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Comment by vatys | Hacker News Reader

> “I could manage quite well working as few as twenty to twenty-five hours a week—in other words, three full days or five half days. Even after I returned from Paris or India in the late 1960s and well into the 1970s, I could take care of my family by working no more than three or four days a week.”

Would today's youth, even if equally gifted and ambitious, have the same opportunity? I think now there is such a great imbalance in cost of living and pay rates, it may no longer be possible to follow a similar path and get similar results.

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Sure, you could move out to rural nowhere, where housing costs next to nothing. Find some part time job, and live your life.

I'm from a place like that, and a bunch of my old classmates from HS have lived like that their entire adult lives working part time. They work 2-3-4 days a week.

Of course, you'll be sacrificing lots of materialistic things, but that's a given.

If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip Glass. vatys isn't asking if you can make any living this way, because of course you can. The specific conditions that allowed Philip Glass to work part time jobs and still live in the same city as people like Steve Reich and institutions like The Kitchen don't exist anymore.

> If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip Glass.

I'm not so sure. A lot of art comes out of "affordable areas" — sometimes small college-town ghettos like Athens, Georgia, for example. Why couldn't we get a Philip Glass from Manhattan, Kansas?

Why not indeed? If there is an orchestra's worth of musicians available and an audience there with the taste and curiosity necessary to support avant garde performing arts, anything can happen. It's easier now than ever to put a band together in your college town or even record and release music without ever leaving your bedroom, but beyond that scale you still need a critical mass of creative collaborators all in one place to pull it off.

There are orchestras everywhere. Because musicians want to play and directors want to direct and any random school has a performance hall. Whether they are all that good is another question, but that's true of big cities in the US also. And audience is still another question: I expect you don't get to have all that much of an audience until you have somewhat made it. No doubt Philip Glass didn't start with much of an audience.

Most artists that try to invent something new start with essentially no audience. They don't create that for the big bucks.

> There are orchestras everywhere

And they can all post videos of performances on YouTube. You don’t even need to have an orchestra perform a work for an extended time before you can find an audience. I would think that this would make it more likely for new composers to be able to find success than before. You don’t necessarily need to be in an NYC or Boston like before.

"Big bucks" is the last thing I'm talking about. I'm not talking about symphony subscribers and other blue hairs in a concert hall. I'm talking about an audience of creative peers.

Okay that's an interesting one. Any artists trying to create something new and different around here? How does it work with the "peers" around you? How does it work with other artists, art writers, gallerists, patrons, etc?

What I have noticed of this, and my readings seem to point to the reaction of people around someone in an uncharted direction like PG being a mix of "bemused but admirative and encouraging", and "ignored". And what proportion of the "peers" is now online? IG and such? (For an artist in my life, IG seemed to be an essential lifeline. A main connection.)

Yeah, requiring an orchestra does sort of crimp your palette if that is what you do — compose for orchestras.

> If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip Glass.

Congratulations-- you're officially wrong on the internet!

Meet Harry Partch:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Partch

He roamed as a hobo for years during the Great Depression. The text for Barstow is graffiti that he saw scrawled on highway railings during that time. It's featured in most music history books that cover the 20th century. (Also, many of the instruments he invented are visual works of art, in addition to being musically beautiful.) And if you liked the recent HN article on just intonation, well... let's just say you're gonna love Harry Partch!

There's also Conlon Nancarrow, who got pissed at the U.S. harrassing him when he got back from fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He moved to Mexico City and hand-punched player piano rolls in seclusion, for decades.

Other composers and musicians made pilgrimages to his studio, just to hear what it sounds like when, say, a 12-voice canon has each voice moving at different tempo.[1]

Nancarrow received the MacArthur fellowship back in 1982. At one point there was a piano duo who taught themselves to play a selection of his pieces as a four-hands duet for one piano.

People who care about music will find interesting musicians, no matter where they live. This goes back at least to J.S. Bach, who reportedly walking hundreds of miles to listen to Buxtehude improvise at the organ.

1: and what are the proportions for the voices of that canon? You guessed it-- they're the ratios from a just intonation chromatic scale, which Nancarrow probably got from a book by Henry Cowell (New Musical Resources, IIRC).

Edit: typos

Em... Harry Parch was living off Guggenheim and Carnegie grants at the start of the great depression. He was also celebrated and known in New York early in his career (while working menial jobs). He absolutely didn't rise from obscurity while living in a rural area. He was still receiving grants while travelling as a 'hobo' at the height of the great depression. He wasn't exactly cosplaying poverty, but it's a total mischaracterisation to craft a narrative where he was discovered while living that life.

> People who care about music will find interesting musicians, no matter where they live

This is the 'just world hypothesis' and survivorship bias combined. Some very talented people will be discovered despite their circumstances. An enormously larger number will not. You won't know you don't know them.

Okay, and supposing an artist doesn't want to be a hobo or a hermit?

Congratulations, you missed the point of the comment while also being unnecessarily condescending! Another internet point!

The commenter remarked "we would never have heard of Philip Glass." Who among the laity would have heard of Philip Glass and the people you listed? I expect that Venn diagram is really two circles.

100% - but people don’t want to make those sacrifices. They want to live and do what they’ve always done. It has and likely always will be possible to pick up stumps and move somewhere very cheap and get on with a personal creative endeavour - not many have the courage though.

You can’t participate in performance arts remotely.

Not to say anything about networking, which is critical for most arts.

Your creativity is a composition of all the novel stimuli you experience.

Going out into the sticks, while calming and healing for the soul, is artistic suicide.

Cormac McCarthy? Georgia O'Keeffe? Robert Johnson? Plenty of artists excel beyond the urban fringe.

Orchestral music composition and performance is quite different from painting and writing. When you are dependent on a large amounts of other highly skilled people to create and perform it makes it really hard to live out in nowhere.

These days internet and digital production can ease a lot of the rural isolation. But for many (most?) people it is essential to be in and around the art scene to be able to create and maintain focus and motivation to work on their art. Especially when starting a career it is important to meet and see other artists and art.

I'm sorry, but I don't hold them in high regard as artists. They're part of the "western/southern frontier" crowd that encapsulated the zeitgeists of their environments, rather than create something that transcended it. The "frontier" is a notable and interesting subject in itself, but it has only peripheral cultural value to... civilization.

Much of O’Keeffe’s work relates to gender in a way that was counter to the zeitgeist of the contemporaneous southwest. Johnson more or less embodied a nascent Delta blues, defining it on wax, then died. It was too early in the codification for there be something to transcend. His career was like 9 months long. McCarthy I don’t know, can’t read because I don’t like the violence.

Nonetheless your final point is far more vapid because the frontier is where civilization is created and destroyed. It is where norms, values and modes of production of some civilization are placed with decreasing amounts of their domestic support, and usually in increasing conflict with a different civilization, so that it becomes clear what aspects have some more fundamental truth or at least robustness, and what is simply town and gown, responding to the ever shifting attentions of easily bored patrons.

Now this is a good interpretation -- let me have breakfast and I will send a reply.

Apologies for the late reply! I'm sorry, I won't be able to respond.

I did that, and it was horrible. The people were nasty, mean, and intellectually incurious. Conformity was valued over all other traits.

Some places might be better, but this is a dangerous option.

In New York particularly this could maybe work. They have strong blue collar unions so benefits and pay would be actually livable. Plumbing anywhere is pretty viable. Faulkner worked in construction and did a similar thing. I am working in tech to fund my creative pursuits, an industry on its way to being blue collar

Not at all. Do you know what it actually takes to get in to those blue collar unions in NYC? It's not at all a "I can just show up, with no experience, and convince a business owner to give me a job" like Glass did.

Well it sounds like glass was charismatic enough to get people to take a chance on him

Glass learning plumbing by asking the guys working at the hardware store sounds more like handy-man work, not a union job.

> I am working in tech to fund my creative pursuits, an industry on its way to being blue collar

I can't tell if you think tech or art is going to be blue collar, but based on the AI revolution, you should stay in tech, or join UA.

IME, my impression, is that far more people today are in 'survival' mode - the fight/fligh/freeze response: not trying to create, build, and self-actualize but to survive, and ridiculing - as people in that mode do - art, humanities (and humanitarianism), knowledge, etc. Advocating the value in those things is now transgressive, IME. 'That's all pointless!' they say - and yes it's pointless if your only goal is to survive a week or maybe a year, and make nothing better of the world.

In my experience, that attitude for me was due to the devaluing of spirituality and the resulting overemphasis on rationality.

Funny thing is in hindsight, I didn’t realise how much my “rational” attitude was informed by the Protestant work ethic pervading secular society. It’s like we threw away the god part but kept the part where we’re all “sinners” until we prove ourselves worthy through work.

Instead of appreciating the natural beauty in the world as it is, I was trying to prove myself worthy of being in the world. From that latter, small view, art was difficult to appreciate.

> I was trying to prove myself worthy of being in the world

I was there too, and I see others doing it. I think that when we look externally for our value, we end up sacrificing a lot of ourselves for someone else's approval.

Is 'rationality' the right word here (I see you put it in quotes)? It doesn't seem rational or based on reason, more a social custom.

>Would today's youth, even if equally gifted and ambitious, have the same opportunity?

Not the exact same opportunities, but the same type.

The type of opportunities that work like this have never been there for the taking, only for the making.

It's simply impossible today, in the same way that my dad was able to pay his way through college with summer jobs is also impossible today.

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