British composer Sir John Tavener passed away yesterday. He will be greatly missed. The majority of Sir John’s music is of the choral Christian variety. You have probably heard his music many times; as background to lots and lots of new-agey TV shows and perhaps in some incense-laden massage or yoga studio. His Funeral Canticle is used in the opening of Terrence Malick’s ‘Tree Of Life’ and his music was played at Princess Diana’s funeral. As a tribute to his talent and skill I want to say a few words about the general state of Christian music to hopefully demonstrate why he was so special to so many of us.

Let’s start by admitting that the vast majority of Christian music (and religious music in general) has been, is and will continue to be absolute crap. At it’s best it can be as profound an expression of faith as any prayer, but let’s be honest: that case is the rare exception. No matter how good the […]

I’ve seen this (very nice) looking advert a number of times recently. Great bit of advertising that’s about 30 years too late. It now reminds me of other quaint vo-tech school brochures like for offset printing or plastering; beautiful skills, but not really part of the modern world. I say that not to be a curmudgeon but simply because ‘music education’ has stopped being anything like a going concern.

Remember that, through the 70’s ‘Music’ used to be one of the ‘Eds’ at any decent American school. You know: Phys-Ed. Special-Ed. Arts-Ed. Music-Ed. No such thing anymore.

This poster (and a number of others I’ve seen) do a great job telling people the -intrinsic- benefits of music. How much good you’re doing for kids by teaching. Showing parents the value of Music Teachers. Basically, they’ve turned Music into vegetables. It’s good for kids so have give servings a day! Teach music and make a difference!

But Plato (yeah, really, a Platonic reference) made the -real- value of Music Ed plain 2,500 years […]

I hear a lot of wistful sighs these days from music lovers. Typically these are older people or younger hipsters. A lot of these people still have quite the love affair with vinyl.

I have one question for basically everyone who loves music so much, “How come when you share music with me, it’s almost always in the form of a video?” Unless we’re sharing iTunes stuff, most of the ‘music’ people want to share with me are actually videos. Even the music magazines almost always share links to performance videos rather than links to plain ol’ sound. Why has video become the new music? I think there are two reasons: Convenience and Planning.

To start with, a lot of this is the design of the Masters Of The Interwebs. Ever since Google bought Youtube, they have constantly tried to push their videos to the top of search pages. A video with a given set of keywords will almost always rank higher than any other kind of content. Oddly enough, links to […]

Everyone talks about ‘polarization’. Politics, income, culture. It has struck me recently how this also applies to art. There are super-detailed pieces of art which have become common-place. Video games, movies, etc. And these are largely computer generated (humans still supervise.) But art which is strictly ‘human’, ie. generated in real-time by real people, has become more simple. As the machines advance, we withdraw.

I have started thinking that, in a sense, we’ve unconsciously given up. Other than guys like Chuck Close, the idea of humans doing extremely detailed and complex contrivances is going buh bye.

I’ll grant you that there are plenty of stunt-performers. Guys who are like cirque du soleil contortionists. Performing ‘how does he do that finger-busting feats. Unfortunately, most of these are, forgive me, circus feats—amazing to watch once. Not necessarily what you wanna listen to for depth.

You can say that art is supposed to reflect the times. But if artists like Chuck Close (who admits he is imitating a machine) are what’s happening, what does that say […]