one small point:
I went to Downie's site hoping to hear some music from this man who 'asserts the autonomy of the medium and creative action from all notions of market utility'. Unfortunately, his site doesn't appear to be Linux aware. One can talk about post-modern absorption of  the 'aesthetic', by all means, but when one can only 'whistle' in one corporate language in which to present one's self to the world, it does kinda dilute this man's stance somewhat. This particular world, post anti-global et al, is very literate when it comes to presentation, what is said versus what is signaled. I'll read Ian's interview.   

And... it isn't always easy to tell which is which, leading some indeed to make the equation between the intention to produce something commodifiable and the actual commodification of the work, so that anything not "obscure" is by unspoken definition the product of cravenness.

(By "reside" I presume you to have intended to type "residue"). Of course it's never quite as black and/or white (due apologies for perceived political incorrectitude here) as you paint it in the example of the above imagined scenario, but I do think that, if one considers it from the other and more passive end of the telescope, many composers do not set out specifically to write commercially viable commodity product per se, just as many more don't set out delibrately to write music that totally ignores all considerations as to how it may get performed and thereby put before the ears of the beholders. That said, if any composer devotes too much of his/her energies to concern for the commercial viability or otherwise of his/her work, it might in certain cases risk affecting how that work is actually done - and one may assume that no one of artistic integrity and in his/her right mind would want that to be the case.

No, indeed - although it might be nice to think that the latter didn't and doesn't habitually engineer its bread production with an eye to deriving profit from association with a few measures of a certain Czech symphony, any more than the former is any kind of illustration of the nature and level of parental support for Richard's work to which Richard himself drew attention a while back. The material difference seems to me to be that the "saleable commodity" aspect of the bread manufacturer's modus operandi centres at least in part around its ability to produce each of its products in vast quantities, whereas the way in which most composers operate is quite different to this.

Best,

Alistair

If any of you have access to JSTOR, you might be interested in Jeremy Grimshaw's article (it's only a few years old) about Philip Glass's Low Symphony, a piece that seems to have been engineered at every level to be as commodifiable as possible.  I'm sure Glass is a Bowie "fan" to some degree, so perhaps that constitutes a "residue" of sorts.  However, I found it difficult to finish reading Grimshaw's dissection with a positive opinion of Glass (not that I had one before), and the other sources (Duckworth, Potter, Morris, etc.) I've sought out recently haven't changed my mind.  He is 1% composer and 99% vertical marketer.

Oh yeah, also:  Downie had a very confrontational article in Perspectives of New Music maybe ten years ago; maybe those squares published it for novelty's sake, because you certainly won't see much political discussion in those pages now unless you're talking about Howard Dean's position on aggregate-saturating tetrachordal arrays.

That will be his 'Aesthetic Necrophilia: Reification, New Music and the Commodification of Affectivity', in Perspectives of New Music Vol. 42 No. 2 (Summer 2004), pp. 264-275. Well worth reading, not least for the passages comparing the marketing photos of James Macmillan to imagery of Christ!

Agree with you on both of these points, and I didn't mean to imply total agreement with the bits of Adorno I quoted; however, I think that while a judgment such as 'entities typical of the culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through' is in the realm either of hyperbole or of metaphysics, nonetheless the basic concept I was trying to explain/illustrate, namely that there is a commodity form or character which can be 'read' as it were from the artwork.

I actually find this way of 'reading' as troubling as it is helpful, since it's one of those things (rather like a lot of Freudian and pseudo-Freudian psychoanalytical techniques) that becomes hard not to see everywhere once you learn to look for it anywhere. Nonetheless, it's a highly influential mode of analysis which I think would be hard to gainsay completely, and although you're right in pointing out that it can appear to involve a claim about intentions and results, I don't think I'd find it so interesting if it were reducible to that distinction.

The apparently simplistic but in fact very subtle intentions vs. effects thing probably comes, at least in part, from the idea of reading the work rather than the artist's biography, to an extent unprecedented in music analysis up to that point.

Would be v interested to hear quartertone's thoughts on this also.

I would love to see them debated there, although I wouldn't like to imply that such debates are not equally valid when they're not happening in MT or Tempo. I don't have any problem reading them in the Weekly Worker (not least because its online feed seems to be much more reliable and accessible than that of any of the other publications you mention; it's also very well presented and tidily and consistently edited). Of course, the debate would take a different shape in MT or Tempo as they're quarterly publications, and I do think the possibility of almost weekly replies from Downie, Hoban et al has been a particularly useful feature of the present debate. As for New Notes, article length and the need to write something in a way that makes it as relevant as possible to a high proportion of readers (since until recently there was only ever one lead article per issue) can be constraints, but I certainly don't think the magazine is unwilling to print politically- or sociologically-oriented analyses; indeed, I covered some related ground in the April '07 issue, in response to spnm's 'Music and Politics' theme. It wasn't quite the same sort of thing as the Weekly Worker pieces we've been looking at, but as I say that's more to do with addressing a different readership than with any unwillingness on my or the editors' part to be perceived as 'political'.

That's been my experience with NN as well, although to my mind much of it is still too superficial and disposable, as if trying to put across the idea that contemporary music is or should be as "accessible" (for which read superficial and disposable) as the commercial music which surrounds it. I think some attempt is being made there to raise the level of discussion but there's a long way to go.

Yes, it can seem somewhat superficial and disposable, and to some extent I felt that even when the spnm alighted on the 'Music and Politics' theme much of what followed under that aegis was superficial, but there was certainly no resistance when I asked if I could take a different approach, and in any case they'd already printed an admirably un-superficial interview with you on the subject. I ended up framing my article as a response to that, although in fact my original plan had been to write a series of 3 articles on the subject, each illustrating a different approach to 'music and politics'; the reason that didn't materialise was not because New Notes were unwilling but because I found it difficult to conceive how that could be combined with my usual approach of listing 5 or 6 pieces of contemporary music as 'Touchstones' which my article obliquely illuminates (without actually discussing them in depth, piece by piece), and in the end I decided I didn't want to publish two more articles that departed from that format.

For various contingent reasons I now haven't written anything for NN for slightly more than 6 months, although in theory I'm supposed to do a lead article once every 3 months. I hope to get back to this in the next month or two, but I feel I've lost the momentum slightly, and I might take this opportunity to say that any suggestions for article topics are always more than welcome. I'm especially interested in angles on contemporary music that don't already get covered regularly by other writers, either in NN or in Musical Times, Tempo etc.