Building Curriculum Diversity: Pink Noises
Tara Rodgers chats with Anne Lanzilotti about electronic music, gear, gender, and the ways in which music is a starting point for exploring questions of belonging and nonbelonging, of identity and difference.
History Repeating: Today's Net Neutrality Day of Action
Today is a net neutrality day of action! New Music USA is certainly interested in preserving a free and open internet and has filed a comment with the FCC to this effect. Eddy Ficklin outlines what’s at stake–especially for creative artists–and shows you how to submit a comment of your own.
Mentor, Me—Sustained Musical Mentorship
Kati Agócs was a patient and thorough teacher who guided me like the complete beginner I was but treated me like a professional. I was such a sponge because I was able to see a person I so deeply admired that might one day be me.
Does Music Played in a Metadata Void Actually Make a Sound?
LPs and CDs package music with a wealth of information—liner notes, additional images, studio details, and lists of personnel. For newer digital releases and libraries of files that carry only a handful of metadata fields, their absence suggests that the music can somehow meaningfully exist without such information. Marc Weidenbaum argues that it can’t.
Building Curriculum Diversity: Stereotype Threat
One of Anne Lanzilotti’s favorite things about teaching is that curriculum is alive and therefore must be nourished so that it may change over time. That means constantly reading and learning from colleagues and students about new music and new approaches to sound.
What Do You Think?
How do we critique each other’s work? What is at stake in such a conversation? For every successful endeavor, there are more failures. As I became aware of this contingency, “What do you think?” became an increasingly high-stakes question.
In Support of New Music
Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing case studies that illuminate networks of support for new American music, as presented by a panel of musicologists at the third annual New Music Gathering this past May. The full series is indexed here.
Kristin Norderval: Permanent and Impermanent Sonic Moments
Composer/vocalist Kristin Norderval’s output has been extraordinarily diverse but addressing societal wrongs is perhaps the one common focus that unites decades of work whether she’s improvising vocals and transforming sounds on her laptop alongside other musicians, performing with the viol consort Parthenia in a song cycle she wrote for them, creating electronic scores for dance, building sound installations involving upturned pianos or repurposed trash, or starring in her own evening-length opera about an abduction during the Argentinian junta, The Trials of Patricia Isasa, which premiered last year during the 2016 OPERA America conference in Montreal.
What Is Music's Comic Book Superpower?
In a comic book or graphic novel, there may be little lines that suggest a tiny burst of noise or emblazoned effects—words writ large in blocky colorful type—that announce the intrusion of sonic events. Sometimes there are even actual musical notes. This week, Marc Weidenbaum explores what the reader “hears” off the page.
Is the Printed Circuit Board a Form of Musical Notation?
Is the printed circuit board a form of musical notation? And even if it isn’t, what can one glean from all those diodes, the cryptic copper lines, the tiny landscapes of circuitry?
Future of Publishing and Music Education Debated plus Awards Announced at MPA Annual Meeting
The annual get together of members of the Music Publishers Association of the United States at the Redbury Hotel in New York City combined a luncheon, legal and copyright updates, lively panel discussions, and an award ceremony, and concluded with a cocktail hour.
New Music USA Announces Nine New Additions to the Impact Fund Cohort
The Impact Fund cohort is a group of 33 New York City-based ensembles, presenters, and venues tackling challenges facing the city’s new music community today, creating a vibrant public identity for the sector, building connections and collaborations, and finding innovative solutions to the need for increased performance and rehearsal space.
Composer Advocacy Notebook: Staying Focused on Next
Classical:NEXT has the potential to be the most viable international gathering place for open-minded music-focused people, despite its name.
Top 10 Things to Know About Social Media Marketing
Social media can feel like a time drain for already busy musicians, but it will only become more important in the coming years to have your own following of supporters that you can communicate with directly. So get started or fine tune your efforts right now.
Audio or It Didn’t Happen
Sometimes Marc Weidenbaum records sound: by writing about it. It’s not so much notating it as noting it, unpacking it, coming to understand how it works by investigating how it works.
So You Want To Host A Composition Competition
We all want to serve the act of making music, but Chris Sivak sometimes wonders if an organization might not be aware of how their competition guidelines inhibit what they’re setting out to do.
Sky Macklay: Why I Love Weird Contemporary Music
Sky Macklay is a highly conceptual composer who typically gets a flash of inspiration for a concept before she writes a single note. Sometimes it’s politically charged, like her Black Lives Matter-inspired choral work Sing Their Names or her provocative chamber opera whose three characters are two spermatozoa and a uterus. But other times it can be an investigation of a purely musical process–like a duo that’s simultaneously fast and slow or a relentless chain of cadences.
The Man With Qualities: Remembering My Friend, Daniel Brewbaker (1951-2017)
To say that Daniel Brewbaker had achieved a certain kind of legendary status in my mind before we even met is no exaggeration. Now, after his untimely death, while it is still too fresh for me to contemplate, I’m trying to remember everything I can about our friendship.
Experiencing Influences
Living in Thailand offers me a simpler way of life than I had in America, and this simplicity has helped my composing and imagination grow into the spaces that used to be exhausted keeping up with a fast-paced life.
In the Name of “Research”
We wanted to use sexuality as the “in”: a topic that might intrigue a wider audience, maybe even get someone to attend their first opera. Getting people in the door is key.
The Big, and Ever-Present, “What’s Next?”
In a motion that has been well practiced during the last week, I reach for the interior jacket pocket that holds my business cards. I’m pleased to find only one remaining.
Music at the Root of Language
Because I am in a different culture, I am learning just as much information as I am teaching.
Candy Floss and Merry-Go-Rounds: Female Composers, Gendered Language, and Emotion
Problematic gender messaging—in academia, the media, and the culture at large—can toxify the soil in which young musicians hope to grow their careers. Too many female composers drop out as a result. For the health, longevity, and diversity of the art form, we must do better.
