Huffington Magazine Issue 26 | Page 83

Exit MUSIC HUFFINGTON 12.09.12 HE FUTURE OF MUSIC FASCINATES ME — mainly how technology is causing it to drift away from the 20th-century model of music as a physical commodity. While the shift may be moving at a glacial pace, I get excited thinking about music, specifically pop music, regaining some of its earliest strengths and traits. Mainly existing in multiple forms, interpretive as an idea, not merely a product set in sonic stone. ¶ I recently had the pleasure of talking with someone of great influence to me and my generation, Beck, about his upcoming Song Reader project — 20 never-before-recorded songs that will be released only in notated form. When I first heard about it I was very intrigued. In my mind, this work will help to continue this emerging evolution of music’s new form by taking up a format long antiquated to the pop audience: sheet music. — Dan Deacon COURTESY OF MCSWEENEY’S PUBLISHING (SONG READER); SERGIO MEMBRILLAS (DO WE? WE DO.) T DEACON: I went to school for music and studied composition and just kept thinking, I am basically writing Sanskrit. No one gives a crap about notation. I’m wondering what your connection to sheet music and notation and songbooks is. BECK: Once I got into playing music, I was drawn to folk music and rural blues music. Recordings of that music were really hard to come by, so certain songs that I had heard about, the only way I could see what the music was like was in notated form. I think about music I recorded in the last 10, 15 years, and I can tell you there’s a lot of music that’s lost forever because it was on a hard drive. We have musical manuscripts from 400 or 500 years ago, so they may be things that last longer. How long have you been thinking about doing a release like this? Well this idea came in the early 90s when I was putting out my first records, and Hal Leonard sent a songbook version of the record. I was looking at it, and it just seemed so abstract and weird. And it didn’t make sense because the record was much more about sonic ideas and experimenting with recording and sounds, and Beck’s Song Reader — out Dec. 7 — is a collection of 20 neverbefore-heard songs by the artist that will only be released in sheet music form. If you want to hear them, you either have to play them yourself, find someone who can, or wait for home recordings to appear on YouTube.