As Leonard Cohen put it in Paul Zollo’s book Songwriters on Songwriting, “If I knew where the good songs came from, I would go there more often. It’s much like the life of a nun — you’re married to a mystery.” Zollo goes on to explain that songwriting is much more than a mere craft, it’s a conscious attempt to connect with the unconscious — or subconscious if you prefer. There’s no right way of doing it. As Paul Simon said, “You can’t teach someone songwriting, but you can teach them a lot ABOUT songwriting.” And  Bob Dylan said, “There’s no rhyme or rule to it. Which is what makes it so attractive, as you well know, or you wouldn’t be doing it yourself.” (Zollo, 2003)

Despite the elusive nature of songwriting, I do believe that one can improve as a songwriter, or at least keep it interesting by exploring multiple approaches.  In response to the difficulty I had in finding quality information to help me hone my songwriting skills, I have compiled a webliography of excellent, and free, online educational resources for the aspiring, and even professional, songwriter.  My focus was in gathering information ABOUT the songwriting process from highly authoritative sources, with a special preference to collect the words of the artists themselves.
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BerkleeShares: Free Music and Songwriting Lessons from the Berklee School of Music
An amazing OpenCourseware resource from one of the premiere music schools in the country.  Quality lessons are offered in a mix of video and PDF formats to promote enrollment in one of their online certificate programs.
Link: http://www.berkleeshares.com/songwriting__arranging

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Words and chords: Semantic Shifts in the Beatles’ Chords
by Ger Tillekens
Soundscapes, Volume 3, June 2000

Scholarly commentary and pattern analysis on the harmonic structure in The Beatles’ songs.  This article is in depth, and requires some familiarity with The Beatles’ music and some background in music theory.  Soundscapes, in general, provides a scholarly analysis of patterns in popular music and is a great general resource for songwriters.
Link: http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/VOLUME03/Words_and_chords.shtml

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BBC: Sold on Song
BBC’s Radio2 series, Sold on Song, published several guides for songwriters and musicians, and a specific on on writing songs by UK hit songwriter, Steven Hillier.  Sold on Song also publishes interviews and intelligent commentary on hit songs from A Day in the Life to You Really Got Me.
Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/soldonsong/guide/song.shtml

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How To Write a Song
by Robin Frederick
Robin Frederick has written over 500 songs for TV, Records, Theater, and Audio Products.  Robin is a former Director of A&R for Rhino Records and currently heads the A&R Team at Taxi, the world’s leading independent A&R company. She gives a step by step guide to her approach to songwriting, and offers many novel techniques.
Link: http://www.robinfrederick.com/write.html

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Measure For Measure
A New York Times blog on the process of Songwriting with contributions by Suzanne Vega, Roseanne Cash, Andrew Bird, Peter Holsapple, and more.  Peter Holsapple actually documents the creation of a new song as he writes it.
Link: http://measureformeasure.blogs.nytimes.com/

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Andrea Stolpe: Career Songwriter Blog
Part of the Berklee Music Blog Network, faculty member, Andrea Stolpe blogs about the songwriting process.  While her intent is to promote Berklee’s online course offerings, she drops lots of good nuggets of advice on song structure.  Ms. Stolpe is a multi-platinum recorded songwriter, performing artist, and educator. She has worked as a staff writer for EMI, Almo-Irving, and Universal Music Publishing, with songs recorded by Faith Hill, Josh Gracin, Daniel Lee Martin and many others.
Link: http://andreastolpe.berkleemusicblogs.com/

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Western Michigan University School of Music: Music Theory Help Site
Songwriters need at least an elementary understanding of Music Theory and Composition.  This “Theory Help Site” has been compiled by Professors David Code, Daniel Jacobson and Julie Evans of the Western Michigan University School of Music.   It is provided as both an introductory and a review reference for essential concepts of the undergraduate music theory core at Western Michigan.
Link: http://www.wmich.edu/mus-history/TheoryHelp/TheoryHelp.html

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A Practical Guide to Musical Composition
by Alan Belkin
A very thorough online book on musical composition, focused mostly on classical arranging, but very useful to the modern songwriter.  Alan Belkin taught at all four of Montreal’s universities, and since 1982 have been a full-time faculty member at the Université de Montréal, where he is now a full professor. He teaches mainly composition, writing skills, and also coach various chamber groups. Be sure to check out the “Musical Ideas” link on this page as well.
Link: http://www.musique.umontreal.ca/personnel/Belkin/bk/

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MIT:OpenCourseware — Music and Theater Arts
MIT offers free online Music courses, including Composition, Structure, Harmony and Counterpoint, etc.  Online courses are created by faculty as supplements to the standard curriculum.  The music faculty includes internationally known composers and performers, and students may choose from a wide variety of offerings in performance, theory/analysis/composition, and music history/literature.
Link: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Music-and-Theater-Arts/index.htm

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Performing Songwriter
Performing Songwriter Performing Songwriter started out as “a humble and heartfelt attempt at creating a place for songwriters to come together in a safe community where they’re understood and supported and heard by those who love music.“  This well-respected songwriting magazine provides a number of free articles, interviews, and even stories behind hit songs in its online format.
Link: http://www.performingsongwriter.com/pages/vault/behind.cfm

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References:

Zollo, P. (2003). Songwriters on songwriting. New York: Da Capo Press.

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Prepared by Shaun Ellis at shaun@sdellis.com on 6/25/2009.

Yet, digital preservation is still an evolving field.  We don’t have all the answers to the mountain of challenges before us.  Because of our uncertainty we can’t tell whether our remedial actions will be effective.  We may have to back track, endure false starts, develop original technologies, and in many ways restructure our organizations to ensure the longevity of our work.  All of this costs money, and due to the complexity of the problem even rough financial estimates are hard to predict.  It also takes people; people with skills that have not traditionally been taught to librarians and archivists in school.  Underutilized capital and staff are unheard of in most libraries, and making a shift toward trusted preservation calls for a team of large, authoritative bodies to handle most of the heavy lifting.

Unfortunately, at the moment we are mostly left to our own devices when it comes to developing preservation programs.  The current approach is like telling citizens to fight climate change by encouraging them to drive less or use wind power.  Despite valiant individual effort, people will simply not be able to change their daily practices without centralized infrastructure development in things like public transportation and alternative energy grids.  They can forgo that vacation, but they still need to drive to work.

This uncoordinated effort challenges even the largest institutions, stretching their resources to the gills.  Some may argue that we have excellent open source repository software at our disposal, namely Dspace, Fedora, and Greenstone.  These are no doubt great tools, but they barely scratch the surface of the problems, and a concerted effort is needed to expand and standardize our toolkit beyond simple object management.

So what are the problems that most libraries, museums, and archives cannot tackle themselves?  According to Trusted Digital Repositories, a critical component of any digital preservation program will be the ability to prove reliability and trustworthiness over time.  We cannot simply ask our patrons to trust us, we must prove it.  A third party must assess the reliability of a program based on a set of widely agreed-upon criteria for trustworthiness (CRL & OCLC, 2002).  Fortunately, some of the largest library organizations are working on this and just last year a document outlining the criteria was published (CRL & OCLC, 2007).

Initiatives such as the certification program provide a great road map and are a step in the right direction, but in my opinion further leadership is necessary.  The current process is simply too complex for individual libraries to navigate.  I actually disagree with the assertion that organizational will and way is the main impeding factor in the slow uptake of digital preservation programs (Cornell University Library, 2007).  I believe that a lack of adequate and standardized technology is the problem, and it only seems like a lack of will because libraries and museums have never been comfortable in the director’s chair of “Software Development: The Movie”.  The slow pace of progress in digital preservation is in fact an organizational problem, but not a problem of “will or way”; it is a problem of organizational structure.

Successful software development requires different organizational environments and leadership than libraries have been able to offer.  Young programmers need mentors and organizations that require a MLIS degree to advance will never be a good incubator for better programmers.  All programmers who are working for libraries should be encouraged to get a MLIS, but we should not throw the proverbial babies out with the bathwater by denying leadership positions to skilled staff in disciplines that are critical to the future of libraries as we know them.

Evidence of this problem lies in the fact that libraries have been using open source tools for many years now, but only a small number of individuals have contributed code back to the open source software community.  Furthermore, the legality of sharing code people write for their own institutions is fuzzy.  Organizations need to formalize the process of open source library software development and create a working group of librarians and developers who focus solely on open source software solutions to library goals such as digital preservation, open access, and the next generation ILS, without the day to day distractions of operations and more institution-specific tasks.  This working group must be informed by the common needs and goals of the greater community, and should be as transparent as possible.  Software cannot solve everything, but it can facilitate the automation of complex processes, and perform audits to make sure the system is functioning as it should.

One of the biggest challenges for such a working group would be to set standards for preserving living information objects.  “Born-digital” objects are never done.  Print, on the other hand, has a finite end date as the very medium is a fixed entity.  The document metaphor was only an entry point to the early days of the Web, and we strain to apply it to modern web sites that go way beyond a linked collection of “pages”.  Today web sites are living, evolving entities consisting of contributions from many authors and readers.

How does one preserve, in a fixed state, an information object that is in a constant flux?  One can take snapshots of change, but does every morsel of new information get its own full metadata record?  We certainly don’t want the redundant bloat of a full archive of the web site every time something changes.  The same problems arise for living datasets, collaborative research, government legislation, and so on.  Preservation software is currently built under the assumption that information objects are static, and we know that is not often the case.

The certification criteria is a map, but like the early days of global exploration, the maps can be inaccurate and the criteria for certification should not be taken for granted.  Anyone should be able to challenge the certification process in a public forum, such as an open access scholarly journal.  The certification board, or perhaps future working group I mentioned, should address these concerns and either provide a logically convincing counter-argument, or incorporate the suggestions appropriately.  The openness of the development processes to democratic legislation is a crucial component of the relevance of the certification.  While a centralized working group is the ship, the greater community makes up the constellations that will verify the soundness of the map.

REFERENCES

Cornell University Library (2007). Digital preservation management: Implementing short-term strategies for long-term problems. http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/dpm/index.html

CRL & OCLC (2002). Trusted digital repositories: attributes and responsibilities. http://www.oclc.org/programs/ourwork/past/trustedrep/repositories.pdf

CRL & OCLC (2007). Trustworthy repositories audit & certification: criteria and checklist (TRAC).
http://www.crl.edu/PDF/trac.pdf

McDonough, J.P. (2008). Digital “dark age” may doom some data. Physorg.com.  Retrieved Nov. 13, 2008 from
http://www.physorg.com/news144343006.html

civicsquared

My friend, Kevin Fricovsky, and I entered the Knight News Challenge.  The projects they fund are those with a focus “on neighborhood and community-focused projects, services, and programs”.  Our project is called CivicSquared, and here’s a PDF document which explains all the nitty-gritty details, since we had to post the abridged version to the site.    The “elevator pitch” goes something like this:

CivicSquared is social software that helps communities obtain and discuss information about local legislation, tax allocation, and elected officials’ voting records. It will be released as an open source Django application.

Self-service is incredibly appealing to many people, and one of the most compelling enhancement to services digital libraries can enable.  It should be appealing to librarians as well, though many frame their identity around the services they’ve been offering for years and are resistant to give up control.  For example, “tagging” is a digital library service that actually allows a user to personally or communally catalog, an activity that was once performed almost entirely by librarians.  While this fulfills a user need to classify and store my own information, the user is also performing the technical task of cataloging an item with valuable information for other library services.  Tags may be mined by systems or librarians to provide even more services, such as cross-disciplinary keyword suggestions.

I also think that the digital libraries can get closer to collecting and capturing work at the moment of creation.  In fact, in order to best service research and archive datasets, we must create services that allow research data to be entered directly into our publishing and archiving systems (i.e., institutional repositories).  As these datasets are accessed and cited, we need to make sure that the data cited in an article can be retrieved the way it was when the author accessed it, even if data has been continually added to the dataset.  Otherwise, the citation cannot be audited.

The solution to the preservation of artifacts that libraries can’t provide tools for creation is a bit more complex.  Many works are digitally produced these days and users are becoming more and more aware of the value of backups.  One service that university and academic libraries could provide would be to offer networked data backups of important faculty material to our repositories, kind of like what Amazon offers with its S3 service (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/).  In this way we get closer to the original source material and also potentially fund the project.

Dr. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, outlines many digital improvements to the Copyright Office (Billington, 2007).  For this reason, The Library of Congress (LOC) plays a key role in resolving both copyright issues and interoperability issues.  Because the LOC houses the Copyright Office, they can facilitate digital lookups of copyright and licensing information by exposing their datasets of copyrights.  If licensing information is readily available and interpretable, the benefit to digital library services would be amazing.  One example of such a benefit is the digital library of sheet music I am working on for my Digital Libraries class term project.  If I could query licensing information, I would not have to rely on user flagging or deal with copyright owners asking me to remove free access to their sheet music.  I could simply use the license terms and date of copyright to determine whether something can legally be distributed or not.

I was rather frustrated with Billington’s description of the “Preserving Creative America” project.  The aim of this project is to join with commercial producers of creative content and “preserve American creativity in all its forms”.   My frustration stems from the idea that commercial producers are fully representative of the America’s creativity.  While I don’t make much money from my artistic activities, I do feel that they are culturally significant, along with hundreds of other works I’ve discovered which never made a dime for their creators.  In fact, one of the LOC’s premiere projects, American Memory, preserves Appalachian music recordings, performances that were a highly creative, yet non-commercial activities.  If the oral history projects Billington mentions aim to record American stories, not only those whose professions involve supplying vocal talent, then the Preserving Creative America project should broaden its scope and not rest on the assumption that creativity is purely a commercial endeavor.  By extending such services to commercial entities and not the general public, I believe the LOC could offer not a novel service, but rather a disservice and an insult to the American people.

We are at a period of history where we must adapt to a changing environment.  The dinosaurs didn’t become extinct because of climate change, they became extinct because they couldn’t adapt (Abram, 2008).  Science tells us that the organisms which have the best odds for adaptation are those that can mutate rapidly.  We should take a cue from biology and frequently try novel services and mutations on traditional services, taking notice of what is valuable to our users.

REFERENCES

Abram. S. (2008). Evolution to revolution to chaos? Reference in transition. Searcher, 16(8), 42-48.

Billington, J.H. (2007). Testimony to Congress. Washington, D.C. The Library of Congress. Retrieved Jan. 7, 2008 from http://www.loc.gov/about/welcome/speeches/digital/digitalage.html

Pomerantz, J. (2008). Digital (Library Services) and (Digital Library) Services. Journal of Digital Information, 9(27).