Ethan’s Trax is an iTunes playlist I maintain that includes all of the music I’ve ever recorded. Well, more accurately, it’s all of the music that I care to be reminded of. I haven’t included every draft and dead end. But if a track has any artistic or sentimental value whatsoever to me, it’s in Ethan’s Trax.
As of this writing, the playlist contains 477 “songs.” That’s a cumulative one day, thirteen hours, forty-seven minutes and fifty-three seconds worth of music. My self-described genres include: Blues, Classical (General), Electronic, Experimental, Folk, Funk, Hip-Hop, Jazz (Vocal), Mashup, Pop, R&B/Soul, Rock, Showtunes, and Soundtracks/Scores. The Electronic category is substantially bigger than all of the others combined. The recent high points are here:
The question is, how much of this music is actually “mine”?
Some people insist on calling me a “composer.” Generally, these people consider themselves to be composers too. I’m not sure about that word. I have composed some music, in the traditional sense. I have a folder of original scores on my computer with tunes that I wrote, in notation. Some of them I actually transcribed from improvisation or electronic tracks, but I guess those were still “my ideas.” If you read this blog, you probably don’t consider a notated score to be a necessary step in creating a composition. When you compare my few dozen scores with my hundreds of electronically produced tracks, it’s pretty obvious where my creative energy has been going. But let’s pretend that my real compositions are the notated ones.
About half of the scores in the folder have never been performed by anyone other than me, and none of those performances have happened lately. The most recent one was a Mingus-flavored setting of “Landscape of a Pissing Multitude” by Federico García Lorca that I wrote in 2006. My jazz group performed it a few times, right before it broke up.
More recently, I wrote a prose score for the NYU Laptop Orchestra. They performed it once, but I missed it, because I had Milo with me, and the pieces earlier in the concert were so loud and abrasive that we had to leave. Soon after, at Marc Weidenbaum’s behest, the piece was realized as recordings by various internet strangers. That was pretty wonderful.
Along with my original charts, I have about seventy-five transcriptions and arrangements. Some are straightforward documentation of existing music, and some are transformed so radically that they’re effectively original music. Most of those arrangements have been performed, by me and various singers. Some just exist as unrealized concepts.
I’ve performed a small amount of my electronic music, though rarely more than a few times, and rarely for more than twenty people. Some of it has appeared in tiny theater productions and zero-budget films. Some of it has been spun by DJs, to my delight. My performances have increasingly been happening in academic contexts, for example as part of NYU’s IMPACT Workshop.
The main life that my music has in the world is on the internet, mostly via SoundCloud. Everything I post there gets a least a few dozen listens, sometimes a few hundred. My most popular tracks have accumulated thousands of listens each. I let people download my music for free. I have no idea what happens to the tracks once people download them, though once in a while a friend tells me that they have me in the rotation. I don’t consider any of these listens to be “performances,” but I’ve had other electronic musicians argue that point.
My oldest few dozen tracks have never been heard by anyone except me and a few friends and family members. This is because they aren’t particularly good, and I don’t feel like inflicting them on anyone else. The more recent a track is, the better it usually is, the more I want people to listen to it, and the more people generally do listen to it.
Most of my heart and soul lies in my remixes and mashups. I feel strongly that my most “original” contributions to the world are based on existing recordings and MIDI files. The remixes are infused with more of my musical self than any of my notated compositions. Like most remixers, I do nearly all of my work without permission, which has led me to a lot of philosophical controversy, as well as some minor legal unpleasantness.
I don’t make “albums.” Back when I was sharing music on CDs, I did feel it necessary to group tracks together into CD-length playlists, but in the internet age, I just post tracks as I finish them–or more often, before I finish them. I use the “album” field in iTunes to group tracks together by theme. Some of the themes are specific enough to be effectively album-like: Miles Davis Remixes, David Bowie Remixes, Classical Remixes. Some are much too big to function as “albums”–my Disquiet Junto album has five and a half hours of music in it.
If you make music, how do you organize it? What do you consider to be original? Do you think that originality is coextensive with moral ownership? Hit me in the comments.