22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY february 23-march 1, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com You involved literature in a few of your projects. I do like to read but my time is so limited. Octavio Paz helped me find direction in a piece that I was lost on in Concert in the Garden. I’ve done some music to the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade from Brazil in an English translation of an American poet, Mark Strand, who was lovely. And I became close friends with Ted Kooser. It’s my favorite poetry in the world. I discovered I liked collaborations, even if we were not collaborating [in real time]. The poetry drives so much about the music, the rhythm— the ups and downs of the music follow the language. Where does your activism come from? My father was an engineer and had quite a few patents so I know the pride of ownership and authorship. I know what it means when your intellectual property is copyrighted or patented and that means that you received royalty. I recorded my first album, Evanescence, myself. I was happy Enja picked it up, but I recorded it for $30,000 and they gave me $10,000. It opened a European audience for me and I did several albums with Enja. But in the 2000s file-sharing started, with Napster and everything. A friend of mine, Brian Camelio, asked me: “What’s the one thing that nobody can fileshare?” What is it? My records were selling really well, but the profits were going between the record store, the distributor, and the record company. I decided I would do ArtistShare with Brian and be his first project. You sell $10,000 through the record company, and it’s nothing. You sell 10,000 [records] directly and if you are making, say, $15 on each one, that’s $150,000. We won a Grammy for that first album. It was crowdfunded. Nobody was using that word yet. We called it fan-funding. We thought that it was the best time for artists, owning your property. Until, you know what? YouTube. YouTube came out. These companies suddenly discovered the value of data. And the best way to collect data is to have something that keeps people glued onto their screen. And that was music, and film. So a world of pirated stuff was turned into a cash cow for them. That’s when I started becoming outspoken. When I realized that this amazing thing we built is being taken away—not by stronger technology, but by a very illegal thing. We live in the United States of America, where in the Constitution there is something called copyright. [“To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries,” reads the U.S. Constitution, Article 1 Section 8 Clause 8.] It’s not even an afterthought, it’s not an amendment. It was put there front and center to incentivize creation. If people own their work and it has value for them, they will be incentivized to create. And now musicians are like on a hamster wheel, churning out as much music as they can, to get as many listens as they can. How deep is your resistance? How do you listen to music yourself? When I really listen to music, it’s usually my CDs that I have, or things that I have digitally. But I did finally subscribe to Spotify not that long ago. Spotify was supposed to legitimize things. But it doesn’t really, because now you have access to most of the music in the world for $9.99 a month. That’s never going to pay for the cost of the music. Spotify convinced the record companies to participate by giving the three biggest companies— Universal, Sony and Warner—equity in Spotify, and a lot of money. On Spotify you can choose if your music is on there. You decide. But on YouTube, everybody can put up my music. But to take the music down, you have to sign under penalty of perjury that you are the person who owns music. People are gorging on so much music and content, they are no longer hungry. You know when you eat at a buffet, at a certain point, you don’t even taste the food anymore? People don’t really listen and hear the music anymore. It devalued music, it hurt music—trading it for ads. David Bowie didn’t come to me because I was mainstream, but because I was niche. Niche pushes the mainstream forward. Does activism take a lot of your time? It’s exhausting. What I do is so many different full-time jobs. But it’s important to speak up for those who don’t have energy to speak up. Wake everybody up. They have a hard time and often don’t know how it happened and why. A lot of musicians fell for this visibility thing—putting their stuff up for lots of plays. But are those listeners paying for your music? Because somebody is really making real dollars out of that, and it isn’t the musician. OK, let’s wrap up with something pleasant. What will you conduct with the most pleasure in Carmel? I’m working on a bunch of different setlists for this tour. So I will bring extra music. It’s always like a Rubik’s Cube, it’s challenging. I love playing “Sputnik” [from Data Lords]. Scott Robinson [saxophone] is so extraordinary in it. There’s another piece that he plays that I like to play and that’s “Walking by Flashlight.” It’s based on one of Ted Kooser’s poems. But sometimes I just enjoy playing “CQ CQ, IS ANYBODY THERE?” Morse Code messages, like: data, hope, power, greed. And maybe, since we started with a small town, it seems that you have been feeling quite at home in a big town for years now. I moved to New York in ’85 and lived in Queens, and moved to Manhattan in ’93. But New York has changed in the last few years. The bloom has gone off the rose for me, which makes me really sad. A lot of clubs not being here, and Covid, and seeing a lot of suffering people on the streets. I’m sure there are cities in California where it feels like that. Hard times. But yes, the Upper West Side had been my little Windom. You can walk everywhere, go to the post office, grocery store, dry cleaner, drugstore. That makes it feel like a small town a little bit. Maria Schneider Orchestra performs at 7:30pm Wednesday, March 1. Sunset Center, 9th and San Carlos, Carmel. $59-$89. 620-2048, sunsetcenter.org. On “Sputnik” from her new album Data Lords, Schneider says, “It felt like space to me. I started seeing this idea: all these satellites owned by corporations, there are a thousand of them out there, carrying digital information about us, and this whole thing orbiting the Earth, creating this exoskeleton.” Briene Lermitte Schneider
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