Your E- MAIL to this page/forum will be MOST WELCOME and hopefully
provoke and enlighten the powers that be so as to protect the rights of
artists from big government, special interest groups and creeping fascism
and flowering capitalism and materialism. Let not the artists allow themselves
any longer to be suckers for the carrot and stick game they been playing
with us throughout much of the 20th century. We need to be heard and counted
through united activism and peaceful demonstrations which this editor will
vigorously help to organize. The "Meet the Composer" issue I had begun
to address in these pages last year is a dead issue now, since it has apparently
become so wed to the government and its corporate and philanthropic pals,
that the original composer driven mission of the organization has failed
and is not worth anymore energy for 21th century composers to lock horns
with what has become an "arts administration corporation" led by also by
lawyers and accountants. Why try to fight a megadollar organization which
essentially "pays" mostly lip-service to composers and turns a deaf ear
to the composer community?. IF you are IN, fine! IF NOT, forget it!
Please send EMAIL to: Editor at "editor@newartmusic.com" regarding your thoughts on this extremely important unfolding discussion. Your e-mail letters to the Editor will be posted, unredacted, on this page every Friday Morning. They will be copied and pasted into thes pages "as is" Starting in June 1997!
Your e-mails will be posted daily starting around Labor Day. YOUR OPINION
WILL COUNT HERE!
PLEASE continually REVISIT this site and be a part of the solution! PLEASE PARTICIPATE!!
I, Gregory Reeve, know the original MISSION! I was THERE!
I organized the formulation of this MISSION and the ad hoc CONCERNED COMPOSERS FOR COMPOSERS IN PERFORMANCE, a large diverse group of composers. Through it we were able to persuade NYSCA, The New York State Council on the Arts, to promise to provide for the continuance and DEVELOPMENT of a special program to meet the needs of composers as we composers clearly could identify them!
I was the prime mover in the restructuring of the COMPOSER IN PERFORMACE Program into the MEET THE COMPOSER Program.
I was the original Vice President of this Corporation and THE person primarily responsible for the birthing of this MTC organization.
I led the campaign to have the long standing original Executive Director hired and therefore have a vested interest and concern for the course the organization has for some time unhappily been on. This has been an unhappy course to many composers/musicians from a diverse palette of musical styles, - or should I say, MOST of the composer "community".
It now appears to so many of us, - advisory board members, established composers and the neglected throngs of disenfranchised unknown yet gifted and hard working musical artists - that any vain attempts to advise the Staff and Board of the Organization were not being taken seriously by the powers that be in the growingly lawyer/accountant/foundation/government controlled corporation which Meet the Composer has become!! The originally enthusiastically and well attended advisory board meetings of the early years of the program have dwindled down to a precious random few!
Why? Because we realized we were not being heard and our advice was not being taken seriously!
WE MUST REMEMBER THIS!
This program was born of the COLLECTIVE EFFORTS of a LARGE GROUP OF CONCERNED COMPOSERS in the early 70s to put MONEY in the POCKETS of COMPOSERS making art encompassing a DIVERSITY of STYLES, TRADITIONS and CULTURES and to INJECT the COMPOSER as a LIVING PRESENCE in the CULTURE and WORK FORCE of our Country and of the Greater World Community!
PLEASE KEEP REVISITING this Site and get a feeling for what a great Democratizer and Equalizer the Internet can be to help the lone voice in the wilderness cry out and be heard by many millions of people!
Seize control of your own destiny and do not allow other artists and administrators to control the flow of your Art, Life and Career!PLEASE PARTICIPATE!!
