Our own journey with Olly Wilson began in 2014. We were entranced by the music and intrigued by the man, who clearly carried a special spirit. As a “Special COVID-19 Pandemic Release,” 100% of the proceeds from the sale of our recording Olly Wilson: Remixed will be donated to the New Music Solidarity Fund.
Maintain a consistency of creative work and to try not and focus on where it may or may not lead. To compose, practice, and play (albeit on the Web) is an act of defiance.
I parked in the front bus lane and jogged up to the main office, tailing the building service manager, who smiled (I think) from behind his face mask and waved me in. As an instrumental director, I’ve spent plenty of time in my empty school building: quiet mornings before the sunrise for a marching band… Read more »
Nathalie Joachim’s exuberant, forward-looking attitude about music-making and her inspiring comments about how she came to follow her creative path still represent our collective future once we are able to get past the tragedy currently affecting all of our lives.
In the hopes that this can lead us toward a consensus about what might be best practices for how to deal with this extraordinary and unprecedented situation moving forward, we posed a series of seven questions to Alanna Maharajh Stone, Katherine Balch, Andrew Bliss, Fay Victor, Roger Weitz, Kate Nordstrum, and Ashley Bathgate.
Standing in the canyons (sometimes playing my flute), thinking of the people who have lived and who continue to live there, I felt the truth of Willa Cather’s assertion that “it made one feel an obligation to do one’s best.” Two years later, during the second season of the Grand Canyon Music Festival, we headed east out of Grand Canyon National Park, descending down from the Coconino plateau, past the Little Colorado River Gorge, towards the Navajo Nation, on our way to perform for the first time for students in Tuba City.
If you read my “Performing Microtonal Choral Music” articles earlier this year, you may remember that I threatened to post some video of my most recent choral and orchestral piece after its premiere. I am hereby making good on this threat.
Although Viet Cuong’s compositional output began with works for wind ensemble, he has branched out into numerous other mediums including chamber and orchestral music.
The ASCAP Foundation has announced the 20 recipients and 3 honorable mentions of the 2020 Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Awards. The recipients, who receive cash awards, range in age from 17 to 28.
Many of us have feelings about what is true, beautiful, or good in music which match the fervor most people hold only for politics or religion. I know I have on occasion felt viscerally offended by “bad” music. Soberly considered, such reactions make no sense. It’s just sound.
Why did you start writing music? Now, what do you hope to accomplish? This year? This decade? By the end of your life? In response to these questions, you might envision your music’s success according to a variety of measures: The awards, press, and publicity it receives. The size of audiences it attracts. The money… Read more »
Are our venues and arts institutions (whether for profit or non-profit) free to do as they please, or do they bear some level of obligation/duty to the communities in which they reside? If art venues and institutions abandon their vital role within the arts scene/ecosystem, leaving the next wave of creative young nest-less, what will that mean for the arts overall in the next twenty years?
Composer/performer Molly Joyce explains why perpetuating the notion that only a small select few are physically worthy enough excludes most people from the experience of making and ultimately enjoying art.
In recent years, the annual Chamber Music America conference has placed a specific emphasis on equity, diversity, and inclusion in the music sector and has aimed to be a catalyst for positive change within our community. This year’s conference moved the dial still further with a heady mix of provocative talks and diverse approaches to music-making.
We present strategies on how to begin disrupting the normalization of whiteness in the music theory classroom, starting with making it visible. We should think of this disruption as a process rather than a product—antiracist describes actions, not states of being.
For amateur choirs, there is no guarantee that the singers will have the whole-score awareness that is a hallmark of elite ensembles; and for many, there is basically a guarantee that they won’t! So why on earth would anyone try to bring microtonal music into this ecosystem? Well, for one thing, it will help hone everyone’s intonational awareness—which can be sorely needed. But, on its own terms: there are new worlds of emotion to be explored that are unavailable with 12 equal tones alone!
Why would anyone expect a choir to be able to sing microtones? All the literature seems to be on their limitations. Everyone knows that choirs are devastatingly conservative, anyway. They, and their audiences, would surely revolt at the slightest hint of strangeness. But—of course—there are cracks in this theory. I’ve recently had some successes with microtonal pedagogy for choirs.
In 2010, I had more or less stopped making music. To anyone who would listen, I complained about other musicians, arts funding, and how much better the European cultural infrastructure was. Then I began looking for opportunities in walking distance from my home. I didn’t anticipate how far this decision would lead me in realizing Music for Contemplation concerts, Creating Music Together workshops and retreats, On Foot walking projects, and Broken Silence concerts.
Bonnie Jones’s music, which fuses electronic noise and text, emerges in large part from the sounds of her childhood, growing up on a dairy farm. Those sounds made an impression, but Jones’s first artistic interest was in creative writing.
Omar Thomas has been named the recipient of the 2019 William D. Revelli Award for his 2018 composition Come Sunday.
The last music Ruth Anderson heard before she died was Judith Blegen singing Kein Musik ist ja nicht auf erden …, with which Mahler’s Fourth Symphony ends, a song which had been a touchstone for us for many years and which I had been unable to find for weeks among our record collection despite just… Read more »
Western art music is not a universal language. It does some things well, other things not as well, and many things not at all. What biases do we create in our students when we declare Western art music to be mandatory knowledge for anyone pursuing formal music studies?
I did not come to the toy piano deliberately. Instead, while doing research on John Cage, I went down a rather strange rabbit hole, where I stumbled across a wonderful instrument. The toy piano is an avant-garde musician’s dream. It has no musical baggage, no weighty historical performance practice, no standard repertoire. It has nothing to hold you back, to tell you you’re doing it wrong; it exists only in the present and looks to the future.
Chinese-American composer Lei Liang has won the 2020 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for a Boston Modern Orchestra Project commissioned orchestral work titled A Thousand Mountains, a Million Streams, a piece that evokes the threat posed by climate change and the opportunity it offers for redemption.
