Ong Jiin Joo

(Read Part 1, Part 2)

Time always passes by quickly when we’re travelling to a new place. I spent 9 days in Shanghai like I spent 9 hours on a busy day in Singapore. There were lots of dead time in between things due to the lack of a concept called a “schedule” in both my entourage as well as the reciprocal locals who can promise to take you to dinner one day and decide to go cycling when the time comes. Oh well

I also had pretty elaborate dreams sleeping for an hour longer than my usual. The body needed the rest but the mind just won’t shut up when it got its fair share of rest. The dreams though, felt different. It wasn’t my usual adventure dreams where I’m either searching for new things or running away. It was something a lot more coherent, something about people and taking huge bets. I don’t recall the dream, but I remembered the adrenaline rush.

Also critical in this trip was for me to gather enough data to project into the coming year – this was supposed to be done next CNY but with Garuda Robotics running at high gear now I have to make certain hard decisions of what to drop on the floor, what to run at a slower pace, and what to charge on.

Although that’s a personal decision, some items on my plate are not heroic battles that I can fight alone. Thus the need to share and hopefully get some feedback from you.

I have described the situation in China in the 1st 2 parts of this series. I have a plan, and now I need to rally a team of varying capabilities to get this done. If you’re remotely interested in wind band music, or music education, or south east asian culture, please read on.

Let me give you more background. Why China? It’s one of the unchartered territories that we have an upper hand in terms of language and cultural similarities. It’s also because we are here in south east asia, at the crossroads or many global cultures in both the past and present, and thus far been (in the band scene again) a net importer of western ideals.

The creed here is not just an artistic one. At some level of artistry and command of musical instruments, relevant and exciting works are being performed and circulated globally. The challenge is one that takes these relevant pieces of art and make them available to the students who are learning, who are exploring, who are, unavoidably, being impressed on.

Why do we all know Beethoven’s 5th or Ode to Joy? At some point in our lives we were all introduced these great compositions, but certainly not in its full glory. It might have been just a melody in your beginner piano book. We checked and it was in Hal Leonard’s widely popular method book Essential Elements too.

Why do they get chosen? Because the creators are dead. Long dead. The problem with most recognisable tunes that define our asian culture presently are from living people or people who are dead less than 70 years ago.

The same goes with folk tunes. But not all folk tunes are equal. Anyone learning classical music is more likely to know about Londonderry Air than 茉莉花 (Jasmin Flower, despite its feature in Turandot). However due to the depth of culture compared to older civilisations, it would be a really far stretch to say anyone outside our region bothers with Wau Bulan, despite it being one of the perfect tunes for beginner too.

There are some new ideas and thinking as of late on how to take advantage of the world’s current attitudes towards each other, to address this cultural imbalance. Here are some that I am at liberty to share:

1. Create companion products that are localised. Pick your favourite method book. By a certain lesson, the student should be expected to learn, say, 5 notes (Bb, C, D, Eb, F) and 2 duration (crotchet and quavers). That’s when the instructor can put the method book down and pick up the companion product of, say, Wau Bulan, and actually perform a Dikir Barat flavoured Grade 1 type piece with only those knowledge. Or Taylor Swift’s Love Story if that’s your preference.

2. Sample or reinterpret great works of art. Pick your favourite composition (or pop music if that’s your thing), write a simple version that attempts to retain as much beauty without technical difficulties. Write it in a way that an instructor can relate concepts used in the original work through your interpretation.

Are you already doing these kinds of work anyway? i.e. are you an arranger writing music like this, or are you a publisher publishing such music, or are you a band instructor looking for such works / know of such works? If so, I want to talk to you to understand how we can work together.

Yes there’s a lot going on in the legal side of things once we touch recent music, but with sufficient volume and lineup, I’m confident we can have a better bargaining power. It gets easier if you know the composer that you’re adapting from as well.

I said a lot about the business and industry transformation, now back to myself. As briefly mentioned earlier, I now understand that regardless of how niche this market is, one cannot create reach with technology alone. People of all kinds of motives will need to be in the picture for now, and hopefully by giving ample time, it will evolve to be more central and people more specialised like the American market.

That’s a big damper for the original business plans of Useful Music (beyond music tailoring), and pivot it will have to be. The challenge is to resist pivoting back to the old way people do things. The best possibility now is to pretend to be a technology company that support publishers, but there won’t be enough trust amongst them to share a platform. And the next best is to simply go consumer model and fight head to head with various sheetmusicsomething.com websites.

And based on that I had to again postpone or elongate the implementation of the next phase and keep up with arrangements for now. I kinda miss the kids in Hwa Chong just a few months back, and might hunt for such projects in the near term, just to keep their youthfulness in my mind.

I did not buy back anything substantial from Shanghai (I have so much left over RMB), but now I see, tenacity, determination, repeat engagement, always showing up, consistent quality, and taking long term but high risk projects, is the only way forward, before the next stage opens up.

突破!

(Read Part 1)

This is a prototype Bb/F plastic trombone, not for sale yet…

The conference got more exciting the following day and next, as more people started coming in. The second day was supposedly a trade visitor day, but quite a number of individuals signed up and came in anyway.

After a leg breaking record of walking all 10 remaining halls (did W1 and W2 1st day, but W3-W5, E1-E7 on 2nd day) I finally got a full picture of every possible niche one can play in this wild music industry. Even though not all brands came here to be represented, there’s at least some brands for each type of instrument, scores, electronics, etc. for everyone. People said it’s larger than the Frankfurt one, I thought it must be.

Some halls were more ridiculous than others. E4 had at any one time 50 drummers letting their hearts out, E7 had so many people looking for traditional Chinese instruments it could be mistaken as a local market. W5 was completely filled with smoke coming from smoke machines and you cannot look anywhere without staring directly at powerful stage lights. It was not that big that you’d get lost in such a show, but big enough that it was impossible to spend time with even just one company per segment.

Theft happens every year apparently. Some just outright steal, others daylight-rob you by engaging you to buy and then walk away without paying. We had one company who wanted every single item on our catalogue, claiming to be buying for the country’s libraries. Yeah right. Did not come back the next day, refused to pay cash, so good riddance. Not so good news for these guys though:

It was also very tiring because engaging with Chinese people require a heightened sense of self, an extraordinary amount of brain CPU for language, while also keeping sufficient power left for surveillance to prevent theft. On top of that, I was an extremely lousy shopkeeper – couldn’t rattle prices and discounts off my tongue or convert fluently between RMB and SGD – not to mention most people who walked into the booth weren’t really serious buyers; many did not know symphonic band.

So when we actually found real potential customers, the conversation carried on and on, sometimes for an hour, as we talked about everything from music education in China to the various stories of how each piece of work came about. And it might still end with, “thanks I’ll take a look at your catalogue when I’m home”. Recording is critical (now the highest on my todo list for coming year) as many teachers don’t read scores (they teach the band to match the recording) and so is localising the language.

Although the conference was supposed to end on Saturday 3pm, exhibitors starting tearing down from around noon. I was quite disappointed that I didn’t manage to get the bass trumpet I liked (someone beat me to it); now I’m hoping it’s a blessing in disguise.

Kimberly, me, Lester, Joseph Cheung, Jack Law, and Fang Kai.

The evening was a surprising treat (or torture?) as Joseph 张老师, boss of JC Link whom we exhibited with, invited us to a concert he was guest conducting. It was a programme consisting of only Chinese works, played by a Shanghai concert band. After the presentation at the newly opened SSO (Shanghai Symphony Orchestra) Hall, we adjourned to supper where we were joined by our friend and luminary Chinese composer Chen Qian and some local band directors and leaders around the greater Shanghai area.

Hearing the struggles of their local band scene again confirmed some of the stories that were told to me in Singapore, but I also picked up a lot of new ideas and anecdotes.

Now, I can’t even start to imagine how large this industry can potentially be, and how under developed it is due to the language barrier and artificial walls being erected around them. Simple example: all these great YouTube clips had to be downloaded and uploaded to YouKu before locals have access to them. It’s no wonder many bands still sounded like local folk musical groups, lacking western concepts of ensemble: rhythm, harmony, balance etc.

On the surface, all is well. Every band do the same activities: concert and competition, like everyone else I know in Singapore and Malaysia. Every band has similar scores, crawl taobao or whatever they can get to find and copy scores. Every band has sufficient instrument, supplied by their excellent local manufacturers who copied effectively and priced competitively.

Unfortunately at this stage of the development of the industry, individual characters who operate the industry often feel insecure about their position, their network, their relevance. Thus the ritualistic patronising of important people that’s commonplace in thousands of years of Chinese culture permeate the band scene as well.

The characters at the supper were telling of their background and ambition, and pointed clearly where their bands will head to. Education, luckily, was still central to everything, and that gave an excellent angle for external players like us to provide relevant content. However, their struggles were more related to financial support, teaching resources and seeing a “path” to progress in music. Some also lack an entrepreneurial mindset to survive.

Ultimately, those with the best attitudes and constantly improving both their level of musicality as well as the operations of an arts group are the best type of partners we should look for to move the industry forward.

上海申城爱乐交响管乐团 before concert begin.

I feel that we underestimate how far we have come. Take “Those Years” 那些年, just an innocent piece of arrangement of the hundreds of pop music I arranged. I now walk into China meeting completely random band instructors claiming to know the piece very well. Many could rattle 新加坡爱乐管乐团 (Philwinds) off their tongue. But these could not be possible without a good recording of a good musical group playing a maybe passable arrangement of an impeccable melody written by a Japanese for a Taiwanese movie.

And we didn’t do this because that was the end goal. It was the attitude put in by everyone, starting from the commissioner and concert conceptualiser, to each performer, to each note being written and played, to the pickup of the mic of a live concert, even to the meticulous plagiarising of the video into the Chinese Internet without losing too much quality, and so on. Everyone was trying to solve a different problem, but all taking up their part, do their best, had a good time, but inadvertently created a mini-storm we did not even see.

However these pockets of energies are spread all over right now. Many individuals who rally their own “gang”, whether it’s in Singapore or other south east asian nations with advanced band scene, failed to see how working together and specialising in their delivery could have an impact to the world.

To build trust and specialisation, one first need a great platform: good governance, written agreements, business level relationships, and not verbal soap boxing, infinite credit terms, and most worrying of all, passion that can overwrite common sense. The entire industry, including all performers and audiences, needs to have a way of recognising quality, not just popularity. And finally, the market makers, the change agents, need to look bigger and wider and stop indulging with domestic politics.

Once we have that, toss in ample amounts of technology, social media, and channel partners who can make things happen in their respective markets (not just distribution), that’s when we will be poised to be a net cultural curator and exporter. America doesn’t care but Europe is watching closely, Latin America is realising, Japan is already reaching out.

A part 3 will follow on how I intend to achieve this and how I want you to help. Now to catch up on sleep thanks to red eye flights Zzz..

(Part 3)

I took a week off to travel to Shanghai to attend music CHINA, an expo under the same umbrella as Messe Frankfurt, one of the world’s largest music trade shows. The show has two sections, one is music the other is PROlight+sound, which is more a sound engineer heaven.

The music side is predominantly western although there are halls with Chinese instruments as well. Pianos, strings, winds brass all take up their own hall, while us publishers are primarily tucked in a nice corner with all the guitars and ukeleles.

Today is only the 1st day (3 more days to go), and after going through all the setup and networking with the other exhibitors, I felt that I need to take notes. This is also specially for you, if you’re trying to do something similar to me, about expanding our culture back into China.

The purpose of my trip is super multifold. First there is the “business” part where I play editor to Retsel Mil Publications to gain access to conversations with other publishers, which I think is progressing nicely as each conversation reveals a little more about this intricate web that we music publishers weave. This effort continues.

Then there is the self-promoting part which was a complete flop because finally I have come face to face with the typical Chinese customer whose last thing in mind is to come to a trade show to talk about commissioning new works or discuss cross border / cross cultural exchanges. They are looking for method books mostly. It is a good learning.

Third would be the bigger promotion of local works, not just works that are already published, but potential other new works that we manage to download its premier from YouTube in time for the show, to be pitched to other publishers and other market makers. Customers generally ignore south east asian works here – speaks volume about how important we are to the general Chinese mindset, but arrangements that touches their culture does create conversations – who know maybe they will actually come back to grab it towards the last day.

The same can’t be said for the publishers. Some of them (especially the owners of boutiques) relish new compositions as works of pure beauty and curate them constantly. Larger monopolies who completes the lowest common denominators only send their sales staff, who are usually friendly but useless to engage in meaningful conversations about advancing the music publishing industry.

Thus in the end, most of my time these 2 days were spent talking to other composers and arrangers who double hat in helping to run a publishing business. This is probably the most rewarding part, realising that composers who survive in this brutal industry is solving the exact same difficult problems as lonely me in lonely Ang Mo Kio, whether it’s a non-existent Viola section resulting in a Violin III for beginners, doing up all sorts of flex-band type music to cater for incomplete instrumentations, key choice, breaking away from western formula writing, taking day jobs and writing at night, doing up powerpoints to describe the madness they go through to make ensembles work for education, decisions on whether to invest in Note Performer for Sibelius and so on, and so on.

Last but not least I need to make new resolutions and redistribute my time once I get off the plane in Changi. This is a short but not relaxing reprieve, but it is already doing a lot of good, especially by artificially blocking my access to Google, Facebook and these American services that runs my daily life. I’ll save this for part 2.

My biggest reflection today is summarised in this picture on the wall.

Meeting these publishers face to face has been a great revelation, precisely because they are so predictable. All of them face photocopying issues in China and the rest of the world. All of them still want to play legal, pay up licensing fees for print rights, invest deeply into good sample recordings, do a decent job marketing online and offline, but most spend little time with the end user as only a few could wear all hats from being a band instructor to a publisher and still be able to travel and develop connections.

In other words, no one is innovating the model.

Maybe they don’t need to maybe they don’t know how. Most have taken some advantage of technology, giving away more online (you can find many publishers freely distribute their conductor scores on their e-commerce store for example), but no one has been able to change how new works are sold and performed.

Especially when it come to method books – it’s being treated like a commodity, with everyone reselling for everyone to capture as much dollars as possible. Here we translate a bit, there we change the packaging a bit and voila another similar product emerges.

Next up is the soaking up of popular culture of their own people / audience. It doesn’t matter if the arrangement is half past six as long as the conductors who are walk the show recognises them. Surely there can’t be any hint of “art” in pop music transcriptions?

Sitting next to those are the nationalistic but mostly irrelevant folk or national songs. Just like people throw me a big Question Mark when I tell them about Rasa Sayang, I wouldn’t care as much for a collection of Dutch folk tunes arranged for flute, cello and harp.

Finally you have the cream of the crop, the reason we all went into publishing, the recognising of original works that defies gravity and fly off the shelves, being programmed by all these university and professional bands, and giving the publishing house some dignity for curating the master work.

Many grumbled how they can’t be effective agents of these arts because customers go direct to composer these days (again blame the Internet), their capital is stretched really thin for licensing with no guaranteed sales, some holding rights to music passed down from their great great great grandfathers that they can’t monetise, etc. All reasonable, but cannot elicit pity.

For the world has moved on. Plagiarism is the primary engine in promoting art. Piracy is the de facto mode of operation for the vast majority of the individuals and some organisations, regardless of what the law says. And there’s no bridge between these two world – you either play nice, which we’re quite fortunate in Singapore to have watchful eyes to ensure this happens, or you play foul.

We’ve been talking about the Microsoft strategy of simply letting China copy Windows for some time. Well it worked pretty well – so well that we couldn’t buy a printer here that supports Mac, and we had to install bootcamp and a chinese copy of windows (why of course it’s free) to be able to print.

The same might have to pan out here. In the face of customers who cannot differentiate good music from bad, we almost have to force feed them with the product that we want them to consume, before a generation of musicians grow up to prefer these product. No amount of reasoning and evangelism is going to change that.

And that’s counter intuitive to how we see art – we want to price the good stuff up, and dump the bad stuff. But for this strategy you have to actually give out the absolute best, and use that as a platform to get people to start following you. Many indie singers has done that before, why are band or orchestra scores so different?

Peter Thiel talks about creative monopoly. If there’s a new kind of monopoly that can capture value in selection, curation or distribution, what would it be?

(Part 2)

Is finally available officially! Thanks to everyone who has supported the piece, from Philwinds who’ve performed it years ago, folks at Retsel Mil Publishing who although warn of how difficult it is to secure publishing rights, allowed for this to go through, and everyone who has performed this piece earlier pre-publication.

For now, please contact Kimberly at www.music-playground.com for price and availability. Wholesale is also available. 1st print is running out fast too.

I’m still trying to setup online purchase to make things easier for all of you. And hopefully it can become a model for future works to be available. Thank you for all your emails to my mailbox and trying to reach me from all corners of earth – it wasn’t the easiest thing we’ve done before, but at least now we roughy know how to make it available (at least in Singapore).

And last but not least, thanks to the original composers and publishers (including Ms Adkins!) who authorised the sale. We are not Hal Leonard, but we do aspire to do better.