Should you be interested in contributing your own interpretation of the Traum illustration, contact me at *protected email*. (The music shown in the image is reportedly an excerpt from Ernest Bloch’s Suite hébraÃ¯que, which dates from the early 1950s.) To read the Atlantic article and see (in larger format) the image in question, visit. I made some additional comments at, where the audio is housed. It is named Despite the Downturn: An Answer Album, the title phrase taken from a sentence in McArdle’s article.įor my (written) critique of McArdle’s piece, go to these two links:,. You can flip back and forth through the playlist using the small arrows. Some contributors used the notes as a starting point, while others took the canvas as a picture to be interpreted: Since the purpose of this album is to respond musically to McArdle, I’ll now let the music speak for itself. In a small irony, the illustration used to decorate the article interpolated a detail of a preexisting work that appears to not yet be in the public domain: The article was accompanied by this beautiful illustration by Jeremy Traum. The article, by an editor at the magazine, Megan McArdle, was titled “The Freeloaders.” It purported to assess the impact of file-sharing on the music industry, but it framed the argument in a manner that (in my mind) contributed little to the important ongoing discussion about the nature of copyright in the Internet Age instead, it simplistically equated the “music industry” with the record industry, and pointed an accusatory finger. What they all have in common is that each is a response to - a non-verbal answer to - an article from the May 2010 issue of The Atlantic.

The interface immediately below will stream in sequence a series of tracks that I commissioned from the musicians.

Down with the sickness midi