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Comment by joe5150 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

"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.)

> 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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