In a creative project, the quest for quality development and preparation eventually meets the question of when exactly to pull the trigger. Danielle Schwob shares her experiences navigating that challenging line.
A survey course can easily convey the impression that “great” music is a finite resource generated by a handful of genius composers. When students become researchers, however, the picture changes.
Why are we doing this? This is one of the toughest and most deceptively simple artistic questions we face, and one easy to run from when planning a new project. Dan Temkin encourages us to take a harder look.
We can’t quite believe it, but NewMusicBox turns 20 years old today! Tim Rutherford-Johnson is helping us kick-off our celebrations with a special feature looking at how things have changed—and how they haven’t—since 1999.
It appears from where I’m sitting (which is often in airplanes) that the world bubbles and froths with swirling, ever-shifting configurations of populations, each grappling with short and long-term political, social, and environmental issues. How can music, and the arts, be helpful? How can it, and we, connect with these populations in all of their individual and uniquely differing diversity?
Having amazing female mentors and role models was and still is crucial to my growth as an artist. Meeting these women has significantly altered my perspective on my own reality: what is possible for me and where I see myself in the future. Without them, I wouldn’t be anything like who I am today.
Pianist Adam Tendler spent more than a decade researching the life and work of Robert Palmer and made an album of his music “when no one asked for it. But in my mind, I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t imagine being the only one who knew what this all sounded like.”
From the moment composer and bon vivant Randy Nordschow started talking to NewMusicBox’s then associate editor Amanda MacBlane and I, more a cantankerous conversation we would have with someone in our new music community than a job interview, she and I instantly knew that he was the right fit for our team. Soon after Randy was hired and started working alongside us, he seemed to disagree with just about everything I said or wrote. But that only convinced me further that he was the perfect fit for NewMusicBox.
This year’s Classical:NEXT opening concert, Hear It New!, highlights the breadth of National Sawdust’s work with composers, performers, filmmakers and designers, demonstrating the potential for true collaboration to create boundary-pushing new music which is relevant to our society.
As she explored different worlds of music, Danielle Ferrari found herself becoming more and more fascinated by soundtracks—how music has the power to transform stories and make characters feel larger than life. Her recent work on her first documentary project ended up completely changing the way she thinks about composition.
There is value in attending a graduate program in composition, but it is not a panacea for career advancement and future job security. It is wise to consider what one wants and realistically what a composition doctorate can offer before assuming that it is the only path forward.
p r i s m, an opera by Ellen Reid, has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music. The annually awarded $15,000 prize is for a distinguished musical composition by an American that has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the previous year.
After raising my glass to the visitors at the welcome reception, I’ll already be looking forward to the first sounds of our opening concert. You can sense the hunger of the hundreds of art music people, and it’s a clear reminder that there remains no substitute for people meeting each other in person.
Why are the seventy northeastern Ohio high-schoolers in this room so psyched to be playing music nobody’s ever played before? The short answer: because of Arlene and Larry Dunn, whose most recent gift to NOYO has endowed its composer-in-residence program.
Creative artists come from different backgrounds with varying life experiences that contribute to our own unique skill sets. Rather than competing against each other, we can utilize our individual knowledge to work together and create immensely beautiful things. Life’s much more fun when you work with others!
What kind of music do you write? Composers get this question all the time, and the answer can often be quite complicated. However, the language that they ultimately use to describe their work is incredibly interesting and should not be ignored.
I’m sitting on a train en route to the Czech Republic just after treading numerous, long-haul carbon footprints on musical discovery trips between my Berlin home and Miami, New York City, Cape Town, and Johannesburg. Not unusual in my life since starting work on Classical:NEXT, an annual international art music professionals’ gathering, and these travels reinforce for me the importance of cross-cultural pollination.
ASCAP Foundation President Paul Williams today announced the recipients of the 2019 ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Awards.
Danielle Ferrari was a very lost graphic design major when she was accepted into the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s groundbreaking Technology and Applied Composition program. But she found an educational gold mine that allowed her to learn everything she needed and more to be happy as a music creator.
Our recent talk with composer-trumpeter-raconteur-poet-community activist-force of nature Hannibal Lokumbe was a 45-minute roller coaster ride that was part testimonial, part reminiscence, part philosophical manifesto, and part performance art, but all pure emotion. Many questions were left unanswered and others just led to other questions for us, some of which we probably will never be able to answer.
Not only do many composers of new music have trouble finding an audience for their music, they–unlike writers and detectives–are rarely portrayed in novels. One notable exception is the 2014 novel Orfeo by Richard Powers, whose protagonist is a contemporary composer who inadvertently demonstrates how avant-garde music can reach “hundreds of thousands of listeners.”
People who want to attend artistic events exist in *all* kinds of bodies and have all kinds of needs. Wrapping up her four-part Introductory Course to Improving Autistic Accessibility in Music, Chrysanthe Tan shares pro-tips, concrete ways to take positive action, and sample scripts for a variety of music-related scenarios.
Rebecca Lentjes explores communication and metaphor in Robert Ashley’s opera “Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)” and how the work arrives at big ideas through a focus on particular microcosms of American life.
This week, Chrysanthe Tan opens up her “Autistic Accessibility in Music” series of columns to address reader-submitted questions, covering topics like sensory-friendly rooms, classroom techniques, wheelchair accessibility, stimming, and more!
