Composer Advocacy Journal: On The Road Again
It’s been two weeks since I returned from Aotearoa New Zealand where I was attending the overlapping International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) World New Music Days and Asian Composers League festivals in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and Ōtautahi Christchurch, but I still haven’t been able to completely wrap my brain around everything I experienced during the 12 days I was there.
Empowering Teenagers to Compose: A Guide for Educators
This article is a collection of actionable tips primarily from my own experience as a composer-educator and founder of the You(th) Can Compose! Summer Workshop. These strategies can be adapted to group or private lesson settings and don’t require that educators have extensive background in composition. Though these approaches are geared towards middle and high school students, many of these tips can be adapted to create lessons for students of different age groups.
2022 ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Awards Announced
The ASCAP Foundation has announced the 23 recipients of its 2022 Morton Gould Young Composer Awards as well as 15 additional composers who received honorable mentions.
Different Cities Different Voices - Portland OR
Everywhere you turn, someone is brewing their own beer, bottling their own hot sauce, writing a novel, or building their social justice-driven non-profit from the ground up. The spirit of imaginative resourcefulness that keeps Portland “weird” and alive is exactly the reason the new music scene thrives. The music community is intimate and supportive of one another.
On the Value of Time
Because composers’ processes are diverse and often opaque, potential commissioners sometimes don’t know how to value what we do. This lack of understanding can result in a reluctance to discuss compensation and often justifies gross demands on our time and abilities.
Winners of the 2022 BMI Student Composer Awards Announced
BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.), in collaboration with the BMI Foundation (BMIF) has announced the seven winners and three honorable mentions in the 70th Annual BMI Student Composer Awards during the first in-person ceremony for these awards in three years.
Raven Chacon Wins 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Music
Raven Chacon has been awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Music for Voiceless Mass. 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. The work, which premiered on November 21, 2021 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,… Read more »
Music For Tomorrow’s World
I engage the future not as something that comes later on, that replaces a complete and whole present, but rather that the future is a method of thinking that shows something that is already here.
Different Cities Different Voices - Austin
Austin’s economic and social reality is complex and our art communities are forever adapting to the challenges and opportunities presented by these realities.
Out of the Box: In Defense of Analog Criticism
The prevailing narrative is that social media and digital streaming services have taken over the space that critics once inhabited. But I would like to present a more optimistic concept of the future, which we could build by reframing music criticism’s cultural value.
Musical Meal Prep: Managing Rapid-Fire Deadlines for the Aspiring and Evolving Music Creative
Having worked as a composer, producer, songwriter, and artist throughout the Film/TV, contemporary, video game and commercial music worlds, I have learned that a good creative creates, a great creative finishes. Here are several fundamentals I’ve come to lean on that help me in navigating through music industry deadlines, multiple project balancing, and multi-tasking generally.
Hearing Beyond The Categories of the 64th Annual Grammy Awards
There are many people to celebrate among the recipients of the 64th Annual Grammy Awards, and since several that we care about deeply were excluded from the TV show and, as a result, you might have missed them, we’re shining some light on them here.
Ukraine’s Musical Front
As Western orchestras, choirs, chamber groups and soloists scramble to find music by Ukrainian composers, and record renditions of the Ukrainian anthem, what is happening to the musicians who must live through this nightmare firsthand?
Synthesizing Environmental Sounds
Let’s do a quick exercise: listen to a sound, any sound (a baby crying, a phone ringing), and ask yourself: can I hum it? Trace the movement of the sound with your hand in the air and observe: is it rising and falling in a pattern? The answers to these questions point toward the equipment needed to recreate them.
Different Cities Different Voices - Baltimore
No artist in Baltimore lives here because they’re making a lot of money or getting a lot of commissions or opportunities. These music creators live here because they’re inspired every day. This place is fertile ground for truly original artmaking.
Genres Won't Go Away But They Won't Be The Same
When I think about music 10 years into the future, the one thing that jumps out in my mind most is the perennial question of genre: How we define it and how it’ll change. Will there be any genres in 10 years? What will post-genre and cross-genre and everything in-between look like? Which new genres will emerge and take over the musical landscape?
Then, Now, Tomorrow: Collaboration in Writing Music for Student Players
Contemporary music is still desperately needed in the teaching repertoire for most orchestral instruments. But I have found that EVERY style can be student friendly if it is tested and presented in a way as to welcome the learner into its universe and not alienate them.
Unbound by “Programming”: A Counter-Hegemonic Reimagining of Contemporary Performance
Can we foment a culture in which composers’ utterances are deemed valuable solely on the basis of having been uttered, regardless of hegemonic notions of musical quality?
Out of the Box: Plus C’est La Même Chose
Music is indelibly linked to space and place. It has only been until very recently that the idea of space and place has been limited to the tangible. That shift away from liveness (something that I believe was on its way) is a huge step in the future of new music.
Different Cities Different Voices: New Orleans
Different Cities Different Voices is a new series from NewMusicBox that explores music communities across the US through the voices of local creators and innovators. Discover what is unique about each city’s new music scene through a set of personal essays written by people living and creating there, and hear music from local artists selected… Read more »
Writing Music for Developing Instrumentalists and Singers
Developing instrumentalists and singers need technically and financially accessible works from living composers. Here is a mix of practical and philosophical ideas for how you can help.
Different Cities Different Voices: Chicago
Different Cities Different Voices is a new bi-monthly series from NewMusicBox that explores music communities across the US through the voices of local creators and innovators. Discover what is unique about each city’s new music scene through a set of personal essays written by people living and creating there, and hear music from local artists… Read more »
Choral Singing on the Brink of Delta
Concert cancellations are likely to commence in the coming weeks and we should be concerned for the musicians and the small choral art organizations who support them.
