Skip to main content

Self promotion

As I have explained before, I unashamedly promote myself on forums...

Once, I placed my music in a forum for self promotional purposes and it was removed with a polite request informing that the forum did not tolerate "self promotion".  This is my reply:

I hadn't read all of your group description when I published my own work so I now realise that I should not have promoted myself so I apologise.  However, I would like to discuss the point of self promotion.  Is it really such a bad thing?  All of the music that is published on this page would have had some degree of self promotion.  You couldn't possible expect anyone to get anywhere in the music business without self promotion.
If you look at the kind of promotional tricks that the young Mozart was subjected to at the hands of his father, Leopold, it helped to create the image of a genius that we still regard as true today. A master of self promotion was Franz Liszt, who manifested the image of possessing almost superhuman pianistic capabilities.  By all accounts, Mahler wouldn't have progressed very far had he not used the influences of his orchestral colleagues to promote his early symphonies.
From a totally different field of music. Frank Sinatra said, "People often remark that I'm pretty lucky. Luck is only important in so far as getting the chance to sell yourself at the right moment. After that, you've got to have talent and know how to use it." It kind of sums up my point.  You not going to get far if you don't promotion yourself but you also got to have talent.
I can understand that you want a music community free of people selling underwear and popcorn etc...But do you want a community where one classical music listener can not ask another to listen to their music?  It's up to you.  You set the rules.  
The difference between a "spammer" and someone who wants to promote themselves is that the self promoter actually cares about what he is presenting to you.  There would be no music business if there was no 'self promotion' because...
How do you expect someone to like your music if you don't really promote it yourself. 
Think about it.

Popular posts from this blog

What is Stockhausen's legacy?

Karlheinz Stockhausen is one of the most important composers of the post war era. He is partially responsible for the creation of the post war modernist music.   But what is his true legacy? Was he the leading composer in his field? Did he invent the 'timbralist' idea of generating music from a single sound? Well, he did accomplish that concept with  "Stimmung'' (Voice) which is completely designed around the single chord of a B flat ninth . But he wasn't the first.  Giacinto Scelsi wrote "Quatro pezzi per orchestre" which is based a single note per movement and that work was written in 1959. Quatro pezzi per orchestre - Scelsi I seriously doubt whether Stockhausen knew about Scelsi's achievement when he wrote Stimmung in 1977. Perhaps one of his greatest works  is " Gruppen'' (Groups) composed for three orchestras. Did it change the way we use the orchestra?  He was a pioneer, especially in the early stages of hi

In the shadow of a genius.

Recently, I have discovered a fascinating revelation about the composers we admire so much.  That behind many geniuses, there usually is a predecessor lurking in the background.  It reminds of that often quoted phrase by Picasso A  good  artist borrows and  great  artist steals Now, I am not suggesting that the composers who I mention are stealing peoples' ideas - there is no evidence to support that fact.  However, I am suggesting that the idea of a genius who came from nowhere may not be accurate.  Let's take the case of Ernest Fanelli.  Who? You might ask.  He is a significant but unknown person in the development of impressionism.  He is an Italian born composer living in Paris.  He composed a good deal of 'new' music at the end of the nineteenth century.  His ideas were quite radical; his instrumentation included harmonics, sul pont., he used wordless choruses.  Unfortunately, he wasn't as talented a composer as Debussy and his music wasn'

Helmut Lachenmann

H elmut Lachen mann is relatively unknown outside of Germany.  Nevertheless , h e is a figure wh o is growing in significan ce in modern music circles.  Despite his wide experience, h is lack of broad appeal is, in my opinion, largely d ue to the individuality o f his music.  He is  not easy to categori se in an era which is   dominated by trends and cliches. A simple way of describing his music is... *"musique concrète instrumentale". The notion is the creation of a subtlety of transformation of timbre, a manipulation of a continuum from sound to noise, from pitched notes to pitchless textural exploration, and all that in the sphere of (mostly) purely instrumental music. That means that in Lachenmann's music, there's a world of sound that rivals and even surpasses what electronic and electro-acoustic composers can achieve.  -Guardian. Essentially ,  he is a acoustic composer writing electronic sounding music.  He is somewhere in-between the timbra