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.

FINDING THE FLOW...

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.

BEING ON TIME

Ultimately, we come face to face with Time, as I have explored in earlier Blogs: IT'S ABOUT TIME. Having been devastated by the effects of the Pandemic COV-19 Lockdown, I know I needed to find a way of of my depression and despair.  Symbolically, I linked my dilemma to a song THE WAY, by Neil Diamond. His songs often reflect his quest to find his identity in someone else, even though ultimately this ideal is about being true and honest with ourselves.  As I listen to this song, I was struck by its structure, each verse reaching a new plateau of insight and realization, then regrouping and continuing to reach new plateaus... finally culminating in "I need to find, I need to find, I need to find The way..."

Neil Diamond: The Way

NEIL DIAMOND: THE WAY
Even as I write this, I am guided by the structure of this song, which is a remarkable achievement in linking the sense of being on a quest and arriving at deliberate destinations along this journey. The essence of the song is the feeling of a solid underlying structure that becomes more and more profound as the foundation of the structure is established through tonal destinations. . The music and lyrics lead to different plateaus of awareness, establishing  a moment when there are no words, only the plaintiff guitar solo--- then resuming the journey, the quest for identity, for reaching for the next level of inquiry... and in the end finding a renewed dedication. The Way always leads to new destinations of awareness. As in life, the Quest is never fully resolved, as we continue to find our way through life.

Neil Diamond I AM I SAID

Inspired by this Bard from New York who began his career hawking his songs to publishers and artists in the famous Brill Building in NYC located at 1619 Broadway at 49th Street, I was inspired that maybe we had crossed paths because the Brill Building was where the printers were for printing scores prepared on onion skin. Many times, while at Columbia, I would go to the Brill Building to have score of songs and shows and operas printed. I remember the cacophony of songs spilling into the hallways from producers, publishers, and sometimes famous performers in search of new material. I think of this modern day troubadour, coming from his humble beginnings (Brooklyn Roads) to extraordinary fame (I AM... I SAID).  Contrast the contemplative performance after a long career (linked here) to his performance 40 years ago at a live concert in 1971 (I am I Said 1971)... as he became an icon for a generation---an extraordinary journey.

BEING AND TIME (Heiddeger's famous inquiry) has always been central to my own inquiry, but now, after my own ontological inquiry, it comes down to the practical structuring of time that can bring me into a new relationship with myself and Time. As I noted in earlier Blogs, I researched how various artists and innovators scheduled their day.

BEING ON TIME: After reflecting on my situation and need to notice and structure time so that it became the conduit for creating quality, responding to the Qualia existing only within our conscious awareness, I found a structure that inspired me while organizing my creative energy productively.

I am now into the second week of implementing this new schedule, and by strictly following this new schedule, I have broken free from the miasma of this government-imposed LOCKDOWN, and have produced more new work in a week than in the past two months.  I won't go into the details of the RITUAL, but I am indebted to Twyla Tharp for her suggestion that a Ritual establishes a context for the whole day.  Each day begins with a renewal. Each of us establishes our own ritual for starting the day, even if informally, such as the first cup of coffee, or thinking reflectively, or working out. My own Ritual is evolving. The above schedule is for my work day, Monday through Friday. The weekend is entirely free, more open-ended.

This most practical outcome of this new schedule is that I focus on Being On Time, each part of the schedule is like the various plateaus attained in Neil Diamond's song THE WAY. And like the song, there is no ending, only the ongoing quest for discovery, for uncovering emerging reality as the experience of growing awareness, articulated in concrete outcomes.

In the midst of establishing a business website, I created a dummy website that serves to illustrate the structure and process of the new site so that web developers would have a guide to how ARTS RENAISSANCE COLLABORATIVE might evolve in this brave post pandemic new world. For a glimpse of this dummy website, you can visit ARC, Arts Renaissance Collective at least temporarily, until the real thing comes along.

I am still discovering MY WAY. Somewhere there's a new song inside of me making its new way to the surface.

IT'S ABOUT TIME

Faced with dilemma of my despair and confusion in the midst of a government imposed lockdown without any referendum of its people, I felt I was powerless to control my destiny. The COV-19 Pandemic establishment, fueled by the pied piper of the CDC, had determined that all I had worked for during my lifetime, and all that I was currently engaged in, was not worthwhile in light of a new virus launched by surprise on an unsuspecting global population.

As I fought through the brain fog of isolation and shutdown, I began to understand that I was allowing myself to be victimized by the circumstances of confinement. I needed to find my way out of this pandemic maze that had totally shredded the mechanisms of routines in my life that had imbued each day with structure and purpose.

Everything seemed to collapse and merge to the problem, (blackhole) of TIME.

Ah, Time...the dilemma of life, of science, of the universe...the focus of Einstein... the relativity of the absolute. Hadn't I always grappled with this... remembering my attraction to and obsession with Martin Heiddeger's BEING AND TIME?
Remembering my romance with phenomenology and ontology, that began when I went to NYU after completing my doctorate at Columbia. That romance began because of an encounter with my colleague in the Art Department, David Ecker, an astonishing phenomenologist who, at first seemed to be talking nonsense, when suddenly heuncovered the landmines of objective reality---and he was opening a new world of wonderment, clear vision and understanding of method. Later, I stumbled across Heidegger's TIME AND BEING, written near the end of his career as an experiment in philosophy and education.

Ecker focused on the process of the phenomenological method, using language as a tool of inquiry to uncover layers of meaning.  While I had read of Heidegger in my philosophy studies, I had not fully understood phenomenological use of language as a tool of inquiry, moving through layers of meaning from phenomenological description to meta-critical observations and conclusions. So as I came across Heidegger's reversal in the twilight of his career: On Time and Being, I was delighted that this was drawn from lectures for a select group of students in which he declares that he has no idea what his lectures will be about, but that they will discover the content of the lectures as it emerges from the class as a platform for inquiry.  I identified with this approach as it has been foundational to my classes and workshops.

As much as what I am writing here might seem a diversion from focusing on my dilemma of the COV-19 shutdown, it is extremely on point.

My own dilemma within the context of the COV-19 lockdown was that I was paralyzed from the shock of isolation and the tangible cultural support that had served as a source of inspiration. The cultural context had served to structure my time as well as define the strategies I needed in order to create new work. You may object by pointing out the vast cultural resources of the Internet. But the energy is different. In the screen before me, I sometimes seem to be staring back at myself.

I realized that I needed to rethink Time in the context of the lockdown. The idea of the schedules of artists and scientists (creators of new knowledge) has long been of interest of researchers. For example, Beethoven's regimine was as follows:

His approach was very disciplined. At breakfast he counted the number of beans for coffee: exactly 60 were needed to make the perfect cup. The breakout came at 4:45 p.m. when he would take long walks while sketching out ideas.

Mozart's schedule was somewhat more frenetic:

Mozart had to build his creative life around employment to serve as the musician and teacher of the court and attend to music for various occasions, some very formidable in terms of large scale music events for which he composed music and led ensembles from the keyboard.

In my teens, I strongly identified with Mozart (I composed a safety opera in the fourth grade), as well as George Gershwin, who fulfilled my fantasies of New York. Both died at 35 years of age, and I based most of my life on the assumption that I would also die at that age. For that reason, I never planned to retire.

Looking at the schedules of creative people led me to research Daily Rituals by Mason Currey, an impressive collection of how creative and innovative people structured their daily routines... great bedside reading. Then I came across a reflection on the creative process by the noted choreographer
Twyla Tharp, THE CREATIVE HABIT: Learn It and Use It for Life. In this book she stressed the importance of beginning with Ritual, and her discussion of how it set the tone for the day deeply impressed me.

I realized that within the isolation of this Pandemic Shutdown, I needed to find my own way out by discovering a regimen that would help me out of the despair that was weighing me down. I loved the circle graph that defined Mozart's schedule. As I read the lives of various innovators, I started to imagine how my day should be structured. The circle graph connects to the earth, to time, to the face of a clock.

So now began my quest to find a way out of my depression by discovering how to re-imagine my typical day. I also realized that this structuring of Time was a dimension of Being. I recalled the improvisations of our class EXPANDED MUSIC that explored Time, Manifestation, and Being through open-ended improvisations in THE PROVINCETOWN PLAYHOUSE. Somehow this Pandemic was opening the pathway to energies of the past that now populate the present.