The Fredösphere

It's the Wiki of Obsolete Skills!  (Via SF Signal.)  It's, you know, all that stuff we know how to do, but our kids couldn't do if their lives depended on it, like dialing a rotary phone or putting a needle on a vinyl record. 

It's a wiki, so think up your favorite and add it to the list.  Mine might be the hand-engraving of musical scores.  A friend of mine from the UM School of Music, was famous for her scoring by hand that truly could not be distinguished from plate engraving.  (A tragic waste of time really; she did it because she loved the precision of the work, but she spent hours per page on it.  Not a good example of setting proper priorities.)

Another interesting case file from the History of Hand-Engraved Music is that of Imogen Holst (daughter of Gustav), whose own compositional career was arguably stunted by her slavish work as an underpaid assistant to Benjamin Britten.  Some of her friends grew to resent the time she spent copying Britten's instrumental parts, but she seemed content, and he was happy to take advantage of that.

I'm glad to see that the Copying Assistance Program of the American Music Center has been renamed the Composer Assistance Program.  I was always sad whenever I thought about that pile of grant money sitting around, dedicated to the cause of helping composers do something that can be achieved these days by selecting the proper item from a pulldown menu in Finale or Sibelius.

I suggest a new fund be created, one dedicated to helping struggling composers remove Vista from their computers and upgrade to XP.  Now there's something that would really stimulate the productivity of composers.

Labels: Culture