Week 4, 1/28

1/28/07

My activity lulled this week, but a few new things are worth noting.

• Mei Han CDs are coming, will spend time with those next week;
• Randy Raine-Reusch (ASZA.com) checked in, and I will also deal with his most accessible materials next week, some projects with Mei Han;
• I’ll probably contact Paul Plimley again, just to alert him to my current focus on ASZA; this site is based in Vancouver, B.C., close to home for me now, part of my current strong Pacific Rim radar;
• Leo Feigin’s rare and valuable 1989 “Document: New Music from Russia, the 1980s,” companion text to Leo Records 8-CD set of that name, just arrived from him, and will engross me as I listen to same;
• Bill Shoemaker has excerpted much of my Northern Sun, Southern Moon’s Chapter Five (“The Free World Beyond America”), on which this book in progress is being built, to run in the next Point of Departure issue. It will run with an ad that will call more attention to the NewOldMusic project site, as well as my heffleyrecords.com
• looking forward to Vijay Iyer’s response to my questions on his dynamite CDs & texts

Some thoughts on the process: I’ve been pondering the design and functional intents of the Basecamp site hosting my project...wondering if it’s the best facilitator for the kind of interactivity I want to accommodate. It isn’t as slick and easy for people to pop in and out of intuitively—like a typical blog site such as this one, for instance. But it is well wrought as a place to do research and writing (as also other typical business-world) collaborative projects, which is why I chose it.

The initial awkwardnesses of some exchanges—those that spilled out from my one-on-ones with one or two people, and some solitary operations I did—were due to my unawareness of certain options. All of those are mastered now, and I know how to ensure email exchanges and private operations don’t trigger unintended automatic notifications, and do generate intended ones. So it shouldn’t be a problem in the future.

I keep in touch with activity on the site myself by having the RSS feed in my Bookmarks Bar. New activity shows up next to its name there by a (parenthesized number) showing the number of new posts. This, after having disabled the email notification option as the default setting.

Thankfully, no one has given me any negative feedback, or asked to be left alone or removed from the list. As I work my way through my research, interviews, and occasional exchanges with colleagues, I’m expecting that most people will be as comfortable communicating there as they were responding initially. I also expect more appearances on the site when I’m focused on a given person’s work and asking particular questions (as opposed to much interest in an ongoing general discussion, like in a blog or a listserv). Even those who have yet to check in, I expect to respond more readily to direct, well-informed requests to investigate specifics of their music or writing.

Once I have substantive threads on everyone woven into the site, I’ll announce that, and invite general perusal of them all by all, and any cross-commenting anyone wants to do.

Meanwhile, the thing is there; people can pop in there and/or here for any reason at any time, with me and/or anyone else in the People section, apart from the snail-plod of my work’s slow-moving dial...and, again, if no one does, I’ll just proceed in the usual way, putting my ducks in a row for the book I want to write at my own pace and wandering rhythm...

Week 3 activity, 1/21

Notable last week:

• my first substantive interview, with Vijay Iyer (he responded to it briefly offsite to say he’d respond to it fully soon). It’s notable for me because it more or less set the template for how all future such interviews will go—what material from each musician, scholar, or musician/scholar (Vijay’s category) I will process, and how and why; how long that’s likely to take (3-4 half-days); and how this project’s new way of doing such research/interviews differs from how I’ve worked before (more self-disclosure and presence, more sharing of my process and background thinking/notes, agendas, personal, creative, intellectual);
• a review of a recent Ganelin concert on DVD (my 4th CD review on-site of many more to come); Leo Feigin checked in, also offsite, and is sending me extensive textual material to go with the 12 CDs of early ‘80s Ganelin and other Russian musicians I got off leorecords.com. I’ll get back to that area after I get and go through Leo’s material and talk to him and others further;
• Ursel Schlicht checked in, with her interesting work with her group Ex Tempore, now on my To-Do list, and waiting on her texts and CD to come in;
• finally, I had one surprising red flag about the site’s automatic email notification function (thought I had that taken care of). One person said he was getting notified whenever I did my private operations, such as working on my To-Do list, or uploading files onto the site. Others I asked said this wasn’t happening to them, so I’m assuming he might have been the only one, for reasons I think I now understand and have fixed.

I don’t want this virtual convention of ours to function like a typical listserv, where you get a lot of emails you have no interest in—but I do want it to be easy for the different interested parties to move in and out of as the project pertains to or interests them. I’m assuming that will usually be when I’m focused on them, which will happen for one or two people a week, give or take, for the duration of the project.

Next week I will be busy with other things, so I don’t expect to do much in NewOldMusic until the week after that again. I have a pile of material to get through, more coming in...and after I go through everyone who’s responded, I will start in on those who haven’t. I will write them up whether they do or not, but I do expect some of them to jump in from their lurk or absence when I start writing them up and invite them to influence the way I do so.
In conclusion, I decided to lose the list of the site’s activities I’ve been ending these Sunday entries with. These notes are quite enough...

First post

Well, everyone, since my initial tap on your shoulder went out inadvertently a week or so ago, I have been scrambling like an improviser to rise to the occasion and make it work out! Given the accidental beginnings, I’m very happy that it’s gone as well as it has.

My main concern has been to speed up my learning curve on how to run and manage the site, simply on the terms of how it works as a computer program. I don’t want it to be spewing out every post to everyone, like your typical listserv, yet I do want the interested parties to have easy access not only to that which directly pertains to them and their work, but to any parts of the rest of the project they may find equally interesting. With this blog, and the RSS feed, you can stay in touch with it without getting bothered by or bogged down in it—as long as we all use those selective email buttons judiciously (ie., not as mass email buttons).

Many thanks to all who have responded so well, so far. I am having a lot more fun with this than if I were doing it all the usual way. I expect to be concentrating on one or two musicians and/or threads per week, and to be adding to this every Sunday. I’ll end each post with the following update blurbs:
---
People who have checked in on New Old Music to date:

Jin Hi Kim, Andrew Raffo Dewar, Steven Pond, Hugo De Craen, Kris Wallsmith, John Szwed, Mei Han, Jason Stanyek, Ajay Heble, David Borgo, Mirjana Lausevic, Mark Slobin, Lewis Porter, Ted Gioia, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Paul Plimley, Jason Kao Hwang, Howard Silverman, Vijay Iyer, Gregory Acker, David Ake, Kevin Whitehead, Wu Man, William Parker, Dick Hebdige, Jason Robinson, Bill Dixon, Min Xiao-Fen

People who have posted there:

Jin Hi Kim, Andrew Raffo Dewar, Steven Pond, Hugo De Craen, Mei Han, Ajay Heble, David Borgo, Lewis Porter, Jason Kao Hwang, Vijay Iyer, David Ake, Min Xiao-Fen

Posted now in Files:

Links2Sources.doc
Links (in lieu of uploads)
Braxton'sGhostTrance.doc
To Andrew DeWar (on his Maya, AB's Ghost Trance)
fromDiss4book.doc
Possibly relevant bits from diss as yet unused...
Mei_Interview_final.pdf
Interview with Mei Han, published on the Musicworks
A_Dewar_SEM2006.pdf
Re: From Andrew DeWar (on his and Braxton's music...)
biblio.doc
Bibliography (ongoing)...
epigraphs.doc
Possible lede quotes (ongoing)...
fromCDnarr4book.doc
Review bits of relevant CDs
MusicStudies.doc
CDs to review (ongoing)
STNrevues.doc
WilliamParkerCitation.doc
AnnotatedSourceLinks.doc
Gen. notes; artists, colleagues, media, organizations, collections, links to
HeffleyPaper1.doc
paper on C. Taylor, S. Murray, A. Ayler early gigs at Montmartre; touches on "free jazz as folk music"
NewOldMusic1.mov: Heffley's talking head intro to project

Current To-Dos:

Posts to follow up in order
As posts come in with substantive responses and material, follow them up before doing other research
Mei Han post & material
Vijay Iyer material
Min Xiao-Fen post & material
Jin Hi Kim material
Steve Coleman material
Lewis Porter material
Andrew Raffo Dewar post & material

Post to Files
Things to put in Files section, for general access; do in order
Work on Ganelin CD reviews for STN
Notes on work of artists & colleagues
Past papers to cannibalize
Rough Draft of Intro to Book
Working Bibliography