9 Sep
2010
9 Sep
'10
1:55 a.m.
On Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 09:24:26PM -1000, david wrote:
Hakan Koseoglu wrote:
Interestingly, they still are.
Almost all the musicians I know of who are actually making a decent living, are doing so
by playing churches, either the white megachurches or the black gospel churches. The
megachurches in particular have sound systems that blow away just about any club or bar or
even concert hall around. They have crazy money laying around, thanks to their own many
millenia of marketing experience, and the American system of giving churches complete tax
exemption. They spend a fair amount of it on music and musicians-- draws in the crowds and
keeps them coming back. Christian music is pretty much the only end of the commercial
music business-- outside of the Disney popstars-- that still exists as a going concern.
On 2 September 2010 08:01, david
<gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com> wrote:
Back then, the churches were big funders of composers and musicians. The
city churches were also incredibly wealthy, even by today's standards. But they weren't created for the masses. They
commissioned and paid for by
the wealthy rulers, for themselves. They were done because someone paid the
artist to do them. Therefore, they are commercial art.
Oh no, they were for the
masses. Most of Bach's product is church
music and those days you can't get more for masses than that.
And the "masses" didn't attend the big cathedral church in town. That
was for the rulers, nobles and wealthy.
Nice pun, the "masses" attending church. Were they then the B Minor masses?
Bach didn't write free music for a church - he
wrote it because they
hired him to write it!
Similarly there used to be plenty of concert
halls where the musicians
played fast and loud, mostly to the people leering and cheering. Most
composers were not retainers by the nobility but would make money by
selling the note sheets (and that's one of the many reason why
Copyright came to be).
Which meant you had to have written music that people wanted to hear in
the first place. You were writing popular music to make money.
Commercial art again. The only difference is who's handing you the coin
for your music.