Limited Resources

The episode of Project Runway my girlfriend is currently watching features a recurring issue: a lack of material. Strange as it may seem, it never occurred to me that musicians rarely face this same problem. There is simply no limit to the ephemeral and diffusive nature of ‘notes’.

I have a bootleg of Branford Marsalis in which he states “a long standing jazz axiom: ‘why say something in two notes, when 10,000 will do?’” Fair point, particularly when 10,000 notes are so easy to come by.

There are, of course, limits to composition and musical performance: orchestration, pitch range, duration of performance, etc. Technology, though, is allowing the limits of those factors to be met.

If only music lacked scarcity in one key department: gigs.

Advertisement