Bobby Ge - You Have Entered the Public Domain, for violin, drum set, and fixed media [Score Follow]

NOTE: this piece is meant to be enjoyed as an audiovisual composition! The video can be found here: • You Have Entered the P...
Completed March 7, 2024
Written for Aliayta Foon-Dancoes and j clancy
Premiered April 16, 2024 at Taplin Auditorium, Princeton University
No art exists in a vacuum. Everything owes its existence to something earlier, and this cycle of ideas forms the backbone of creativity. The public domain - the body of work free from copyright restriction - is one of the most important fixtures of today’s creative landscape, providing a rich library of source material for artists of any medium.
The Disney Corporation has long had a difficult relationship with the public domain. Most famously, when their copyright on Steamboat Willie was set to expire, Disney aggressively lobbied the US government to pass the Copyright Act of 1976 (derisively called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act by its critics) to dramatically extend copyright term limits for all intellectual property.
The law’s worst effect was to cast the public domain as a villain to be guarded against, a stance that could not have been less prescient. The world was on the cusp of the digital era, a time of unprecedented availability of information, and such a newly protectionist approach to IP would eventually lead to the kinds of headaches artists of all kinds face today - from remixes getting ‘copystruck’ by content monitors to exclusivity restrictions that vary confusingly from country to country.
In 2024, Steamboat Willie finally ran out its copyright limit. Hundreds of thousands of memes sprang up to crassly mock Disney, and this piece - as much as it is a joyous celebration of the public domain - is proudly suffused with that same kind of over-the-top, meme-worthy contempt.
It was an absolute delight to create this piece, and I must also give credit to Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, and John F. Kennedy for providing such wonderful source material to supplement Mickey with.

[@marcsmith7789]

profoundly trippy! Love the imagination and color in this piece. The combination of the sort of "found" material is delightfully chaotic and fun, and all that fun belies what is clearly a very thoughtful and carefully constructed piece.

[@bobbycge]

thanks a ton! yeah, the whole thing is built around the idea of how everyone (whether they realize it or not) is inspired by something that's come before, so i thought to try and make it a tad more explicit here (and a tad more irreverent).

[@pietandersen6120]

How you even imagine some of these sounds is beyond me

[@bobbycge]

somedays i wonder that myself :P

[@thekathal]

goodness those percussion instrument changes seem a bit athletic lmao :P great piece!!!

[@OctopusContrapunctus]

Oh hi there 🐙

[@thekathal]

@@OctopusContrapunctus well hello :3

[@bobbycge]

hahaha that's what i asked my percussionist! we ended up working out a solution where the glockenspiel was right next to them and they could just turn and play the glock/drums with the same sticks/mallets if needed.

[@15tatt]

This is absolutely amazing and such an inspiration!!!! You depicted how a PhD student in composition at Princeton should sound like!!! As a student preparing for his portfolio I am so very grateful of this, and I sincerely wish you the best on your academic and composition journey!

[@bobbycge]

lol thanks a ton! i should say my colleagues here are all wonderful and have very different (though equally impressive) soundworlds! i'd highly recommend checking out the music of christian quinones, if you liked this piece; he's a truly fantastic composer with a much more impressive command of electronics and such. best of luck with your applications - phd apps are such a drag lol

[@15tatt]

@@bobbycge thanks so much for your reply! Just one question, how would you define the musical ‘ism’ of this piece?(like electronic, neoclassicism smth like that)

[@bobbycge]

​@@15tatt hmm i actually have no idea! i guess i'm not especially preoccupied with classifying my own music or trying to fit into existing aesthetics... i just like writing what's exciting to me! i suppose this could maybe fall into some kind of poststructuralist critique of popular entertainment? idk lol

[@15tatt]

​@@bobbycge AAAHA! thats what I figured lmao I definitely appreciate and love this attitude towards composing, thank you so much for answering! Ill take a look on the musics by christian quinones! thanks again!

[@idontwantahandle.]

This is really cool! I'm curious have you ever tried writing anything for harp?

[@bobbycge]

alas nothing for solo harp yet lol! if you enjoyed this, you should check out this piece by tom morrison for harp and electronics - kzbin.info/www/bejne/gJndZWWcbrp7Z9U&ab_channel=ParkerRamsay

[@machida5114]

quite delicious......

[@christopheschiltz9976]

At 6 minutes in, I was starting to feel like the piece could be a bit shorter... Then came this ridiculous (in a good way) ending, and I was like "You know what, nvm, It definitely needed that" 😂 Great piece as always man, love your work! ❤ You are a great inspiration ^^

[@bobbycge]

hahahahaha i am glad! yeah, to be honest, i do think the pacing drags a little bit around the same point - but happy to hear the ending felt earned! the final two minutes or so are probably my favorite part of the piece lol

[@zaqareemalcolm]

I FOUND IT AGAIN AFTER FORGETTING THE NAME AND GETTING LOST IN KZbin ALGO. HELL

[@bobbycge]

@@zaqareemalcolm lol welcome back!

[@OctopusContrapunctus]

Really love it ❤love the well deserved dramatic arch. I love how kind ironic the climax sounds and how it is really a mixture between silly and dramatic love it❤(I use silly as at most care and use always as a highest praise❤)

[@bobbycge]

lol thank you so much! no it definitely is silly, and that was a big part of the point hahaha i think silliness is very underrated in classical music : P

[@OctopusContrapunctus]

@@bobbycge sameeeeeeee I believe that silliness adds so much more drama that people consider. I found that for my taste in classical music it depends so much on the possibility of the composer to Humor themself, not in the hihi haha sense, but most likely that the music has this kind of ecstatic feeling to it

[@johnpcomposer]

Always using these playing techniques in wonderfully musical ways....the 1812 overture and other works and their recombinations are so much fun...this creates an ethereal fantasy kind of world...a kind of surreal musical collage....as if perhaps Schnittke and Ives got gene spliced in a teleportation machine.

[@bobbycge]

thanks a bunch! yeah, i'm really attracted to humor, absurdity, and surrealism, and i thought it'd be fun to try to create something really surprising and wild with this one. glad you enjoyed - love the comparisons to ives and schnittke hahaha.

[@johnpcomposer]

@@bobbycge Well, it takes a lively imagination and alert musical thinking to pull something like this off.

[@_cynth_wave]

yeah okay i guess

[@bobbycge]

lol

[@raphbiss1]

Masterpiece

[@DolceMusicGroupZim]

Amazing composition. Was the drum kit part played live or it was sequenced?

[@bobbycge]

that's all live! jc is a monster performer! (there is one sequenced drum set part around 3:10 though!)