The new music community offers us a model of rigorous self-examination, a thorough and ongoing exploration of the processes leading to creative innovation. The tech community favors a skills-based approach to growth. The strategies overlap, even as the applications differ. Here are the top growth strategies of 35 colleagues from the industries of new music and tech.
Fay Victor began her career as a straight-ahead jazz singer but now makes extremely difficult to define music that embraces blues, psychedelic rock, Caribbean popular forms, experimentalism, and even elements of classical music, as well as jazz.
A conversation in Fay Victor’s Brooklyn apartment March 31, 2015—11:00 a.m. Video presentation and photography by Molly Sheridan Transcription by Julia Lu The word jazz has been used to describe music that has now been made for more than a century. (The origins of the word have been heavily debated, but its use to describe… Read more »
Boston’s $1.5 billion arts industry is teeming with life, from the heady and formal to the gritty and DIY. Will Roseliep plunged into the ecosystem and brought back this report.
There may be no greater way to make yourself feel like a bad composer—the worst composer, really—than watching the fluffiest of all fluffy shows in the house of one of the Great American Composers while being paid, essentially, to live there and compose.
Introducing a new way to enjoy the music and interviews NewMusicBox collects every month! You can now sit back and listen to audio-only versions of the profile videos we have created in a single continuous stream, or pick and choose to create your own playlist.
Listening to Charlie Parker’s 1945 recording of “Now’s The Time” changed Sheila Jordan’s life, but hearing her sing “You Are My Sunshine” changed mine.
What if we technologists could be as rigorous about reinventing our creative processes as we are about reinventing software? And what if some of our time-tested best practices could be of use to new music makers, as they pave the way for new explorations of sound and performance?
Whatever Sheila Jordan sings she makes completely her own to the point that the line between composition and interpretation is extremely blurry. Now in her late 80s, Jordan is booked for the rest of the year with performances and masterclasses across the USA, as well in Germany, Austria, Italy, and Japan.
“What are you working on now?” Few—if any—composers are willing to admit when we’re not writing anything. It’s time to acknowledge that in a creative practice, a period of rest can be necessary.
What a jazz singer does with a melody is every bit as compositional as an improvised instrumental solo, and not only when those singers are scat singing. Over the course of the next three weeks, three extraordinary jazz vocalists who come from three very different backgrounds and span three generations—Sheila Jordan, Fay Victor, and Jen Shyu—will tell the story of why they sing, what they sing, and perhaps most importantly, why they sing what they sing.
The possibility for “new music” to find its way into advertising is there, it just needs to be the right sound for the right project.
Los Angeles writer and rocker October Crifasi remembers how the wild gang of Killsonic brought artists into its fold — and then launched them out into the world.
It’s no secret that there’s a student loan crisis in the United States. It’s also no secret that this crisis impacts the music community. With the 2016 elections on the horizon, it’s a good time to speak up about these issues and make sure that they’re on the table for consideration.
Earlier this month, Nouveau Classical Project premiered Vin Calianno’s Sororatorio: a Cuntata, which took as its text the famed, absurdly vulgar 2013 email lashing delivered by a Delta Gamma chapter president. So just how did he end up setting that much anger and profanity to music?
“It’s not your skill level, it’s how much you communicate,” cellist Erik Friedlander advises. “It’s how much you express that the audience really wants to hear. They come to hear you be real.”
Matana Roberts, Joan Tower, and Gabriel Kahane will share stories and music at this free event in New York City.
Julia Wolfe has been awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music for the oratorio Anthracite Fields which premiered on April 26, 2014 in Philadelphia in a performance by the Bang on a Can All-Stars and the Mendelssohn Club Chorus.
Composers Christopher Cerrone and Nina C. Young—along with 29 other artists and scholars—will be provided with a fellowship that includes a stipend, a study or studio, and room and board for a period of six months to two years in Rome.
[UPDATED APRIL 21, 2015] Anthracite Fields by Julia Wolfe has been awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music. The work (which was commissioned through Meet the Composer’s Commissioning Music/USA program and is published by Red Poppy Music/G. Schirmer, Inc. ASCAP) premiered on April 26, 2014 in Philadelphia in a performance by the Bang on a… Read more »
The music community is uniquely equipped with the kind of long-game thinking that it takes to make substantive policy changes. We have more power than we often imagine, even if it takes some time to see results.
Discovery Grants aim to identify, support, and help develop the work of female composers writing for the operatic medium, raising their visibility and promoting awareness of their compositions.
This season, four composers will have a new symphonic work workshopped and read by Berkeley Symphony at the Osher Studio in Berkeley on May 2, 2015 at 3pm (the first public unveiling of the composers’ works in process) and on May 3, 2015 at 7pm (a run-through of the completed pieces).
Unlike composing concert music, in film and advertising a composer is tasked with writing music the audience wants, but sometimes that audience has trouble parsing what it wants.
