PAST EVENT: Friday 3 December – Music and Censorship: Who calls the tune?

25 Nov 2010

Music and Censorship: Who calls the tune?
A panel discussion on music and censorship
Friday 3 December – 6:30pm
School of Oriental and African Studies
Thornhaugh St, Russell Square, WC1H 0XG
Location: Room G2
Nearest tube Russell Square

MAP

(Room G2 is immediately to the left of reception as soon as you enter the main building. Ask at reception if any doubt.)

Music is the most censored of all the arts – from the restrictions facing musicians in Iran to the pressures of the global market. To coincide with Index on Censorship’s special issue on music and censorship, ‘Smashed Hits 2.0’, please join us for a panel discussion with leading performers, broadcasters, producers and commentators.

David Jones, director of Serious and London Jazz Festival
Daniel Brown, journalist and broadcaster
Malu Halasa, writer and editor
Lucy Duràn, broadcaster and academic
Khyam Allami, musician

Chair: Jo Glanville, editor, Index on Censorship

The event will include a special screening of the short film Baddil Musiqah (7min, Arabic with English subtitles). Produced by Aramram, an independent film production company based in Jordan, it gives an insight into what is on the minds of young independent Arab musicians in the region today.

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  1. David Knopfler

    November 30, 2010 at 17:03

    It’s hard to know where to start. The freedom the West offers is that anyone can make pretty much any piece of music they like – provided that they also understand that the rules of engagement will also make it much easier to find mass-market exposure with work that is politically and socially bland and almost impossible to make commercially viable work, if by it’s intrinsic nature it’s what is commonly understood as “Art” since no meaningful funding for such work is available any longer, as outlets for it are so restricted. The margins are not wide and they are narrowing.

    I’ll cite just one recent anecdotal experience. I was touring in the US this year and visited a radio station for an interview. As is customary in such situations I brought one of my CDs along, assuming that the station library wouldn’t have a copy. The presenter was apologetic… “We don’t control the content that is played and we can’t interject our own choices into it. We can’t play a track from your CD” The station, like many others plays only from a computer playlist of a thousand former hits and recycles them in a pre-assigned somewhat randomised formation. There are assigned slots for local chit-chat and that’s it. He was the only human being in the building and after he left at the end of the interview the station continues to broadcast but all the lights go out. It’s as good an extended metaphor for what’s been done in the name of profits in commercial radio to music as any.

    Then there’s the issue of copyright infringements which has left the record labels rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic for the last fifteen years, with still no meaningful sign of life rafts.

    The oppression of art doesn’t necessarily require a Bogeyman oppressor… it just requires unregulated markets and a few oligarch corporations trapped by their own damming logic that the quarterly bottom line matters most.

    I personally have no budget to pay for my next record and even if I manage to make it without a budget that will preclude working with orchestras or even a band, as musicians wages alone would require some tens of thousands Record Labels and Publishers can no longer afford to pay up front.

    We will come in the decades to come to look at the handful of exquisite recordings made in the big studios with limitless budgets, the best technology and art in harmony could produce in the last quarter of the 20th Century, the same way we marvel at Victorian splendor over contemporary functionalism in Architecture where cost completely dwarfs choice of materials.

  2. David Knopfler

    November 30, 2010 at 17:06

    PS Ack – no editing facility… so several annoying typos went un-proofed- sorry

2 Responses to “PAST EVENT: Friday 3 December – Music and Censorship: Who calls the tune?”