In my own case, my “day job” is practicing law, while my avocation is making ambient music. The stereotype that attorneys do not artists make fails to apply to me. Similarly, though, the stereotype that creative people are by definition impractical is often very wide of the mark. The musically-inclined among my friends often work quite practical jobs to support their vocations. This is not unusual–the composer Charles Ives carved out a successful career with an insurance firm. It’s true that the “bohemian artist” exists from time to time, self-liberated from the practicalities of earning a living, but this stereotype has been used to paint too broad a brush on a dedicated set of people who make art and music and hold down jobs capably to make ends meet.

In the arena of music, we sometimes lament in our area the decline of the once-thriving “club music” scene that gave rise to a number of fine acts.
Yet the internet makes this a particularly exciting time to make music.
I co-own a netlabel with a friend in the UK. We release albums by artists from a diverse set of places, all available for free Creative Commons-licensed download.

Our listeners are from all over the country and many places around the world. The existence of a “club scene” in Dallas is irrelevant to what we do.
At the same time, I find there are a number of positive developments in music in the Dallas area. The Bend Studio concerts show that listener-oriented small space performances can be a working alternative to the old-time bar scene. The guitar studio in McKinney has similarly sponsored some exquisite guitar concerts in small space in Collin County. In the rock music arena, Mike Ziemer’s Plano Centre concerts seek to spotlight local acts for a home-grown music scene. Dallas still has a good concert scene among the indie bands which have “broken” nationally, and we still have the enviable situation of getting most good concert tours without tickets being impossible to achieve.

I used to live in Los Angeles. There the bands often must pay the clubs to play, and take all the financial risk of a club show. The local scene is filled with people from elsewhere who wish to get the “big deal”. Those who imagine that the west coast, for example, is a heaven for musicians may not have visited the “scene”.

I do wonder, sometimes, at our institutional culture’s view of the “arts scene”. As much as I would enjoy a concert hall in Collin County, I wonder if we would not be better off with a more modest hall and an arts endowment that actively supported chamber players, touring classical performances, and arts programs. The notion that only an 80 million dollar 2,100 seat facility will “do” seems to me to fail to calculate what impact an arts center would have. It’s a bit like, to draw an analogy, spending city money to build a convention hotel, but only at the cost of closing the public aquarium.

We in Dallas can do better in our support of the arts. But the issue is not whether we are encouraging artists and poets to be artists and poets. The issue is whether we are recognizing that the arts are not limited to Board of Directors of edifices, but instead are a living, breathing part of all of our lives.

Robert, who records as gurdonark