Foundation for Contemporary Arts Announces 2016 Award Recipients
Joan La Barbara is the latest recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’s biennial John Cage Award and sound artist and visual artist Jennie C. Jones has received the annual Robert Rauschenberg Award.
Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head
I have finished the first “student composition” of my life. Now the nine-minute piece goes to the musicians who will be playing it who range from freshman to graduate level and two are sort of on loan from the jazz department. At every lesson I worried aloud about the difficulty of some of the ensemble playing; I didn’t want to be setting anyone up for a terrible experience, myself included.
Improvising With the Instrument, Not Just On It – A Remembrance of Paul Bley (1932-2016)
In addition to being one of the titans of the free jazz movement, Paul Bley, in collaboration with his wife Carol Goss, was a pioneer of the music video. Carol Goss shares the story of how that collaboration began.
Con vibrato ma non troppo: Rethinking Sopranos
Why as professionals do we perpetuate, and why as composers do we imitate, the sound of a soprano section comprised of pre-pubescent boys? Why insist on the misunderstanding that adult female sopranos are able to or should sing strictly senza vibrato in the way children do?
Michael Jackson-Themed Orchestra Piece Wins ASCAP Nissim Prize
Vincent Calianno has been awarded the 36th annual ASCAP Foundation Rudolf Nissim Prize for The Facts and Dreams of the World According to Michael Jackson, a 12-minute work for orchestra. Selected by a panel of conductors from among 170 entries, the Brooklyn-based Calianno will receive a prize of $5,000.
New Music on Vinyl: Everybody Loves It, But It Doesn’t Make Much Sense
After more than a decade of gorging on ones and zeros, the vinyl resurgence should be great for new music, right? Well, it’s complicated…
The Long and Winding Road
I am expected to bring fresh music in every week. I have spent more than twenty years writing to deadlines and I am proud to say I’ve never missed one, but this feels different. I don’t know why. For each lesson, I bring in music.
An Atheist Composer on Choral Music
Have you wanted to compose choral music but have not—or have you ignored the contemporary choral scene altogether—because of its religious association?
Still B.A. After All These Years
I’m staggering, this late December, to the end of my first semester in graduate school, pursuing a master’s degree in composition, but I am thrilled to report that my comrades in the department are just as worn out as I am. This counts as a win because I am 58, and they are younger than my own children.
Enthusiastic, Shy, Quirky and Brilliant: Remembering John Eaton (1935-2015)
When my mother was just a few years out of college, she took a position teaching music at East Stroudsburg High School in Pennsylvania. John Eaton, then 16 or so, was one of her first students. In spite of her own gifts, and a fine music education, nothing–absolutely nothing–prepared her for John Eaton!
Get Vulnerable
I’m hoping that the 2016 New Music Gathering can be a space where we can all shed the need to project individual strength and can take the time out of our shells to ask the questions and voice the concerns we might usually refrain from sharing.
Remembering Composer and MTC Founder John Duffy (1926-2015)
With John Duffy, everything was possible. He radiated an optimism as forthright and clear as it was free of guile and self-importance. Though the limits of observable reality might be challenged, audacity never distracted from core purpose. His optimism happily went about its business. It lived solidly on terra firma. It got things done.
Good Old-Fashioned Human-to-Human Connection on a Very Honest Level
When I heard that Daniel Felsenfeld, Lainie Fefferman, and Matt Marks were creating this conference, I wanted in even though I didn’t really like conferences–they make me think of barriers and give me the heebie jeebies. But take self-aggrandizement and/or alienation away, and you’re left with conversations and ideas being exchanged between people who simply want to create art and people who want to facilitate the making of that art.
NewMusicBox Mix: 2015 Staff Picks
Before we bid farewell to year that was, New Music USA staff members have surveyed the 2015 recordings crowding their desktops (real and virtual) and chosen some of their favorite tracks from the past twelve months for a special NewMusicBox Mix.
Creating Points of Entry Into Opera Through Video
Opera videos provided the “way in” I needed to become a fan, which led me to pursue live opera performances and eventually to compose opera myself. Now I’m looking for ways to help more people find their way in, too.
A Week in Havana
Most concerts of the Festival de Música Contemporánea de la Habana featured Cuban musicians and were heavily populated with music by Cuban composers, but there were visiting performers from Argentina, Canada, Denmark, Korea, Italy, and Spain performing music by composers from their home countries as well as from Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, the Czech Republic, France, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Japan, Poland, Taiwan, Turkey, and Venezuela. And, for the first time in its 28-year history, a delegation of musicians and composers from the United States was invited to participate.
Tempering My Friends Anxiety and Doubt
My first reaction was: “Yes! Hell yes! Let’s do it and let’s kick ass at it!” My second reaction was: “Matt, there is no goddamned way on Earth you could do something as complicated and high-stakes as starting a brand new music conference.” Enter my good friends Anxiety and Doubt. They set up shop and didn’t leave until after this whole thing was finished.
What Are You Trying to Decide in Your Career?
Our own Kevin Clark wants to hear from musicians about big decisions you’re making in your careers.
We Need More (On-Demand) Films of New Operas
Imagine the possible impact of a subscription streaming service that included a substantial library of contemporary operas. How might such a service expand audiences for new opera? Further the artistic development of the field?
Vertical Performance
Most serious instrumentalists don’t like to sing onstage. They may have sung in chorus or solfege class, and may sing in the shower, but the spotlight is something else. Adding to the stress, stage direction may take the singer/instrumentalist away from his or her music stand, requiring that the instrumental parts be memorized.
The Gathering Storm: How We Made a Conference
It began, as so many things do, with a moment of discourse on social media, a Facebook thread that got—as these things tend to do—heated on a topic I cannot recall. I messaged Matt Marks privately—the modern equivalent of repairing to the hotel bar for the sanity of a quiet drink—and said, simply, that we needed an actual space where these things could be talked about
About Those 2016 Grammy Nominations
Media pundits will probably debate whether the latest from Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, or The Weeknd will get the nod as 2016 Album of the Year, but the choice for Best Contemporary Classical Composition might ultimately be more interesting; it certainly seems even more competitive.
He Knew Everything and Everyone--Remembering David Stock (1939-2015)
As soon as David Stock got know you, he began to meditate on how his network could be used to help you—to make connections, to further your creativity, to further the cause of new music, and even to help you make a living. For as brilliant and accomplished as he was, he was a staunch anti-snob and always remembered how it felt to be starting out.
Adams's Become Ocean Inspires Taylor Swift to Make $50K Gift
The New York Times reports that Taylor Swift has made a $50,000 donation to the Seattle Symphony, inspired by their Grammy-winning recording of John Luther Adams’s Become Ocean. Will the “Swift effect” will carry over to a different genre?
