My partner is currently studying for her Masters in Classical Music Composition. To that end she has been getting into the local classical music scene and I have been going along.

I love classical music, there is nothing better on a rainy night to bring the lights down and turn up a Bach Fugue, or maybe listen to the Requiem Mass or even bring out some Debussy.

However nothing gets me more angry than modern classical. I used to dismiss it out of hand as pretentiousness or simply an a-tonal mess. The last performance Cath and I went too started off well but rapidly went downhill. The worst offender was a well-known composer who has had her pieces played around the world. In this piece there were three performers, one on Soprano Sax, one Alto Sax and the other on percussion. They were all facing a projection screen. A movie was projected on the screen of failing pieces of cut out coloured paper and each performer was assigned a colour. They would randomly play notes while their colour was on screen.

Say it with me now: This is not music. It was a hideous mess of random sound, I just felt horribly embarrassed for the performers and the audience. They finished and…everyone applauded.

We had an intermission and Cath was kind enough to let me beg off so I went to the pub and watched the cricket.

While I was sitting there though I got thinking. Is it really their fault? Let’s have a look at some of the music genres around today. Rap was first really performed in the early 1900’s, Rock music? Went mainstream around the 1960’s, was really started though around the 1930-1940’s. Hiphop? Started in the 1970’s! Classical music? That started in 1100. That is over 900 years of music.

In that time we have had some of the greatest artists ever encountered. With that kind of pedigree it would be daunting if not impossible to live up to those standards. When Cath first started writing for her masters and she asked for my advice I was blunt and said I did not enjoy the music she was writing and I asked why she did not write more in the Classical or Romantic era style and the answer was no one writes in that style because it has already been done better than anyone possible could.

So I think that is why we are left with these people writing for random videos or playing the piano with a teddy bear or using a prepared piano.

This is not the road it should be going down. People should be proud of what has been achieved and use it for inspiration for their pieces not simple look at it and conclude you could never be that good. It really smacks of my previous post The Great Leveler.

I could be wrong but I get the feeling that classical music is dying by being its own worst enemy.

Go me, two more exams to do…

I understand that people have been banging on about this topic for a good long while. Things are more expensive to purchase in Australia, mainly entertainment products. As someone whose entire leisure time is dedicated to these I am particularly sensitive to the pricing.

For the longest time I did not purchase games. That’s not to say I didn’t play them I just sourced them from other means. When these products were being sold in America for US$60 (A$65) but expecting to purchase them in Australia for the princely sum of A$110? I must admit I balked and chose other outlets.

The usual arguments would get trotted out and they boil down to the following:

• Exchange rates.
• Too far to ship
• Small market share (compared to the rest of the world)

Nothing looked like it was going to change for a while so I continued getting games the way I always had (much to the chagrin of my parents).

Then Steam came along created by Valve Software and it looked to revolutionize the way that people played games. Steam is a social network, Instant Messenger and more importantly a digital distribution platform. When it first started it was terrible. It was used to register games you physically purchased and they did not have the infrastructure in place. So image you have bought a brand new game, really excited. You rush home, install it and start it up to play single player and it tries to connect to an internet server and it can’t because thousand of other people are trying to do the same thing bringing the servers down. So you cannot play this shiny new game.

It has since matured as a platform and has the largest market share of all PC digital distribution platforms. However not all is rosy. As it started out they really were blazing unknown trails. It was like the old Wild West, you never knew what you would find. Purchasing games with no physical components was so crazy there were people decrying it as the end of physical stores within the year; you would log in one day and see a sale of a game drop from US$30 to US$3! Everything was new and it had an unbridled exuberance to it.

Now though it feels like it has become so large that the gamers who were in charge have had to get in more help. The help they have been getting in are not other gamers, they are the suits. Things are turning filthy and I don’t know how much are publishers forcing Valve to do what they require or Valve being more run by sales than gamers. I offer the following examples of what I mean and it hopefully shows this is not empty hyperbole.

Modern Warfare 2. Was the largest game release of all time. A few digital distribution platforms, Direct2Drive, GamersGate and Impulse all pulled out of selling it on their platforms because the game came bundled with Steam. So Steam had it locked in as the only real digital distributor and what happened? If Steam detected you were from the US it would charge US$60 if it detected you were from Australia it would charge you US$90 (A$95). Really? Please excuse me while this goes a little blue.. Fuck that shit. The game is the same, there is no shipping involved, no pressing of discs and sending them to us, no physical overheads. It is in reality a Fuck You Australia tax.

Okay one example fine. It got me riled up but ultimately I didn’t care as I don’t enjoy the game. However I have always been a fan of Steam. I urge my friends to join me on it; I purchase all my games through it. It was the perfect confluence of ease of use, did what I needed and had fair pricing. As I said one example so Steam didn’t lose much in my eyes.

Then this happened. A game came out of no where and grabbed me and my friends. Borderlands. It hooked itself into me and would not let go. I picked it up with a few other friends off steam for US$50. A fair price. We played the hell out of it and really enjoyed it. All was good in the world. I got talking to another friend who was looking for a co-operative game so of course I waxed lyrical about Borderlands say he should grab it so we could have a game. The next day I got a message from him saying:

“Sorry mate but I just can’t swing the US$80 for a game I am not sure about”.

What? US$80? I jumped on steam and yes there it was. It was originally selling for US$50, had been pulled and re-upped as US$80. The official word was it was a pricing mistake and has been fixed. I have some words as well: Greedy Fucks. This game was selling gang busters, it really came out of no where with how popular it was. Then someone picked up on how Australian’s were paying the same as the rest of the world and realized that they could continue screwing us.

So for the years I have been using Steam, for the hundreds of dollars I have happily spent on games, all the marketing and word of mouth from an incredibly happy customer, destroyed in one go. This is not one of those empty boycotts’s that get bandied around all the time. It’s simply just a choice.

I choose to not get screwed anymore.