Crowdsourcing Rehearsals
I’m convinced that the majority of conductors believe that simply because a student is in his/her ensemble playing an instrument, or singing, they are “engaged.” More and more, I’m convinced that this just isn’t the case. We stand on a box, with a stick, telling them what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.
Retaking the Stage: What Artists Can Be In Our Society
It’s not as much about attracting new audiences as it is about retaking the stage for what artists can be in our society. Music and performance is an incredibly powerful way to connect people. You can create community and discourse and new ways of understanding each other through pieces of art.
An "Inspired by Midwest Clinic" Playlist Curated By Nicole Chamberlain
Our friend and colleague Nicole Chamberlain agreed to curate a playlist inspired by the upcoming Midwest Clinic with works that she sourced from across the New Music USA platform. She put together this fantastic list featuring tracks from Alex Shapiro, Molly Joyce, Jennifer Jolley, Emily Koh, Alan Theisen, Russ Zokaites, and more!
The Collaborative Studio: A Look into the Process of Producing Non-Classical Music
The goal of being a producer or a teacher isn’t to create carbon copies of yourself or your tastes. Instead, you work harder to help artists or your students achieve (or sometimes to develop) their visions. It’s a more involved and difficult process than it would be to just change everything until you’re satisfied, but the end result is a product that is a true representation of someone other than yourself.
It’s Not What We Do, It’s How We Do It: Evolving the Concert Experience
It’s time that we start thinking more about a pretty important stakeholder in what we do, our audience. Just about everything we do, especially as teachers/conductors, is driven by the end result. In our case, that’s the concert, isn’t it? Here are some things that we have experimented with at the University of Georgia, and before that, at Cornell University.
Composers Collaborate!
Instead of talking about how many hats we wear as a badge of pride, I want to ponder how much we lose when we choose to write, arrange, perform, and produce in our own solitary creative bubble.
The Collaborative Studio: Roles and Expectations
Working in a studio environment has been one of the most beneficial experiences in my musical development, and I want to encourage musicians to take full advantage of the possibilities of a truly collaborative studio environment.
Jeanine Tesori: Holding Center Stage
Every project that Jeanine Tesori has worked on—whether it’s a musical, an opera, incidental music for a play, or a soundtrack for a motion picture or an animated film—has a storyline. She claims she needs one to get started. But the storylines to which she’s been most attracted are about people who society has deemed not worthy of being protagonists which has been a hallmark of the five shows of hers thus far that have been produced on Broadway: Fun Home; Caroline, or Change; Violet; and even Thoroughly Modern Millie and Shrek The Musical.
New Music for Old Film
The continuing popularity of silent film showings with live music means that there is plenty of room for experimentation in composing new scores for old pictures—and that audiences can experience individual silent films with multiple soundtracks as fits the occasion or mood.
Music Can be a Counterbalance to Hard Times
Sometimes music is a counterbalance to tragedy. And in times of personal grief, I also turn to composition. It’s the role of the artist to dream beyond the borders of current circumstance.
Setting the Scene with Sound: (Re)Scoring Silent Film
We all know that the soundtrack changes the way we experience a movie. Buster Keaton’s 1927 comedy “The General” is a popular choice for showings with live accompaniment, and here Kendra Preston Leonard walks us through an illuminating assortment of approaches.
Music and a Sense of Place
A sense of place can be the impetus for a piece, motion can be the catalyst. Sometimes a place can affect the music more indirectly.
Saving The Earth–Artist/Activists for the Environment
It’s obvious that our physical world is in deep trouble. Old and new technologies are out of control—polluting our air, water and soil, poisoning our health, heating up the climate to extreme weather changes, and destroying the ecosystems upon which our lives and all living things depend. What is it that we, ordinary people, can… Read more »
Taking a Cue: Accompanying Early Film
Many cue sheets for silent film show notations where the performer swapped out a suggested piece with one they already knew or owned. Claire Hamack, an accompanist whose scores, photoplay albums, and cue sheets are now online at SFSMA, often made changes—including adding her own original music.
Always In The Moment—Remembering Roy Hargrove (1969-2018)
Roy Hargrove (1969-2018) was always only in the moment, hard and sincerely. In that moment, he meant everything he did; he meant every word he said; he felt everything he felt. But it is hard to go through life in that way when everyone else around him wanted more than that moment.
What the Optics of New Music Say to Black Composers
The absence of music by black composers in concert programming and academic institutions tells them that they are not wanted, no matter how much success they gain. The new music community has not only the responsibility, but also the incentive, to change this.
Toward a Music of the Spheres
It’s August and I can finally turn my head to a collaboration with Polish violinist Kinga Augustyn for a concert in mid November—a piece for solo violin influenced by Bach’s Chaconne in D minor. I’d been blown away by how Bach took this repetitive form and developed it so profoundly. I aspired toward such a depth. Could I do it? And how? The answer that came: Be yourself.
New Music for a New Art Form: Photoplay Music
The advent of the moving picture brought about the development of an enormous amount of new music composed specifically to accompany film. There are hundreds of pieces in the Silent Film Sound and Music Archive to discover and use for accompaniment or analysis, all of it once an influential force on the development of the cinematic score.
Help Me Help You: What Orchestra Managements Need from the New Music Community
There are a great number of interlocking gears in motion behind every orchestral programming decision. Understanding this can help all of us in the new music community be constructive, rather than reactive, advocates for the repertoire we want to hear.
Musical Experiences in Daily Life
Looking at life through a musical lens, I see many correspondences that are perhaps easier to see in a city like New York, where the counterpoint of life is omnipresent.
Bun-Ching Lam: Home is Where You Park Your Suitcase
Born in Macau, educated in Hong Kong and California, and now dividing her time between Paris and Upstate New York, Bun-Ching Lam creates music that is shaped by her multicultural experience as well as her extreme curiosity. But she is skeptical of fashion.
A New Music Halloween Playlist Curated By Vanessa Ague
Our friend and colleague Vanessa Ague agreed to curate a Halloween-themed playlist with works that she sourced from across the New Music USA platform. She found some great tracks!
The Irresistible Soundtrack to Terror
Originally recorded for Counterstream Radio in 2008, Diamanda Galás presents selections from “The Exorcist” (1973), “Squirm” (1976), “The Alligator People” (1959), “The Mechanic” (1972), “Blood of Dracula” (1957), “Sisters” (1973), and also the music of MaryAnne Amacher.
Six Great Film Composers Tell Their Own Stories in Music for Solo Piano
Montage: Great Film Composers and the Piano was a collaboration that was bound to happen one day given my years of living in Los Angeles and working with composers.