Thrift Store Music
Wednesday, April 28 at 7 p.m.
Sunday, May 2 at 2 p.m.
This two-day event invites local bands to explore, create and share self-made musical instruments. On April 28, musicians will meet at Central Library, be given a budget, and sent to thrift stores to find objects that can be used as musical instruments. For the next four days the musicians will create songs with their self-made instruments. On May 2, the musicians will return to Central Library to perform music created from their thrift store finds.
Recycling, small scope, community engagement. Negligible carbon footprint. Bill McKibben would love this event. This is from his "Deep Economy":
You can make a strong economic argument, even in conventional terms, for more localized economies… Tangible commodities such as timber and apples are not the only ones that might be localized. Take entertainment, for instance. During almost all of human history, people provided it for themselves: music (like food) was something you produced, and the pleasure was as much in the production as the consumption. With the advent of recording, and then of broadcasting, all that changed; the new technologies allowed us to be more efficient and single out the best musicians and let everyone else listen to them simultaneously, much as factory farming allowed 1 percent of Americans to feed the rest of us. We began to take it for granted that music came from somewhere else: Tin Pan Alley, Hollywood, Nashville. Now, of course, new technology is beginning to undermine that century-old system: file-sharing allows listeners to, in essence, wander onto the big farmer’s fields and glean what they like. The recording industry’s short-term solution was to sue file sharers, and the slightly longer-term fix was to sell their music over the Web; if they can’t protect the profit margin, they argue, there will be a “reduction in creative activity” because without the possibility of growing rich, fewer people will write songs.
Perhaps. But people wrote songs for millennia before they had any chance of making big money at it. At most, you could make a decent living as a wandering bard – a profession that seems to be coming back into style. The New York Times rock critic Jon Pareles wrote recently that while “selling pop music on expensively produced and promoted CD’s is a paradigm under siege,” “jam bands” in the tradition of the Grateful Dead and Phish ‘have flourished as concert mainstays and as an alternative to canned music,” and in the process bring “music’s ancient business model – the roving troubadour – to the interconnected modern world.” Imagine, he says, “current pop turned inside out. Playing concerts would be a living rather than a promotional tool, bands would take music chances nightly, wardrobe would be an afterthought… Music’s past would be a foundation rather than a scrap heap.” Such changes aren’t only only taking place in America. In England, government figures showed “a live music renaissance underway across the country,” with half of pubs, clubs, and restaurants featuring at least occasional live acts. Bands still sell recordings, but more and more, they sell them to the people who come to the shows, audiences that are interested in a shared community at least as much as virtuosity.
It’s as if musicians were suddenly, like the new wave of farmers, able to grow smaller quantities of more interesting crops and find reasonable profitable markets for them. The live shows that provide more of their revenue are the equivalent of farmer’s markets, places that customers love not only for the product, but for the experience. No one gets superrich, a la Mariah Carey or Archers Daniels Midland or Exxon Mobil; but plenty more people get to do something lovely, whether it’s grow berries for their neighbors or write songs for their region. This parallel musical universe may not replace the centralized global one, but it’s clearly gaining. How far might it go? Here’s a statistic that gives some small indication: in 1900, in the state of Iowa alone, which was then crowded with small farmers, there were also thirteen hundred local opera houses, all of them hosting concerts. “Thousands of tenors,” writes Robert Frank, “earned adequate, if modest, livings performing before live audiences”.
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