The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA), a nonprofit arts organization founded by John Cage and Jasper Johns, has announced that composer Eve Beglarian is the recipient of their third annual Robert Rauschenberg Award which includes an unrestricted cash prize of $35,000.
Few of these works can be experienced in their entirety, but that is partly the point; they act as a corrective to our uniquely modern assumption that—given advances in travel, communications, and media technology—we can know the whole world.
I recently saw a huge banner on the side of one of Tallinn’s major shopping centers promoting an upcoming concert by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir featuring works by Carlo Gesualdo, Salvatore Sciarrino, György Ligeti, J.S. Bach, and a premiere by Helena Tulve. I have a hard time imagining a similar advertisement hanging on the Prudential Center in Boston.
For Daron Hagen, working on an opera is so immersive that his life can be fairly neatly divided into chapters corresponding to each of the operas he has written. Nowadays, even though he is principally concerned with being a father, opera continues to inspire him, in part because he sees parallels between writing opera and parenting.
Another exclusive new music-themed crossword created just for NewMusicBox readers! De-stress from the holiday crush and review the year that was…
It is absolutely reductive to think of music being solely either for the performer or for the audience. This is a both/and situation because we all get something different out of it. We are all there to play our own parts.
Rather than attempting a synthesis, Pamela Z’s music highlights—and perhaps even celebrates—difference. She presents identity as a matter of polyphony, sometimes between irreconcilable parts.
Thomson’s often-complex work is carefully designed and communicates powerfully in live performance without exhausting the audience. We chat with him off stage about how he navigates multiple projects and genres while keeping listeners on the edge of their seats.
Before we close the file on 2014, New Music USA staff members have chosen some of their favorite tracks from the past twelve months for this edition of the NewMusicBox Mix.
Deborah helped many composers and performers through her work as a consultant and at the American Music Center, Concert Artists Guild, and the American Composers Alliance. But she was much more than an administrator. Her librettos included Under the Double Moon, a collaboration with composer Anthony Davis, and Mary Shelley, which she created in partnership with the composer Allan Jaffe.
The whys and hows of romancing your fans and serving your ticket buyers.
In C, Taylor Swift, and Cultural Canonization: A reflection in 53 phrases.
More than 130 music creators were honored during the 2014 ASCAP Foundation Awards, including John Corigliano who received the first-ever ASCAP Foundation Masters Award.
When I was 16, Mark was like the big brother I never had. He was always a little larger than life. I had my first beer with him, my first cigarette. We’d stay up half the night on Fridays and Saturdays listening to Elliott Carter or Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite after having played quartets until we dropped.
In its early days at least, the net served as globalization’s ideological model. That ideology spilled over into the first experiments in net-art and net-music.
The banjo’s timbre cuts to some of the deepest seams of America’s past. To a number of contemporary banjo players and composers, the well of history and associations surrounding the banjo becomes a musical parameter to be bent, subverted, or used to evoke a particular landscape or time.
Does the new music performance belong to the performer, the audience, or both? Both points of view, though conflicting, are necessary to uplift the other party and elevate both the artistic achievement and commercial viability of our community.
Sharpen your pencils, voting Recording Academy members. Nods were given to…
I sometimes wonder if, several decades from now, people will look back on the current era of new music and characterize it in terms not far removed from tourism.
While Silk Road’s music is enjoyable, its goals laudable, and the musicians’ skills impressive, hybridization of this sort is not a perfect model for understanding or addressing the issues of modern-day globalization through music.
Music people, in general, have always seemed to possess a higher level of character and integrity in pursuit of a particular calling. But it seems that now, even in the new music world where we are all essentially in the same boat, so-called professional courtesy is no longer a given.
NewMusicBox Regional Editor Ellen McSweeney has been recognized among the “professionals of the year” in the edition of Musical America 30: Profiles In Courage released today.
When Nick Norton tells people he’s a composer, the conversation usually turns to the music itself. The one question that no one ever seems to ask, however, is “why?”
Paul Dresher has done work in at least three distinct musical streams with equal vigor and equally significant results. But whether he’s creating a fully notated piece of post-minimalist chamber music, a poly-stylistic score for an intense musical theater work, or an idiosyncratic experiment for one-of-a kind instruments of his own design, he’s always operating with the same basic assumptions about his audience.
