5 Female Composers Among 9 Winners of 2017 BMI Student Composer Awards
For the first time in the BMI Student Composer Awards’ 65 year history, a majority of the winners (5 of the 9) are female composers. In addition, Lara Poe, is the first woman ever to win the William Schuman Prize (awarded since 1992 for most outstanding score) and Sydney Wang, winner of the Carlos Surinach Prize (awarded since 1999 to the youngest winner of the competition), is only the second woman to be so honored.
Preparing for Performance: What I Didn’t Know I Knew
For a week, we geeked out over performances we had attended, technique, our teachers, our “real jobs,” other projects we were starting, and what notation programs we used.
Making Music in Thailand
In Thailand, it is a very exciting time to be a composer because there is a lot of space for development. There have been several influential composers here, but contemporary music is still a relatively new idea.
Speak Now: D.C. Dispatch—Arts in the Time of Trump
While “federal government” is abstract in many parts of the country, here in D.C. it is very real. It is people and lives, flesh and blood. We know people working for the NIH, the NEA, NEH, the Smithsonian, and other government departments. And we certainly know many people in the arts, including many military musicians.
Taking Tweed Seriously–Lessons for the Emerging Opera Composer
“I am becoming a better opera composer” is my brand, to borrow a word from the marketing world. While not my favorite term, The Brand provides a compass, an overarching explanation as to why I make my decisions regarding my work and how I advance plans that will hopefully lead to collaboration.
Follow the Music
When the phone rang four years ago, I was asked if I would be interested in moving to Bangkok, Thailand to teach music theory and composition. I said yes. Even though I did not know precisely where I was going, I had to honor the important rule of my life: follow the music.
A Fine Mess: An Emerging Opera Composer vs. the American New Opera Machine
After college, I laid out a ten-year plan to develop the skills I thought I needed to write opera. Beginning with the voice, I wrote and sang choral music and art song, learning how singers thought and operated (no small feat). Next, I worked my way from solo instrumental pieces to chamber music to full orchestra, settings songs for voice and chamber instrumentation and simulating Puccini arias and duets along the way.
Béla Fleck: Things That Sound Right
Since becoming a professional musician as a teenager in the late 1970s, Béla Fleck has redefined jazz and newgrass (a harmonically and rhythmically progressive off-shoot from bluegrass), collaborated with traditional musicians from India, China, and multiple nations in Africa, and has composed significant repertoire for chamber music ensembles and symphony orchestras. The only common ingredient in all these endeavors is the banjo.
Commemoration Music: Narrating 9/11
In WTC 9/11, Steve Reich follows the repetitions and cyclical structures of minimalist and post-minimalist music, but applies a heavy editorial hand to his sources and their setting to construct an unambiguous emotional and affective narrative. Tim Rutherford-Johnson concludes his examination of memorial music with a piece that creates a sort of minimalist realism rather than an abstract space for contemplation.
Composing and Motherhood
Though my commitment to composing is as strong as ever, I’m starting to understand some of the ways that composers who are mothers intentionally and unintentionally get written out of new music.
Self-Plagiarism and the Evolution of Style
A composer’s style becomes distinctive not only because certain ideas are present in many of their compositions, but because that composer has made compelling artistic choices deliberately and repeatedly across their body of work. Rather than imitating old ideas or forcefully repurposing them into new pieces, we can view a creative lifetime as a chance to create our own musical vocabulary.
Commemoration Music: Working Out What’s Going On
Tim Rutherford-Johnson continues his examination of memorial music with a deep dive into Michael Gordon’s The Sad Park: “a rare portrait of doubt, anger, anguish, and bafflement that stands apart from the calming tone of official memorial style.”
Undisciplined Music
Practitioners of serious music have often neglected to take their physical selves seriously. But in new music today, a focus on the body as performing subject is gaining momentum. Ready or not, Jessica Aszodi digs into The New Discipline.
On Being a "Choral Composer"
I’d urge any other composer contemplating a full-time composing career to ask the same questions I considered: What work do you most enjoy doing? What work of yours have others already recognized as excellent? What medium or mediums stand out as the best fit for the ideas you feel compelled to express in your music?
The Big Man with the Big Sound--Remembering Arthur Blythe (1940-2017)
Big Arthur Blythe, the big man, with the big sound. That’s the way I will always remember him: big sound / big heart / big laughs / big personality.
30 Fellows Selected for Inaugural Blackbird Creative Lab
Thirty early-career musicians have been chosen to receive fellowships to the Blackbird Creative Lab, a newly launched two-week summer training program taking place Ojai, California, this June.
Commemoration Music: Commemorating 9/11
If one were looking for an official “monument” among musical responses to 9/11, one might expect to find it in John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls.
Your Computer is Listening. Are you?
Due to the rate of growth and development of A.I. technology, #resistanceisfutile. Which is to say that computer-composed music is here, and the conversation needs to change.
Du Yun Awarded 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Music
Angel’s Bone by Du Yun has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music.
Bringing a Residency Home
The time at a residency feels sacred, and for that brief period, your life is centered around the pursuit of creativity.
Twenty Seasons of Cutting Edge Concerts
The challenges of producing, organizing, maintaining, and funding the Cutting Edge Concerts are great. However, the rewards are equally great: bringing new music to new audiences; providing a platform for composers to hear their music performed by outstanding musicians, and providing musicians interested in new music the opportunity to work with composers.
Commemoration Music: Memorials and Monuments
While the “memory mania” seen in public art may not have overtaken music, it is clear that musicians have been similarly fascinated with memory and commemoration over the last twenty years or so. What might these works say about how we articulate and understand the difficult emotions associated with traumatic loss?
Speak Now: How Classical Music Got Me Woke
Ashley Jackson’s research and writing have focused on how 20th-century African-American artists and composers navigated a sharply segregated society through their cultural practice. “It is to their artistic bravery that I look,” she says, “when thinking about how to use music and words as my own voice in today’s wave of social and political activism.”
Living a Long-Form Life
We don’t need to imagine that one big performance or one big award will be responsible for making our entire career. Instead, we can ask ourselves what we’ll try to achieve over the course of a creative lifetime.