Creative music. Art music. New music. These comprise Smashedpiano. Why Smashedpiano? So we can all discover each other and collectively grow an online home for, and greater awareness of, music's most original art.
Initially conceived to highlight the activities of the musical artists who use the Arraymusic Studio, smashedpiano.com was ultimately developed by Canada's Arraymusic to showcase Toronto's creative music artists and beyond. Best known for its loft-style studio that provides an affordable home to a vanguard of the city's musical innovators and for its Arraymusic Ensemble, a frontrunner in contemporary chamber music expression since 1972, Arraymusic has long provided a kind of artistic NASA for those who fearlessly explorer music's frontiers.
Arraymusic created smashedpiano.com to give composers, musicians, sound-artists and improvisers a "fool-proof tool-for-technological-dummies" to quickly, easily generate, and update, artist profiles online which, when placed altogether, form an events-listing web-service and community-based website where the bulk of content is created directly by its members.
"CBC's elimination of Two New Hours suggests Canada's publicly-funded broadcaster is determined to join music's mainstream. And retail stores are selling the same conventional CDs by the same top 40 sanctioned artists heard on every radio station from Alaska to Mexico. The oligopolization and homogenization of media is continuing to impede creative music's ability to grow audiences and it's time to react less and become more pro-active," says Arraymusic general manager Sandra Bell. "Despite this, Toronto's creative music scene is broad and diverse with artists move seamlessly between many small and large niche communities eking out a living and expressing themselves artistically. Smashedpiano.com gives the most original practitioners working in music today a central place where they can house their information and provides a new way to get the word out."
Arraymusic's artistic director Bob Stevenson says "By bringing the many artists from across the new music, improvisational, electro-acoustic, sound-art, jazz and other experimental music genres into one virtual home we not only start to find a solution to the thorny problem of media exclusion but we also start to develop a new global audience online for this exciting art form."
Smashedpiano.com was completed with special funding support provided by Canadian Heritage (Canadian Arts & Heritage Sustainability Program) and Canada Council through its (now defunct) Targeted Initiatives program.
One day in the spring of 1982, two members of the Arraymusic Ensemble at that time, Henry Kucharzyk and Roberto Occhipinti, rented a funky outbuilding (formerly a gas station) behind two abandoned houses on Albany Avenue, north of the tracks. The Arraymusic Studio quickly became a centre not only of the Ensemble's activities, but for a burgeoning creative music community in dire need of affordable, well-equipped rehearsal space. Since then, Arraymusic has provided Toronto's creative musicians with a studio space in Toronto's changing Liberty Village that has functioned as a centre for experimentation, development, preparation, and most recently, performance. We provide our colleagues with these services in the spirit of cooperation and to contribute to the development and growth of this diverse community of artists.
In this same spirit we launch www.smashedpiano.com as a site where the creative music community can maintain a calendar of events, along with mp3s, jpgs and text about the artists and their activities for the World Wide Web. Now, for the first time, those interested in discovering what's up in creative music in Toronto can go to a website that, as more artists make use of it, will keep them posted on the rich, exhilarating activities of this artistic community. I think of smashedpiano as an extension, or evolution, of the Arraymusic Studio. Smashedpiano brings the idea of community into the virtual and provides a way for individual musicians, ensembles and organizations to reach an international audience, while building a strengthening sense of identity for ourselves as well as identification with our music.
We encourage everyone who is interested in discovering what's next in music to visit www.smashedpiano.com on a regular basis. To those who make non-commercial creative music, we invite you to contact us at admin@arraymusic.com about creating your page on www.smashedpiano.com.
If you write, create, conduct, direct or perform music that is considered to be original in its creative expression, experimental, avant garde, new music, contemporary classical, improvisational, electroacoustic music, sound art, sound sculpture art, acousmatic, jazz that opens beyond its form, etcetera, chances are you belong on Smashedpiano.com.
There is currently no charge for using smashedpiano.com. However, Arraymusic may have to charge some nominal fee down the road if the site becomes popular enough and bandwidth charges escalate and advertising does not cover these costs. Peace and fine musicmaking.
