Kotebel's Blog

Piano Concerto nominated in the Independent Music Awards

cplaza — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 11:10:19 +0000

I want to share this excellent news with you. Our “Concerto for Piano and Electric Ensemble” has been nominated for Best Instrumental Album in the 12th edition of the Independent Music Awards. This is great news not only for us but for our dear genre in general because ours is the only progressive rock album nominated in this edition.

Here are several related links:

IMA Website

IMA Nominees for Best Instrumental Album

By the way, in the link above you can vote for our album. There is a special Public Award based on votes from the fans so help us (and progressive rock) out by casting your vote!!

Kotebel’s page at the IMA Site

This page features a Q/A with questions prepared by the IMA organization.

As always, we look forward to hearing from you!!!

The “Piano Concerto” is now being manufactured

cplaza — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 21:39:27 +0000

This week we sent the manufacturing order, so the album is on its way! Thanks again to those who supported our pre-order campaign. If all goes smoothly, we should receive he stock and be ready to ship in about two weeks. We will send all our pre-orders before putting the album on general release. We plan to intensify our “live” activity this year in order to promote our new album. So far, we can confirm our participation at the “Worlds End Music Festival” in Austria, in August. More dates will be added so be sure to check our site regularly!

Our new album is finally out!

cplaza — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 19:12:38 +0000

After many months of intense work, the Concerto for Piano and Electric Ensemble is finally completed!! The album will include a bonus DVD with the recording sessions. As I mentioned before, due to the nature of the concerto, we had to do the recordings in a studio that had an appropriate grand acoustic piano. Of course, once you made that decision, it was foolish not to record the drums as well. And then, why not record guitar and bass as well? So one thing led to the other and we decided to record it live in a very nice studio in downtown Madrid. The result was so good, that it deserved a good mastering as well, so we invested much more than was previously anticipated in the production of the album. Things always turn out for the best. We decided to reach to our fans in order to help us finance the manufacturing of the album. I think it is a good way to involve the Kotebel community – it gives a feeling that everyone has been part of the release of the album. We are confident, with your help, that we will be able to manufacture the album in just a few weeks!

New Kotebel Album – Progress to date

cplaza — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 10:46:14 +0000

About a year ago I wrote a post about what we were up to for our next album. Back then, half of the second movement and the first movement of the Piano Concerto did not exist. I finished writing the Concerto during the backend of 2010, and since then a lot of work has been put into fine-tuning arrangements and studying each part (especially the soloist, of course). We have now gone through the more complex passages and hope to be prepared to go into the studio by mid September. The album will feature another beast left over when we selected creatures from the “Book of Imaginary Beings” to make Ouroboros. This one is a very common: The Hippogriff. “The Flight of the Hippogriff” will be presented in two parts, separated by one or two pieces. This work is intended as a contrast to the piano concerto; there is no acoustic piano and is much simpler in its overall conception. Both parts should not take too long to assemble, so we should also have them ready by mid September. After our gig in January we have not scheduled any concerts and still there are no plans for immediate ones. But we are already developing some very interesting alternatives and hope to be in action, live, in 2012. We had to devote exclusively to the preparation of the Concerto if we wanted to have it ready throughout this year.

Based on progress done with our rehearsals by the end of August, I will update the expected recording and release of the “Concerto for Piano and Electric Ensemble”.

Take care,

Carlos

Video of piano piece written/performed by Adriana Plaza

cplaza — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 11:05:49 +0000

Here’s an audiovisual project done recently by Adriana:

My take on illegal downloads and piracy in general.

cplaza — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 21:33:13 +0000

Lately, I have seen a growing tendency, especially from new/young bands, to just post their work and give it for free or, at the most, putting a donation button. Some justify this by saying it is a way to protest against the state of affairs in the music industry. Others say that they are doing music for artistic or personal realization and they don’t do it for the money.

Had I ever formed part of a musical endeavor with some sort of commercial potential, I would not have the moral authority to say what I’m about to say, but luckily it is not the case. In all my years writing classical music, and now through Kotebel for quite some time, the driver has been the same as these younger or novel bands: to create art.

The problem of piracy has to be examined from many angles and I do not attempt to cover them all here. I would like to concentrate on two:

- The intrinsic value of a work of art

- Sustainability of an artistic project

Intrinsic Value:

If we were to add the cost of all the materials and the hours plus all related expenses that Picasso incurred when painting “Garçon à la Pipe – Boy with a Pipe”, and compare it to the selling price it has today ($120 million), what would be the margin of this “commercial” transaction? Would anyone in his right mind be willing to pay millions when the cost, even assuming outrageous hourly rates for Mr. Picasso, would probably not even reach $ 10.000?

If you believe there is value in the work that you have created, why give it away for free?

Sustainability:

People that listen illegally to music don’t seem to be aware of how much it costs to launch an album on the street. If you start to count from the moment you sit down in front of a blank piece of paper, and start adding hours and expenses related to composition, arrangements, rehearsals, recordings, mastering, manufacturing, distribution and promotion (yes, we do all this ourselves in Kotebel) the price tag goes up to several thousand euros. After 10 years, Kotebel is still not able to produce enough to cover its costs. However, in only 1 illegal site alone, the number of downloads of “Ouroboros”, had they paid 5 euros, would have allowed us not only to cover the cost of releasing “Ouroboros”, but also we would now have the resources required to cover the studio expenses for our next album.

Here are classical reasons that people use to justify why they do illegal downloads:

If I like the stuff, I will probably buy the album and recommend it to others

Imagine that you go to the supermarket, go to the winery section, pick up a nice bottle of red wine, and go to the cashier. And you say: “I’m taking this bottle of wine and I’m not going to pay for it but don’t worry because if I like it, I will recommend it to my friends and I will come back for more – and next time I will pay, I promise”. We know what would be the reaction of the cashier, but more than that: what would the others in the cue think? Do you think they would say “Hmm, interesting… he does have a point” or “This moron wants the wine for free and here I am willing to pay for my shopping basket!”.

Why should I pay for something I don’t know if I am going to like?

I could easily go back to the same example as before and argue that we buy many things without knowing beforehand if we are going to like it or not. But in our case, it is even more ridiculous: most sites (certainly in our site you can) have a wide range of long samples so the listener can get a pretty good idea of the type of music that you are going to have. It would be like having in the winery section a small bottle for free, so you can try the wine before you buy it.

The price of CDs and downloads is too high

People tend to apply the same rationale for commercial music – that sells in the order of millions and hundreds of thousands – with Art Music that is sold usually in hundreds or few thousands in the best of cases (yes, some exceptionally reach tens or hundreds of thousands but they represent and insignificant percentage). In order to get some significant revenue from sales, Art Music should be sold three or four times more expensive than commercial music. The arithmetic is simple. Yet, you find that many artists (like Kotebel) sell their music at prices even lower than your average commercial release. Going back to the question of intrinsic value of the work of art, if a fan is not willing to pay 10 euros for a CD (excluding shipping) or 5 euros to download a complete album, then I wonder if it is a fan that we really want to have.

We still need to go a long way in this Copernican shift that the music industry is undergoing, but eventually, whatever new model these changes eventually lead us to, it will, without a doubt, end up finding a way to make sure people pay for what they listen to. And, hopefully, this new model will allow artists to get the major portion of what is paid instead of the ridiculous percentages that artists have been receiving for the last 60 years.

So here you go. My take on piracy. I welcome supporters of illegal downloads to challenge my arguments. And I’m not being cynical; I would really like to know if someone can give me a convincing argument as to why piracy is good for the artist, the listeners, and the industry et al (as some claim).

Piano Phase – Tubular Bells

cplaza — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 16:55:32 +0000

Just uploaded Adriana’s version of a piano phase, using Tubular Bell’s main theme. Check it out:

New album – progress to date

cplaza — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 22:25:13 +0000

Yes, we are working on our next album. I guess this is the period where there is the greatest gap between the “perceived” and real activity level of the band. For the past months I have been working on what will probably be the main piece of the album: a Concerto for Piano and Electric Ensemble. The album will probably be titled like that or “Concerto” for short. But who knows at this stage. “Omphalos” was going to be titled “Clepsydra” and “Ouroboros” was going to be the “Book of Imaginary Beings”… The concert will be structured in four movements. Two of them, the second and third, are based on pieces from a piano work I wrote in the mid 90′s called “Book of Brief Images”. I always felt that these short piano pieces had some ideas that required extensive development and now I found the perfect place for them to grow to their fullest extent. I began with the 3rd Movement – a Scherzo that lasts around 9 minutes. This movement already forms part of our live repertoire and we will play it in Crescendo Festival this summer. Then I went on with the 4th Movement. It is finished (around 14 minutes) and we will start working on it after the summer. I’m sort of half-way through the 2nd movement and not a single note written for the 1st. There’s also some material written that do not form part of the Concert and of course the album will also feature at least one piece written by Cesar. Adriana will be the soloist for the Concerto (both live and in the album). It is quite an ambitious and elaborate project, so it will take some time to complete. As any other piano concerto, it is a technical challenge, demanding from Adriana a fair number of study hours in front of the instrument.

From an aesthetic point of view, the Concerto draws from a number of influences – from the traditional language of the Romantic piano concertos of the 19th Century, to Villa-Lobos or Ginastera, and of course, a gentle amount of rock as well. As with the previous work done in Kotebel, our approach to the integration of these diverse languages is not to mix them in such a way that you can notice its constituent elements, but rather to integrate them seamlessly.

We hope to have the album ready for release next year, but at this stage it’s still too early to make an accurate estimate. We will let you know how work progresses in the upcoming months.

Carlos.

New website and logo

cplaza — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 21:47:56 +0000

I guess there is no better way to start this blog with a reference to our new website and new image. Kotebel has been around now for 10 years and it has gone through many changes. Ouroboros, our first album with the current quintet instrumental configuration, started a new era for the band so we felt that a new image was required. The new website has been designed and developed by Eduardo Plaza. A very prolific person who has somehow managed to become a highly accomplished pianist, musicologist, teacher, web designer, currently engaged on a PhD, Director of the excellent on-line Venezuelan music magazine – Musicaenclave: www.musicaenclave.com (only in Spanish I’m afraid), and the list goes on….From all at Kotebel, our greatest gratitude for this excellent new site.

I think our new site is very functional and allows for easy access to all things of interest to Kotebel fans: music and videos, flexible on-line store, and complete information about our next concerts. In this blog you will find the latest news, so if you want to know what we do and what we’re up to, this is the place to go.

I also want to encourage you to participate in the blog. We want to hear from you. We want to know your opinions, expectations, suggestions, doubts. We will do our best to answer them on a timely basis.

So I guess this is it for now. Look forward to reading all of you.

Carlos.