics. An institution that survives without becoming a cannibal itself is one that can collapse in an instant, that will break into constituent parts then reform in another arena. It would be
TV, why should I have to pay for the recording?).

like a coffee shop from a parallel universe, where you get not just coffee but exposure to wonderful, strange, ephemeral art that defines your experience. But the model is working

horribly, and it is this attempt to associate what should be a qualitative music-toaudience relationship with a quantitative audience-to-music relationship that is killing it; it drives up costs, which are expected in ever grander halls and ever higher-paid superstars, but result in frankly lack-luster performances and a diminishing pool of jobs, as well as a relationship to the audience and community that is more like that of a trustfund brat to their now uninterested parents. Make friends with deep-sea divers. That is

why it is a dialectic, a form a reasoned arguing: the community has one set of needs which it believes must be met (not an absolute, something continually being discovered through medical applications) while art has a set of absolute inherent qualities that appear different under different light, the absolute nature of which is only known through the realization of the art. The Collapsible Institution recognizes this as well: a performance on top of a hill is not seen as a complex decision of compressing specific logistics into a foreign space, but rather a simple question of the correct content in a perhaps unexpectedly correct space. This is especially true of music, where preservation merely becomes the tearing of an art from its relational context, supposedly for the benefit of future generations (an ironic goal given the cannibal nature of society today). I
understand the risk (and huge change of habit) involved in shifting from reliance on a repertoire to focusing on new music, but it is the only way to reinvigorate what has become a stagnant tradition ruled by a few backwards blue-hairs. In a way so does the flower,
just the currency is different. We would have to rely on patrons, and if our arts do not already receive

support in this way it is unlikely a new platform would do better. One of the primary arguments

I hear from people associated with orchestras is that their audience does not want to hear new music; I realize now that this audience is made up of people who fund the endowment.

Why be afraid to let a music die out? (which is why we need the Central

A limit should be recognized not as a line/wall but as a grey area where we acknowledge that these forces have organizing forms we are all in fact subject to: that they are natural laws. What is the purpose of the Symphony Orchestra?
Bank more than ever)

The question is, how should we look at what is on the other side of that wall? That relationship is managed with the focus on the community, that the dialectic
is for the benefit of the community; but it is also managed with the knowledge that Art is never a derivative, that you cannot bend art to the needs of the community. Capitalism as it exists today is at the extreme of this value-symbol relationship, creating ever more complex systems while minimizing the actual real-world analysis of value.

When is a music not a music? When does a new music become a tradition? If any of these sources dried up, it would immediately have a dramatic effect on
our ability to function; running it as a business in parallel with local shops gives us more funding sources, and would connect us to the larger local community, making support in hard times more likely. *independence? Carriers expect a transfer of some kind to occur (no entitlements). The problem with

orchestras is that gaining access to this privileged relationship excludes highly qualified professionals; the business focus of an orchestral association only allows for those with the ability to produce a quantitative return to attempt to develop a qualitative association with the orchestra. The Collapsible Institution is often a confused mess of ideas that

points in one direction, rather then a slick, sick vehicle of speed moving along a golden monorail track.

It needs to be both industrial (quick and cheap) while of high aesthetic quality (tastes good and looks crazy).
The Collapsible Institution can exist without a founding document, but usually has an arrived at set of guiding principles. What I mean by this is that The Collapsible Institution should be suited to constant traveling, and must acknowledge that while standardization has made for the appearance of a permanent context in association with specific geographic locals and times, where and when present themselves in an infinite variety and the appearing of the institution must ride these questions like a seabird. If all
you needed was a chart, and you improvised everything else on the spot (composing during a performance), there was no need for long rehearsals. We just need to know

that if there is only a hole, the rain will come in, and it might flood the basement where we keep our history.

Ads should focus on

hipsters.

Is it the music they love, or is it the fact they are near blackout drunk, over stuffed with fatty food, and something comes on that triggers a positive memory for them. Classical music, in this case, is sustained
by qualitative value: a musician devotes their life to it because the intensity is so high, and patrons give to orchestras because their relationship with the music is so intense.

Design of The Collapsible Institution

drawbacks.

Also, the geographic

nature of the aesthetic means that simply exploring a city as large as Los Angeles would be a huge task. There is the possibility of making this venture non-profit, but this has several

The argument is one in which musicologists spend lifetimes explaining what in math would be called a proof, or an assumption so basic there is no need to explain it. Should we put in a

Does this happen naturally, or is it forced?

colorful glass brick window, so we can make out shapes and movement but no definition? Build a self-destructive institution. Do we even

The aesthetics means speed should be reduced (while still being fast) so that each customer has a unique
live in the West anymore?

experience.

Or should it be a large picture window, perhaps with bulletproof glass? Should there be no window, and we only allow imagination to dictate how we view the other?

I am

writing you from aboard a cruise ship.

know.

While I am no sociologist, or economist, I believe my argument may stray into these areas, and if I use terms that have well explored equivalents in other professions, I ask that people let me

And its cheap, too; the whole point is to convince a person to trade their units of value for something of yours thats of less value. The other path to
support would be to make the bulk of our work about the local community. We would get a consistent means to support ourselves and these shops would also profit, and gain large amounts of exposure. We would be relying on a small group of patrons, including grant-writing organizations, to dole out large sums of money. Also, the long process of

composing/practicing/performing a piece now had to compete with other forms of music

Economic Systems of Representation and The Collapsible Institution Need

that had a much shorter realization time.

a partner? There is no best there is. This has an underground, kind of dangerous, kind of like street-art, appeals to cool young people in the know So you would call this show
a success, correct?
itself. The Collapsible Institution recognizes this and braces

Strategy like old phonograph dealers get your street-cred by touting your coolness, but focus on selling to everyone (this will be the bulk of your income) Think about the shark and the
suckerfish. And for this Sharks are rightly feared.
It is always highly unlikely that any art that does not have a literal physical manifestation is assigned its appropriate value; the goal of The Collapsible Institution is to derive a small but steady stream of symbols, by methods perhaps secondary to its purpose, through which it can support itself at a basic level.

But then of course you need to

burn it.

I understand that the orchestra needs to be able to pay their musicians, but you would think that increasing audience attendance would be one reliable way to do

If it is completely successful at this, it may eliminate parasites altogether, or perhaps in this expansion the suckerfish removes beneficial parasites from other types of fish. Now, the suckerfish cleans parasites off the sharks. Let me rephrase that: what if the only goal of the suckerfish was to maximize its return on its investments? Is the same true for sound?
that.

Community minded people interested in supporting living, creative art-making through entrepreneurship (more progressive) by real human beings Long time spans are viewed not solely as a test of
endurance, but rather as a means of providing access to displays of scale. But, of course,
this argument ignores the aesthetic component, which is a given in the majority of music circles. At the time I was writing this, the cheapest ticket for a Friday concert at the L.A. Phil was $42; a student ticket would be cheaper, between $10 and $20.

Thats

called profit.

I dont necessarily mean this as an insult; parasites are essential to the health of the ecosystem.

Performance space
While art clearly has an affinity to the processes of nature, art is not a derivative of the economy; it is a separate entity, internally infinite and multiple. The Collapsible Institution is a body, able to facilitate the active dialectic of a community and an art without subsuming to meta-cannibalism itself.

Coffee Space

This keeps the shark healthy. By only focusing on return the suckerfish no longer has its focus on keeping the shark clean. I dont really know how long the suckerfish has been around.

But

will this work?

How are we on time?
Lets define value in two ways: quantitative and qualitative. The social fact of the orchestra is that there are high barriers to gaining access to its wonders, with the level of understanding the language only one such barrier.

The Community-Art Dialectic

By relying on the endowment system, instead of ticket sales, the orchestra is influenced by an ever-smaller cadre of reactionary listeners whose tastes

But they are an essential part of the food chain. The suckerfish would say, I must devise a
have little relation to the majority of the community.

way of sucking more parasites than I am currently sucking.

Money should be recognized for what it is: an imperfect system through which we attempt to recognize the value of an object through an assigned number. Money is often viewed as an essential means of creating an art, but like listening itself there is no absolute zero for the economic functioning of an art; what I mean by this is that, like the dinosaur it is, music finds a way.

Single Serve Coffee

Machines?

Every night I put on headphones and play along to poorly arranged pre-recorded tracks of top 40 hits, and the people in the audience love it. Focus on the local nature,

on being involved in local art making; they are a part of supporting local art, developing a real local identity. If you live before the invention of
fire, you have no concept of what it means to burn something. An art institution must be a mediator that treads carefully, sneaking

The focus should be on people interested in the arts who dont feel comfortable seeking out galleries (casual arts people), and Key demographic (2-point plan) From a purely
the cannibals real food while avoiding offenses to nature.
economic stand point, probably.

We already have an infinite

music, this can be expressed in a relationship, the higher the intensity of the
relationship the higher the qualitative value. The problem with this is that the orchestra is making an exception; by making tickets affordable only as an exception to the rule, it sends a clear message that the main focus of the orchestra is not the community, but the

Without them the ecosystem doesnt work, then everything is screwed. Some people just strike oil. Why should you believe that this is possible, then? Now, there is a lot of death surrounding Sharks, and this is paralleled in music (every time you make a sound, the sound begins to die. Every sound has a
elite.

death).

Instant filters with

water heaters?

It must be recognized that an art institution should never, and in fact can never and has never been able to preserve. This means it is time to change the mission of the orchestra, and of
music in general; it should no longer be used as a tool for the affirmation of individual, physical wealth, but should be used to document the vitality of a living community.

Spend as much exhibition time on everyone else.

There are only so many parasites on sharks, so perhaps the suckerfish expands to sucking on other animals. The oldest institution in the western musical world is the Symphony Orchestra? Stay hidden below the surface; water is clear, so you can still be seen.
Quantitative relates to pure monetary value; i.e. the more demand there is for something as related to a limited supply, the more value it has. It functions at a basic level with the

secondary acquisition of capital, knowing that real value may not be reflected in the current economic system. Do institutions rise and fall, and rise again,

while music exists consistently in the ether? The problem comes when the suckerfish believes that its only goal is sucking. From where does it derive this legitimacy; is this a legitimate statement?
The only way of maintaining a dialectic in an economy of cannibals is to be obsessively mobile. When is it appropriate for a new tradition to form an

institution?

There were orchestras all over the country, even in mid-sized and small

This is what the musical institution should do; keep the shark healthy.
towns, supported by wealthy patrons for the good of the community.

Sell it like artisinal/organic food.

Of course there is something inherently live about sound. Will it

conflict with the open structural nature of The Collapsible Institution? So the question is more
one of infinite listening. They choose whatever is most familiar. Associating a music with the wealthy only works in a society
that values the upper class above all else; plus, by using classical music as an instrument to confirm the uniqueness of those with wealth, the orchestra becomes a

Shouldnt the people of the future have the good fortune to stumble upon something great? This is
document in support of inequality.

convenience, the defining feature of our age.

Collapsible Institution.

This is The

Or
We do need to kill the orchestra; but let me explain right now that Im

It must be the music they love. If you think the answer is sound is unlimited because sound waves are merely waves traveling through the air you do not know what I am talking about. It
not calling for its elimination.

discovers and utilizes the remnants of lost civilizations, as opposed to the monorail that only stops at sticky replicates of present-day notions of history.

This is not a

fair choice.
civilization.

In the late 19th early 20th centuries, many wealthy people were focused on supporting the community; there existed the idea that classical music was unique in that it helped foster, and indeed its consumption resulted in, the affect of

For a caveman oil is completely worthless.

This is selling status, if patronage is involved.

But how do you listen to sound?
structures influencing their actions. It is important to remember that, like any moving animal, musicians are subject to large numbers of seemingly random

Deal with the ridiculous sense of entitlement in the arts If the shark is not
clean, its probably going to die, and then the whole system is fucked. A community will only be comfortable assigning value in a way that is
familiar; therefore secondary methods of value assignment can be ideal.

Should The Collapsible Institution become an economic scheme to redistribute wealth from art institutions to individual artists by dominating the public conversation?
The shark has been around for millions of years; it was around in prehistoric times. And then came the gramophone. I,
instead, still want to talk about value, though in a way that I hope will include the legitimate parts of a musicological argument.

They eat it up. Is sound a

finite resource?

People are purchasing their status in an art project (is this too evil?)
This will, above all else, require a change to the way that orchestras are

Or rather you must have spent less then you receive, to get what you give, in order to increase the unit of value assigned to you. Oil will run out long before the sun, it is a problem that we can expect, on a smaller scale (one that we can emotionally identify with). We should approach
run in regards to the treatment of their audience. music at face value, attempting to evaluate it based on its own merits, rather than its

I, for one, love plants. The question is then one of scale. The more people who know how to listen, the less sound there will be? A
place in some glorious history.

collapsible institution should be able to take advantage of the deceptive nature of present-

But if we are going to be honest with ourselves, we must include the other factors. The
day contexts.

problem comes when institutions focus on concrete goals that can only be recognized economically. This is one way that the orchestra was
able to survive economically; it also helped that the music was quite popular, and there

Of course the more people who have the concept of burning, the more people will want to use oil. Sound arts are wonderfully
wasnt very much competing for the attention of audiences.

suited to this method of operation; continually fading away, even the means of consumption being inherently performance based. An orchestra needs an expensive
hall, because acoustics matter more than the content of the music, etc This is one of many reasons why the American People have lost interest.

You always get Or

heat. We need limited choice.

The Collapsible Institution is a

crowd that moves on the ground, on a dirty road among the brambles and weeds.

maybe we just need to imitate plants more in our manner of listening. How is an art institution to avoid being caught in the

But if you burn oil, you get heat. Does this mean that the value of classical music has declined? But that is because you have never listened. The Collapsible Institution needs the lubricant of a
crossfire? million meals, tangents moving in impossible parallels, until they can become a single

The ending is always in sight, and this may in fact define the piece. Now, people still needed to go out and have a good time;
line.
there was an escape that the orchestra provided. This is something that recently has benefited rap and hip-hop immensely, incredibly low production costs. How many of us are no longer students, but recent graduates with little money? The maintenance of this intensity should be the chief concern in regards to the sustenance of a unitary group of musicians. It is a gorilla form, leaving nothing behind but artifacts of process (instruments, even recordings, are merely artifacts of the experience). Qualitative is much more difficult to define, but what I am talking about is an intensity of value between two objects, be they two people or a person and a non-person. While during the early period of recordings certain classical music was popular, not everything translated to recording easily. The solution is to ignore the halls, ignore the decorum, and ignore the repertoire. This often takes the form of the constituent parts having secondary identities,

day-jobs and the like, that while providing support to the parts are in fact secondary to their function. For a large portion of their possible audience, a typical concert has
suddenly become unaffordable. All of a sudden, sound could be transmuted into a physical good, something, a consumable that was represented in physical form. A

If you have never done it, then you have no concept of it, and it is totally worthless to you. As long as they pass out before they sober up youre fine. That track ends in the clouds, drops the vehicle in the ocean. You can listen to it anywhere, at anytime, for as long as you want. They know how to use an infinite resource. Simple answers usually present themselves
musical ensemble is in fact a basic form of collapsible institution. once the limit is viewed as a viable option. The most important relationship the
orchestra should worry about is that between a persons humanity and the music. It is

the relationship that is the focus of the institution.

Conclusion

Now, to be fair, this

This drives away anyone who may

can be the result of serendipity.

be interested but is of a lower tax bracket.

Thats effectively all you need to make money in the arts: trap people, get um liquored up, and play em something they know.
Limits

This model is obviously still alive/the orchestra is not dead. However, the physicalization of a sonic art led to its industrialization, which favored quick turnover. This means real creative programming, not two weeks of the same Beethoven symphony and then one day a month of a new composition that everyone views in the shadow of Beethoven.

The Collapsible Institution is only known in the present, like music itself, a chase best done with an emptied mind, only as a natural effort, knowing we can only do the best we can rather then being the best there is. But what about special deals, such as the student
price for concerts? Do we really want the associative crux of music to be that only the wealthy are really deserving of high art? Frankly, no one really knows if new music will draw a bigger crowd, but there are some very hopeful signs, for instance: the L.A. Phil plays more new music than any other orchestra in America, and it is the only orchestra that makes more from ticket sales than from an endowment. This is also anathema to

If you never burn it, you never get any heat. The sun had a beginning, and someday it will burn out. Most sound/s are on a scale that we can easily identify with emotionally. 3minute pop songs are a good example of a finite resource. Maybe plants know how to listen to an infinite music? But how is this infinite listening arrived at? You can wait until you are in the correct frame of mind. But this doesnt answer our question, because an infinite resource has a beginning, middle and end as well. An infinite sound verses a finite sound (infinite sound is more convenient). But what is the tendency of people who have infinite options? It is always being created and destroyed, it is practically defined by the fact that it has a beginning, middle and end. But whatever is most familiar isnt necessarily what is most valuable. People will choose no music; it can be a very good choice. A better choice is infinite music or no music at all. Some of you know what I mean by sound and some of you do not. Everyone knows how to burn oil,
the middle class focus of American life.

because everyone has the concept of burning. But we are only now learning how to derive energy from the sun. Plants do it all the time, in this way they are very advanced. If more people knew how to accomplish this (to listen to music as a plant lives in the sunlight), they wouldnt be so consumed with the ending of a finite resource. One might assume that recording would make an infinite listening easier to grasp. Infinite choice, choose whatever is easiest; whatever is easiest is most familiar.

Think of This As
Think of this as a theory of suggestions. Think of this as a mist, not a solid. Think of this as music about writing, not writing about music. Speak everything on the page aloud, inside your head. Listen to paper, I beg of you. If you have finished this essay confused, then you have reached the end. Read it backwards and you will reverse the process. Think of this as if you are going to someplace. There is no right way to cook this essay; you may eat it raw. I began this project as a way to gain an understanding of the economic and musical processes I am currently enmeshed in; this is just the runoff. It is an artifact of thought. Writing as the loose change of thinking. Economy and Sound are a very complex equation, and this is just an excerpt of the remainder. What is that which is a pile of a pile? I believe I am thinking of a compost heap.

[Notes: 1. Milton Babbitt, c. 1947 2. Ernest Fleishmann: The Orchestra is Dead, Long Live the Community of Musicians An address given at the commencement exercises of the Cleveland Institute of Music, May 16, 1987 ]