MOZART LIVING IN 2016? / How my story character sees life in the 21st century
Few people can argue that musicians, songwriters and other Creatives living in this era of music and artistic proliferation are at the bottom of the food chain supplying the needed creative "food source" for the hungry, corporate giants. The pay scale for the majority of streaming content is, well, a joke - a really bad joke that isn't at all funny. It wasn't always that way in the days of the record album, arena tours, and grandiose stage productions of rock bands' performances.
Enter the computer age and all that dissipates like the hiss of a crash cymbal at the hit of the last chord of the last song of the night. Yes, there are still touring rock bands and grandiose stage productions (for some) because there has to be. Those things are how the artist makes any kind of real money these days.
Digitizing everything (books included) has a way of devaluing the content in the eyes of corporate profiteers, making it an "intangible" property that comes, and just as transparently, goes with not so much as a turn of the page or an admiring of the art or reading of an album cover. And it doesn't help that our government is completely inept, seeing that it stays that way by not standardizing some sort of payment system, a "minimums" scale across the board, like a minimum "wage" per play, as per the medium, but negotiable upwards from there by parties in the free market who want to use the material. Dream on...
I said, "it wasn't always that way" and that's correct, for the time period I mentioned, the Golden Age of rock of the 1960's and 70's. What about the 1770's? How did musicians and composers fare over two hundred years ago?
What was life like then for a creative person? More interestingly, how would they fare now, with our technology and ways of marketing?
How would they integrate into our society and cope with our language, music, technology and our modes of transportation?
How would someone from the 18th century see our culture and creative community today - and do it seamlessly without telling anyone who they were?
And what if that "someone" was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?
That was what I researched and set my sights on for A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC: Mozart / A Variation on a Life. Read the backstory to the book here: http://www.jawilloughby.com/a-little-night-music
Links to the Kindle and paperback are there, as well, if you want to purchase the book.