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Articles
Frank J. Oteri

Command Performance

Whatever your view might be of our nation’s current military endeavors, there’s no debate that some of the highest level ensemble playing occurs in military bands.

Articles
Yotam Haber

Modern Music as a Political Statement

I was amazed to see virtually the entire audience remain for a performance of Luigi Nono’s A floresta é jovem e cheja de vida, which came last on the second half of a 2 and 3/4 hour concert.

Articles
Randy Nordschow

NewMusicBoxOffice: Love is in the Air

It’s not easy to get a date on Valentine’s Day. But who the hell cares, because there are a ton of new music concerts going on to console our eternally bleeding hearts.

Articles
Mark N. Grant

How Good Is Your Ear? (Part 2)

The stronger your ear, the more liberated your musical imagination. That’s how Beethoven could compose after deafness. His ear—outer, and then inner—was spectacular.

Articles
Trevor Hunter

What's So Amazing About Really Deep Thoughts?

Could the aesthetical chasm between composers and audiences be neurological?

Articles
Molly Sheridan

The Friday Informer: The Technology Will Kill Us All

When the horsemen of the Apocalypse come riding in, it looks like they’re going to be mounted on the Internet.

Articles
Randy Nordschow

Outsourcing the Overture

Does the new music scene have some kind of collective control issue?

Articles
Colin Holter

Anyone Got a Corkscrew?

We have Adorno to thank for that great image of new music as messages in a bottle. What he failed to mention was that said SOSes to the world are stopped by unremovable corks.

Articles
David Dunn

Acoustic Ecology and the Experimental Music Tradition

Acoustic Ecology has evolved somewhat consciously from its original intentions but, as importantly, from activities that developed independently, in parallel to, or in reaction against it. Current usage of the term can now be found to describe any or all of these sometimes contradictory positions.

Articles
Frank J. Oteri

If You've Got the Time

Pundits periodically profess that some composers write too much music. Is such a claim valid? And if it is, how much is too much? Is it also possible to not write enough?

Articles
Yotam Haber

Getting Lost in the Music

When listeners get lost in a piece, what can I do to more clearly lead the way?

Articles
Mark N. Grant

How Good Is Your Ear? (Part 1)

Having a good ear is the quintessence of a composer’s gift; but what constitutes a good ear for a composer?

Articles
Trevor Hunter

Evolution, Not Revolution

Have there been any revolutionary leaders in music, rather than evolutionary benchmarks?

Articles
Molly Sheridan

The Friday Informer: Top Ten List of Lists

Lists from London, lists from France. Depressing lists, lists that hate lists, lists for Franz Liszt.

Articles
NewMusicBox Staff

New Music News Wire

Subito Music Corporation signs an exclusive publishing agreement with Judith Lang Zaimont; Nexmap chooses three composers to participate in Sounding Out California CD; five presenters and six ensembles from the East and West Coasts will be recognized with CMA/ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming at the Chamber Music America National Conference; and composer Jennifer Fitzgerald passed away on December 23, 2007, following an extended battle with cancer.

Articles
Randy Nordschow

Finding Meaning Where There Is None

There is some sort of idea transmitted through music, just nothing
specific; meaning is in the ear of the beholder.

Articles
Susan Feder

Everbest: Remembering H. Wiley Hitchcock

Everbest—Anyone who ever received a letter (often handwritten in elegant script) or email from H. Wiley Hitchcock will recognize his favored signoff, borrowed (with attribution) from Virgil Thomson; it could also be the ideal epitaph for this brilliant, elegant, cheerful man, combining as it does the superlative and the constancy of personality.

Articles
Colin Holter

Can I Have the Recipe for Your String Quartets?

I want to take some time this week to investigate what the verb “to compose” is really used for; specifically, I’d like to speculate about how “composing at the computer differs from “composing away from the computer” with only a pencil.

Interviews
Frank J. Oteri

Lois V Vierk: Slideways

Lois V Vierk’s extensive use of slides is a personal musical response to a reality of nature.

Yotam Haber

Passion and Consumption

A few days ago a heated debate broke out between some of the fellows about the nature of art: two fellows were vociferously arguing that the only art that really matters is that which is informed by mass culture: high art and low art are useless misnomers, and the avant-garde is irrelevant if not non-existent. On the other side of the sticky bar table, some of the other fellows pointed out that art is always being created in the shadows of successful art.

Articles
Frank J. Oteri

The Composer vs. The Audience

The holidays have in no way diminished the debate about the relationship between the composer and the audience.

Articles
Roger Rudenstein

Classical Music: Alive and Kicking

I doubt that rejection of modernism is what drove Baby Boomers away from classical music; they weren’t there in the first place. Part of their act of rebellion was to put a minus sign on anything their parents found important and classical music was seen as part of the conformity and stuffiness of the middle class life they rejected.

Articles
Colin Holter

Reindeer Games

My brother and I have developed a ritualistic nightly game entitled “Best Song/Favorite Song,” a trifle of deceptive simplicity in which we take a band whose output we know back to front and each propose our favorite songs and, separately, the songs we feel are the best of the group’s catalogue.

Articles
Scott Johnson

The Arbiters of Doom

The modernist presumption that audiences exert a negative and coercive effect on our artistic options is often an inversion of the truth.

Funders

NewMusicBox receives major support from the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts.

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NewMusicBox is funded in part by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and with support from The Aaron Copland Fund for Music Inc., Alice M. Ditson Fund of Colombia University, and The Amphion Foundation, Inc. Support for New Music USA and its many programs and activities is provided by foundations, corporations, government agencies, and hundreds of individual contributors.

NewMusicBox receives major support from the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts. NewMusicBox is funded in part by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and with support from The Aaron Copland Fund for Music Inc., Alice M. Ditson Fund of Colombia University, and The Amphion Foundation, Inc. Support for New Music USA and its many programs and activities is provided by foundations, corporations, government agencies, and hundreds of individual contributors.