Sam Brukhman, Founder and Artistic Director of Verdigris Ensemble, Discusses Choral Music on the Blockchain and the Crypto-Future of Classical Music.

On Saturday, May 8, the world’s first piece of programmable classical music “Betty’s Notebook” by the Dallas, Texas choral ensemble Verdigris Ensemble went to auction at Async Art and shattered expectations of $150,000, bringing in over $375,000 in total sales for Verdigris Ensemble and breaking the Async Art monetary record for single NFT sale. Sam Brukhman, Founder and Artistic Director of Verdigris Ensemble, talks to Classical Post about “Betty’s Notebook” and the crypto-future of classical music.

Colleen Kennedy: Before we get into the technical aspects of “Betty’s Notebook,” can you tell us about the choral work itself?

Sam Brukhman: In 1937, a teenaged girl living in Florida, Betty Klenck believed that she heard Amelia Earhart’s distress signals while she was listening to her shortwave radio. She transcribed what she heard in a notebook with her doodles of glamor models and other notes. No one believed her at the time, but she held firm to her beliefs. We commissioned “Betty’s Notebook,” a 20-minute-long choral piece by Texas composer Nicholas Reeves in 2018, and it premiered in February 2019 in several Dallas venues. Verdigris Ensemble recorded “Betty’s Notebook” with 16 choir members under strict social distancing guidelines at Luminous Sound in North Dallas several months ago, but it’s been an idea I’ve been planning for over three years.

CK: Sam, I think many of us are still novices when it comes to the world of cryptocurrency, non-fungible tokens, and the like. And it may be even more novel of a concept when we think of this in conjunction with classical music. Can you begin with some of the basics?  

SB: First, “Betty's Notebook” is a non-fungible token (NFT). We basically created an MP3 file and it’s imbued with an algorithmic code on the Ethereum (a type of cryptocurrency) blockchain, and therefore it becomes a non-fungible token, the only one of its kind.

Unlike Google Images where you can copy and paste any image and then reproduce it 10 million times, with blockchain you no longer can do that. When an artwork is imbued with blockchain technology, it says, this piece has X-number of iterations. And that's it. And the scarcity aspect is what makes what makes artwork really attractive to other people, because all of a sudden it is a collectible item, not unlike rare baseball cards, Pokémon cards, U.S. pennies that have certain accidental imprints, and so one. That is why it's so attractive, because you can always prove ownership, provenance, and scarcity.

In the case of “Betty's Notebook,” we have five non-fungible tokens that we have created. Actually, it’s more like 2018 non-fungible tokens when we consider the variations and the unique blank recordings, too. If you go online, you can hear the master track; within that master track, there are multiple stems and the stems comprise their parts that make up the whole of the piece. “Betty’s Notebook” is the first classical music on the blockchain. Our choir Verdigris Ensemble is on the cutting edge of innovation of blockchain technology and programmability.

CK: What do you mean by programmability?

SB: There are four different musical stems and within every stem there are three variants, different sonic effects at play. And those three variants slightly change the music in one way or another.

In “The Choir” stem, you can choose whether the choir sounds like they're singing in a studio, in a concert hall, or where it's directional sound with music in your left and some on the right.

“Betty’s Voice” is the narration of the piece and the owner of that stem can control which perspectives the listener gets to hear. It may be Betty Klenck’s interpretation of what she heard on the radio in 1937, the supposed lost transcripts of Amelia Earhart’s distress calls, or the mindset of Earhart’s navigator Fred Noonan.

In essence, the owner of the stem “Betty’s Voice” essentially gets to change the trajectory of where the piece goes and how it plays. The composer Nicholas Reeves actually took a spectral analysis of Betty's voice, and then isolated certain pitches and overtones from her voice and put it back into the choir.  It's very symbolic because from the moment that she heard it as a 15-year-old girl, Betty Klenck spent the next 60 years trying to convince researchers, scientists, museums, but was never believed.

The stem “Betty’s Choir” is like her voice is actually singing with the choir, and gives the overall character of the piece. The owner of “Betty’s Choir” can toggle between three different emotional resonances: reminiscence, distress, or cry. If you listen to “cry,” there are sirens in the background that if you listen closely, you'll be able to hear so it's these like little nuggets of gold creating a rich sonicscape.

The final stem “Betty’s Radio” are three different jazz compositions, also by Reeves, that sound like music of that era that teenaged Betty may have been listening to before Earhart’s distress signals came through. 

CK: At some point, does “Betty’s Notebook” become a fixed, unchanging piece of music? Or can the owners continue to change their stems?

SB: It’s an ever-evolving piece of art. That’s the beauty of it, it doesn’t have to stay in one place.  So, in essence, what we're doing in one sense with the audiences, we're literally putting them in front of a shortwave radio, the way that Betty Klenck was, and we're turning a tuning knob to try to hear Amelia Earhart's voice but it's constantly obstructed by jazz standards, Betty’s choir, and all these different sounds. Listeners become detectives because through the modulation of different stems, they get to uncover new parts of the story that give a holistic picture of what actually happened that day. It’s a community of people that get to access and change this all the time.

CK: Can you tell more about the “Master Track” for “Betty’s Notebook”?

SB: The owner of the “Master Track,” receives the NFT, where you can experience the artwork, but you cannot change it. In addition to that, actually creating a physical radio. The Master Track owner will receive a vintage 1930s radio that will have a screen and speakers to reflect the latest state of “Betty's Notebook.” The Master Track owner will be able to turn on the radio and hear this piece the way that Betty Klenck was able to 1937, getting closer to the experiences of Betty did during that time.

CK: Can you explain how the blank recordings—the platinum, gold, and silver records—work? 

SB: If you purchase and own a blank recording, you have the ability to record the piece in its latest state, its latest iteration. You take a snapshot of the audio and the visual state, and also you get us snapshot who the current master track owner and who the stem owners are. It’s like the naming rights at many non-profits and cultural institutions. The Master Track owner gets their name recorded on the track. Now, one thing that I haven't mentioned to you is that the music changes, but also the image changes as well: the planes change, the face changes, the words change, the dial changes, and all this sort of stuff. So this, every single image is tethered. The images are based on the drawings in Betty’s notebook, animated by Bryan Brinkman, a well-known artist who has worked for Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show. We sold out of 3 platinum and 10 gold records early on, and there were 2000 silver records; about half of those are now sold out.

CK: Why is the sale of Betty’s Notebook so important?

SB: Well, choral music doesn’t tend to be very profitable, unfortunately, for the most part with few exceptions. But this isn't even an album. This is just one 20-minute song. This may be the most expensive piece of choral music sold ever.

Metapurse, an NFT production studio and largest NFT fund in the world, purchased ¾ of the stems and the “Master Track” at Async’s auction for over $215,000. Metapurse also purchased Beeple’s NFT artwork, and they invested in “Betty’s Notebook” and Verdigris Ensemble. It means so much that they found the value—and not just monetary—in this art.

This sale is also revolutionary because for the first time, we see the ability of choral music to permeate mainstream culture. We had a we had a listening party for blockchain owners before it went to auction, and it was amazing to me how many people on the blockchain who admitted that they don't go to classical concerts were really into “Betty’s Notebook.” We were able to create a bridge to the world of classical music through this technology, the artwork, and the entire experience. “Betty’s Notebook”  is a complex piece of music; it’s not necessarily something that you would bob your head to in the car. Choral music is music that you actually have to invest time in, that's the only way to listen to it. But in spite of that, people who admit that they aren’t as familiar with classical music stated that they really loved it.

While it’s amazing that “Betty’s Notebook” broke records, the price tag is not so much important to us as much as the proof that choral music is a vital medium that can be appreciated as a strong purveyor of the human experience. And this presents a great opportunity to diversify our funding, giving us capital to reinvest into “Betty's Notebook.”

Music is becoming more like visual art and visual art is becoming more like music.  Visual artists can sell originals and then they can sell prints. What this particular release does is it allows musicians to sell their original (not the intellectual property) and selling the limited-edition token on the blockchain. From that perspective, it is an entirely new asset class to musicians. Unlike relying on distribution, streaming, or live performances, this is the first time where musicians can actually make a profit simply from the recording. Because of the blockchain and projects like this, they're getting a larger distribution as a result. And, I think that's here to stay.

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