Tuesday, May 26, 2020

MUSIVERSAL CEO ANDRÉ MIRANDA ANNOUNCES NEW INITIATIVE




CEO André Miranda has announced that Musiversal is developing a new platform that will be released on June 1st featuring a completely new branding and a much wider set of services beyond orchestra recording sessions. This is the next step as a managed marketplace and will allow music creators to hire and collaborate live with some of the best musicians, music producers and engineers.
staff at musiversal
Musiversal has curated and signed some of the top talent in LA and in other cities around the world and is opting for quality instead of quantity, a completely different strategy from other music production marketplaces. Coincidentally, Musiversal's 1-on-1 sessions were being developed before COVID and they are set up to be performed live over a zoom-call-type from the artist's home studio. The pandemic situation makes this solution particularly relevant now at this time where musicians jobs are being affects and new remote solutions are necessary. Musiversal also prides itself in its business model that aims to pay fairly to musicians while its shared session model makes prices for the consumer much more affordable than other alternatives.
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André in EXPANDED MUSIC

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

My relationship with André Miranda developed when he was in my experimental class at NYU.

It was my great fortune, a few years ago, to have had André Miranda in my newly revived EXPANDED MUSIC, an experimental class in movement, media, and collaboration using new technologies. The class focused on improvisation and Internet2 interactive performance ...we developed material through collaboration and improvisation to share scenes with Quilmes University in Argentina. This had been the first class I taught at New York University in 1969, and it had been especially created to integrate new technologies and media in the creating and production of music. It was revived in 2012 to explore new techniques and media.

As I began my new business of ARC ASSOCIATES, I planned to visit my former students in their countries as I hoped to network with their work as we sought to support Arts Collaboration initiatives on a global scale.


Among the first of NYU Alumni that I visited was André as I returned from a celebration of Human Rights Day with Sandro Dernini in Rome. I was delighted when André indicated he was at home in Lisbon and would welcome my visit. I had longed to return to Portugal where I had performed a multimedia festival with Colleagues in Porto.
But I was especially enthusiastic about reconnecting with André, since from the first day I met him, I was impressed and excited about his new ideas for the business of music. His enthusiasm and passion for pursuing innovative ideas for music business was a catalyst for my own thinking as I retired from NYU,  and started to work on building a network in international collaborative media artists.

André proved to be the perfect host, taking me to lunch and then tour the world famous MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology).

Located in Lisbon beside the Targus River, MAAT's iconic structure defines the essence of what it curates for the 21st century, bringing together philosophy and architecture (a stunning installation of Wittgenstein, for example, while I was there), and rooms of old technology as objects of history and art, to the ecology of waste and its impact on our oceans... I can't think of any museum in the United States that provides as wide a range of converging disciplines as what I saw at MAAT---Lisbon should be proud.

Thursday, May 21, 2020

FINDING THE FLOW...

POET'S PASSAGE
POET'S PASSAGE Home Page
As I found structure to my process through enacting a way of dealing with Time, I discovered openings to old, abandoned passages of creative energy. It was a little like finding an old site on the Internet that I had forgotten about: POET'S PASSAGE. This is similar to other websites I created early in the days of the Internet as we entered a new century. It was designed so that  "travelers" would find their own paths by clicking on moving objects entering and leaving the site. I remember another based on Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but I couldn't find it, even though it might exist somewhere in cyberspace. And I think there was another site for a small group of students in IMPACT, who happened to be in my mentoring group on text and texting, but several computer crashes and disastrous data transfers have obliterated the location of this site that was secretly posted during one summer of IMPACT around 2014. Years passed, and I forgot these experiments. Stumbling on this old, unvisited site, reminded me of past noticings that found articulation in some past fabrication that was squirreled away in the labyrinth of time.

As I faced the dilemma of this Pandemic 2020 Lockdown, I was shackled by the debris of unfinished projects and creative ideas that had receded into the realm of the forgotten.  A number of elements had a numbing effect on my perspective:  the spontaneity of the past, and the immediacy of the moment were now tattered remnants of consciousness. My conscious awareness pursued expansion through the act of noticing. Our personal NOTICING is the singular dimension that we bring to the world through what we see, touch, feel, think and experience. Sharing our noticing contributes to the quality and quantity of the reality of the world. We share by creating. In the labyrinth of time we posit our awareness of our noticing.

Thus, we are all poets of the world's reality.  My personal experience is etched in the permanence of reality when I create a poem to disclose my singular noticing of a moment walking in a New England forest:
Sunlight, breaking through the leaves,
Spikes brilliant shafts into the ground,
Shimmering, transparent spires
Of some invisible kingdom.
Silence slips through the trees
Masquerading as the wind;
Imitating eloquent Eternity,
The shade, riddled by the light,
Accommodates a galaxy,
Enduring one silent moment
Some brief, forgotten day.
The COVID-19 crisis awakened within me an inner impasse of spiritual struggle. So many things, so many works, so many opportunities had vanished in the wake of my own inertia. This personal blockage had begun early on, well before the crisis of the Pandemic. In fact, my colleague's March visit for a project in Lived Experience as Research, was an attempt to revive creative energies that at one time seemed inexhaustible. Connecting with the Flow, seemed elusive, blocked by impediments of bewilderment and detachment.

I remember when I was about five-years old, sitting in the hallway, secretly listening to my sister, who was nine years older than me, as she played through works by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart in an impressive display of mastery and understanding. Later, when no one was around, I would find my way to the keyboard to improvise in the moment. I couldn't read music, but I felt the flow of music that emerged as sound from my fingers on the keys. From that time on, I could improvise endlessly, but also had a gift for remembering those improvisations.

Flow was brought to our attention through the work of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in 1996, as an optimal psychological state emerging when deeply engrossed in an challenging activity  through immersion as concentrated focus on a task. This was something I was experiencing in 1941.

I bring attention to this, because today as I listened to a Rachmaninoff piece: Moments Musicaux Op.16 No.3., I went to the piano and improvised. Rachmoninoff's work had a special quality of a dissonant suspension which resolved upward, and inspired by that, I improvised a prelude based on a song I had composed a few years ago, but never wrote down.  It had that same kind of suspension with upward resolution.

Within the crisis of this pandemic, I open to new awareness, to a new sense of Flow where the moment connects with energies I thought were lost. I pick up the loose ends of projects abandoned from fears instilled that it is too late for me... the stories vacated... the lyrics of librettos and plays forsaken... I feel them flowing in a moment of marvelous mingling of miracles.