Tag: audience development

Not Satisfied

Posted on June 10, 2013 by - Columns

“[T]he composer of what we will, for the moment, designate as “serious,” “advanced,” contemporary music … expends an enormous amount of time and energy … on the creation of a commodity which has little, no, or negative commodity value. The general public is largely unaware of and uninterested … But to assign blame is to imply that this isolation is unnecessary and undesirable. … [T]he composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute, and voluntary withdrawal from this public world … By so doing, the separation between the domains would be defined beyond any possibility of confusion of categories, and the composer would be free to pursue a private life of professional achievement, as opposed to a public life of unprofessional compromise and exhibitionism.”

—Milton Babbitt, “Who Cares If You Listen?”
(originally published in High Fidelity, February 1958, and available online here)

“The contemporary American writer is in no way a part of the social and political scene. He is therefore not muzzled, for no one fears his bite; nor is he called upon to compose. Whatever work he does must proceed from a reckless inner need. The world does not beckon, nor does it grant reward. This is not a boast or a complaint. It is a fact. Serious writing must nowadays be written for the sake of the art. The condition I describe is not extraordinary. Certain scientists, philosophers, historians, and many mathematicians do the same, advancing their causes as they can. One must be satisfied with that.

—William H. Gass, from “A Revised and Expanded Preface”
(written between May 26, 1976 and January 26, 1981) for his book, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories (New Hampshire: Nonpareil, 1981), pp. xviii-xix.

“[E]veryone who is deeply into music has figured out how to download music for free, despite the best efforts of the record business to stop them, and has far, far more music downloaded to their laptops and iPods than they will ever have time to listen to in their entire lives. Gigabytes and gigabytes of meaningless data. These same students invariably report that they have actually listened to all the music they paid for. If a virtual tree falls in a virtual forest and no one opens the file, does it still make a sound?”

—Bob Ostertag, “Why I No Longer Give Away My Music”
(posted at On the Commons, June 6, 2013)

“Perhaps if we dedicate some time to exploring how classical can be listened to just like any other genre of music, we can view it as an art form that’s easier to confront and enjoy. … Your hipster friend might judge you if you’ve never heard of The Decemberists, but I can promise the classical community isn’t so damning.”

—Mary Sydnor, “Classical Covers”
(posted on Drexel University’s online magazine, The Smart Set, June 6, 2013)

Washington D.C.

It was somehow appropriate that the nation’s capital was the meeting place for a group of music creators who hope to create a network that would give them more power.

I was unable to write anything for these pages last Monday since I spent most of the day in Washington, D.C. in a series of meetings with a group of music creators from all over the world. Many of these people had come to the nation’s capital for the General Assembly of CISAC, an International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, which most of the world’s performing rights societies—including the USA’s (ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC)—are members of. This ad-hoc group of music creators met in advance of the “official” CISAC convening essentially to talk about possible common ground between individual music creators worldwide and to look for ways that such a common ground could form the foundation for a viable network. But before I attempt to recount some of the conversations that transpired during the day and to explain a bit more what I believe the goals are of some of the people spearheading this initiative, I want to address the extensive and possibly excessive citations above. I believe these four quotes not only relate to what I witnessed in D.C., but also strike to the heart of what I believe could be a paradigm shift both within the composer community as well as a possible game changer in how we interface with the public at large.

The opening citation herein, by Milton Babbitt from his now infamous 1958 essay (admittedly more infamous for its title, which he did not choose, than for its content which few people who decry it have actually read), came flashing into my mind as I was on a train headed from New York City to the District of Columbia and was attempting to read a book of short stories by William H. Gass. (I was reminded of Gass after reading his introduction to the most recent edition of Robert Coover’s gargantuan McCarthy era parody, The Public Burning. I was actually disappointed that my train journey prevented me from hearing Coover recite some of his prose at a concert of music by Daniel Felsenfeld, who has written extensively for these pages and who had recently set some of Coover’s words to music.) Anyway, I was shocked to discover in Gass’s introduction to his own collection of stories a bleak assessment of the situation of contemporary writers in America that was exactly the same as Babbitt’s view of the role of contemporary composers written a generation earlier. While many readers here might judge the views of both Babbitt and Gass as elitist and disdainful of the general public, I would contend, rather, that both were satisfied with what they perceived as being their role in society, for better or worse, and that nowadays, most composers—at least the most vocal ones, myself included—are not satisfied with such a marginalization of either our own efforts or the efforts of our colleagues.
I’ll go out on a limb here and state that part of what enabled both of them to feel content with their position in the greater society was the belief that there were two kinds of artistic creation—work created for the sake of the art itself and work created for monetary success. In the beginning of the 21st century, there is no clear either/or; everything has become completely blurry from both an aesthetic and an economic standpoint. I would argue that there never were only two “kinds” of music, but now those two larger buckets hold no water. I would also argue that the wall that divided the “two kinds of music” from one another was equally harmful to both sides and that there is no music, no matter how erudite the methods used to formulate it, that cannot be appreciated by a wider audience than it currently has. And aside from the ubiquity of music that is created without the slightest regard to the genre distinctions of earlier eras, the monetization of any kind of music making is still undergoing a massive transitional process. When I used the expression “outside the commercial mainstream” to describe the majority of the music we feature on NewMusicBox, Eddie Schwartz–author of the Pat Benatar’s 1980 blockbuster single “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” president of the Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC), and the prime mover behind a newly formed alliance called Music Creators North America (MCNA)–asked me how much music I thought was commercially viable nowadays.

In an essay I quoted from above, Bob Ostertag, a composer whom I would have clearly placed in the “outside the commercial mainstream” camp once upon a time, explained how he is now forced to charge people for his music just in order to make it available in places where people actually look for music and listen to what they find there. And Mary Sydnor, a 22-year-old contributor to Drexel University’s online magazine and the author of my final citation, opined that the so-called classical music community is actually less elitist than many denizens of pop culture. All of which brings us back to that gathering of music creators in D.C.

DC Music Creators Meeting

Alfons Karabuda (standing on the left side of this photo), President of the European Composer and Songwriter Alliance (ECSA), opens up the meeting of music creators at the House of Sweden in Washington D.C.

Most of the North American attendees I encountered came from, for lack of a better term, the various worlds of “pop” songwriting (country, rock, etc.). But among the Europeans were Martin Q. Larsson, president of the Society of Swedish Composers, a representative organization for composers of “contemporary classical composition,” and Tomislav Saban, secretary general of the Croatian Composers Society (HDS) which organizes the Music Biennale Zagreb. (I initially met Saban, who is also the vice president of the European Composer and Songwriter Alliance, a.k.a. ECSA, during the ISCM’s 2011 World New Music Days which was hosted by the Biennale.) Also present was Lesley Thulani Luthuli, the executive producer for the South African-based Wala Entertainment, who has recently formed the Pan African Composers and Songwriter Alliance (PACSA), a group that will hopefully address the shocking inequities of royalty distribution to African musical creators that I learned about during the IAMIC Conference in Greece last year.

A recurring theme during the talks in D.C. was the need to articulate to the general public the need for music to be disseminated on the basis of fair trade. Some of the people who spoke proposed that music creators should look to the fair trade coffee movement of the past decade as a model for how to proceed. Many coffee drinkers are willing to pay more money for their coffee if they believe that their money will reach the farmers who actually produced the coffee. The creators of the music are like those farmers in that, as Eddie Schwartz put it, “We create the one essential element in an enormous value chain. Creators need to determine fair compensation; it shouldn’t be imposed on us from anyone else.”

Another pressing concern that several attendees spoke about is the need for performing rights organizations (PROs) to be based in the territories where they collect royalties. This is predominantly an issue for Europeans since there is growing momentum for PROs from various EU member states to compete with one another rather than to be the exclusive representative for creators within their own national borders. Opponents of this new business model claim that it will weaken PROs based in smaller countries and as a result will erode the culture of—as well as ultimately hurt the economic livelihood of creators based in—these smaller countries. According to Patrick Ager, secretary general of ECSA, “Exclusive assignment is a necessity of culture in Europe.” Another major issue that was on a lot of people’s minds was the negative impact of direct licensing, specifically the lack of transparency in the negotiation of such licenses. Perhaps no one put it more succinctly than Nashville-based songwriter Rick Carnes, the charismatic president of the Songwriters Guild of America: “If we can’t be a part of the process, then we’re not going to approve the process.” Like a classic labor leader, Carnes pulls no punches. He asserted that “whatever happens to any creator happens to all of us.” Seemingly taking a page from cognitive linguist George Lakoff (author of the provocative Don’t Think of an Elephant), Carnes asserted that the community of music creators needs to come up with its own language rather than argue positions using the frames that other constituencies—whether its technology companies, record labels, publishers, or anyone else—use for them. As he said, “It is important to have arguments based on your principles, not just Google’s principles.”

None of the people I met in D.C. last week were content to create music in a society that doesn’t value it, either aesthetically or economically. We should not be content either.

Two Concerts, Two Audiences

Posted on January 18, 2013 by - Columns

It’s always a good thing to have a trip correspond with some good new music concerts, and my week-long adventure to northern Illinois this past week allowed me to take Ellen McSweeney’s advice and attend two concerts in Chicago. Both events–the Chicago Composers Orchestra concert at the Garfield Park Conservatory and the Third Coast Percussion concert at the University of Chicago–were very successful and demonstrated why new music concerts can be diverse in content, in venue, and in audience to great effect.
Amidst Lush Plantlife
The Chicago Composers Orchestra is a relatively new group in Chicago, having been formed in 2009 by Roosevelt University grads Brian Baxter and Randall West, with a mission for “performance and advocacy of orchestral music by living composers.” The event was entitled “Amidst Lush Plantlife,” reflecting their decision to perform at the Garfield Park Conservatory, a two-acre botanical conservatory with several large rooms filled with many species of trees, ferns, and assorted flora. The entire concert spanned no less than three separate rooms, starting off with Occupy Orchestra by Seattle-based Byron Au Yong. Yong spread the musicians around the enormous Palm Room and allowed the audience to move freely through the space, casually chatting while the performance took place. It was hard to miss how many families were in attendance during this first portion, as there were many small children with their parents eagerly walking up to each performer and listening with open ears.

Once the first work was finished, the audience was shepherded into the Fern Room where Baxter’s Spring Song for strings and percussion was performed; also spatial in nature, the room was the complete opposite of the first–whereas the big room allowed one to walk up to the performers easily, the Fern Room shielded the performers altogether from my vantage point and made for a completely different listening experience. The remainder of the concert was held in a slightly more traditional setting, with the Horticulture Room set up with folding chairs both for the performers and audience. Works by Chris Fisher-Lockhead, Bruce Saylor, and the world premiere of Pos Metaphonos by Lawrence Axelrod (which featured Chicago Symphony bass clarinetist J. Laurie Bloom) filled out the rest of the program.

Three things stood out for me at this event. Obviously the venue is about as non-traditional as you can get–sight-lines are rarely marred by cacti or cycads in other halls–and once you got used to the slight ambient hum and the occasional choir of crickets, acoustically it was actually quite good. The ensemble itself, consisting of Chicago performers primarily in their mid- to late-20s who volunteer their services (ably led by guest conductor Stephen Squires, filling in for music director Matthew Kasper), played every work with an intensity and passion that proved their serious commitment to the music. Finally, the size and makeup of the audience really caught me off guard; here you had a concert of contemporary works for chamber orchestra by not-famous composers and there were over 250 people in attendance on a Wednesday night. There were obviously a good number of other composers and musicians there, but they were outnumbered by families with kids and other community members who seemed to really enjoy themselves. There were several details that showed that CCO was being smart in generating and keeping a good audience, including serving beverages and forgoing a ticket price as well as cultivating a strong relationship with the conservatory.
Third Coast Percussion
Two days later I had the good fortune to attend Third Coast Percussion’s concert in the International House at the University of Chicago. Since their formation in 2005, Third Coast has become one of the most well-known percussion ensembles in the country. The concert, simply titled “Metal,” covered four works written for a wide variety of metal instruments by established composers from across the spectrum of percussion ensemble literature. Utilizing two additional percussionists (Ross Karre and Greg Beyer), Third Coast took the audience through a thoughtful and well-balanced program, from John Cage’s First Construction (in Metal) and David Skidmore’s mind-blowing performance of David Lang’s The Anvil Chorus to James Tenney’s Koan: Having Never Written a Note for Percussion (my favorite performance of the evening) and Philippe Manoury’s massive Métal. Groups like Third Coast demonstrate why the percussion ensemble has become one of the staple instrumentations of contemporary music today.

The venue, compared to the CCO’s conservatory digs, was much more traditional in nature, though both groups utilized the spatial opportunities of their venues well–Third Coast’s performers began on stage and surrounded the audience by the third piece. As much as alternative venues have been celebrated over the past few years, one could not imagine this concert being as effective in a space that wasn’t as quiet and acoustically solid as the International House; the subtle interactions of timbres and harmonics in the Tenney would have been completely lost in a space with more ambient noise. The audience for this concert differed in several ways from the one at the conservatory. In general, they seemed to be relatively older and more formal than at the CCO concert; let’s say the number of bearded academics with horn-rimmed glasses had gone up considerably for this event. That being said, the size of the audience was practically the same and they were equally supportive in their ovations throughout the evening. This was not an event that audience members stormed out of, rather they seemed to either know what they were getting themselves into or were open enough to enjoy whatever was presented to them.

As there has been a fair amount of vitriol recently about the worth of one composer or another from within our own ranks, it was heartening to see two dramatically different and yet completely viable and successful concert events that were both celebrating contemporary concert music…especially in a city with a relatively young and emerging contemporary concert music scene. Both concerts had taken care of business as far as cultivating audiences, promoting their concerts, and making sure that the listeners were both involved and invited into the music-making process. The result of that hard work was an audience that was form-fitted for the occasion and ultimately a successful evening of music for all involved. This is not rocket science, as they say, and the more we focus on what is important and ignore the petty distractions of the here and now, the better.

…When You Can Blog

Posted on October 19, 2012 by - Columns

A few years ago, my student-run new music organization Ethos began an “Overnight Composers” series. We bring composers who are relatively early in their careers to campus for a day. There’s no attendant concert or residency other than a couple of lecture-presentations on their own music and a topic of their choice. After treating them well once the lectures are done and putting them up for the night, we fly them back the next morning. It works out really well, since it increases the number of early- and mid-level composers that my students get to interact with (both through the presentations as well as taking them out to dinner afterwards). For many of our guests it also provides a useful line on their tenure dossiers as well as experience presenting their music to a new music department.

Jennifer Jolley

Jennifer Jolley

This week Jennifer Jolley will be joining us as our first “overnight composer” of the year. An active composer and educator–a recent graduate of the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, she’s just started her first year as the new assistant professor of music composition and theory at Ohio Wesleyan University–Jennifer has garnered quite a following within the new music community, although not for what you would normally expect. While most composers become well-known because of their successes and the accolades that follow, readers of Jennifer’s blog “Why Compose When You Can Blog?” know her because of her failures.

In addition to blog posts on topics such as studying composition, turning 29, explaining why composing in bed is bad for you, taking a lesson with Augusta Read Thomas, and celebrating Cincinnati’s first streetcar, Jennifer has a running series of blog posts (she’s up to #60) entitled “Composer Fail.” Emerging from her suggestion that composers keep their rejection letters from competitions and job applications for scrapbooking purposes, Jennifer decided to post each of her rejections as they came in. Over time she has allowed the series to evolve (eventually adding photos of cats to each one, for instance). “Composer Wins” are posted as well.

I find this interesting and important for a few reasons. First, the fact that Jennifer is already up to sixty “fails” in the two and a half years since she started the series points to the number of competitions for which she’s applying. This is a wonderful demonstration–teaching through example–of the doggedness and stubbornness that many composers need to have in order to establish their reputations and find their place. Second, the simple fact that a composer is brave enough to put their career, with all its nooks and crannies, on public display is notable. Most composers, if they do take care of their public image at all, do their utmost to emphasize only the best parts. While this is perfectly natural–few of us enjoy having a spotlight shone on our foibles–it also has created a slightly “artificially enhanced” quality over a good portion of our community. Finally, one gets the sense–by reading not only the “fail” posts but the entire blog–of who Jennifer is as a person; to be honest, I’m excited to meet her tomorrow partially because I already have a sense of who she is.

This last point is especially important for composers. For as much as we would like to have our music be the true conduit through which others can understand who we are, it is increasingly necessary for living composers to allow musicians and audiences to discover who the person is behind the score. Performers want to be able to not only enjoy a composer’s music but enjoy working with a composer on a personal basis. Whether it is through the use of a personal blog–both Nico Muhly and John Mackey are deeply associated with their online musings–or other means, the decision to allow others to see at least a part of one’s life as a composer is something that we all will have to make in the future.

Point A to Point C

Posted on June 22, 2012 by - Columns

For the past few years, late May and June seem to have always been busy, especially when it comes to new music. This year has been no exception. In addition to last week’s interview with violinist Hilary Hahn about her composition contest, the past few weeks have allowed me to travel to the West Coast and interview five more composers for my book project as well as attend the June in Buffalo festival, live-blog the Bang on a Can Marathon, and even find time to review a three-concert “Bach & Beyond” festival in Fredonia, New York.

All this composer-based and concert-based activity has gotten me thinking about that nebulous time and space between the point where a piece of music has been created and the point where a listener/audience member first experiences that same piece. This fall, thousands of first-year music majors will be introduced to the ubiquitous diagram that attempts to describe the musical process. Sometimes written in a straight line and sometimes in a triangle-shaped closed loop, this diagram starts with the composer, moves to the performer, and ends with the audience. I’ve always thought it was a bit simplistic, and the more I get a grasp on the diverse paths a musical work can travel along this continuum, the more interested I am to explore that no man’s land that exists between creation and experience.

My main intent with this exploration is to try to understand how performers and audiences discover a new work (or a new composer) and ultimately how both parties’ interest in new music might be expanded. To this end, over the next few weeks I’ll be considering the various cogs that make up today’s contemporary music scene; these cogs might include music festivals, concert series, recording labels, media outlets, social networks, publishers, promoters, and the performers themselves. Over time these aspects of our community have grown and become quite potent, if not always well understood.

Last week I attended the Bang on a Can Marathon, which supposedly had an attendance of around 10,000—an impressive number for any concert performance. To witness how the crowd grew and intensified when a well-known individual like Steve Reich came to the stage was to catch a glimmer of what could be possible. At the same time, at least that many people have filed past me within the past hour as I write this column in the Baltimore International Airport (I told you June is busy), and I would be scared to imagine how little of this slice of average America even listens to concert music at all, much less concert music which has been recently composed. There is always work to be done, and hopefully by being curious and questioning some assumptions, some progress might be made.

Personal Filters

Posted on June 1, 2012 by - Columns

Recently, I asked my wife what she thought of a new choral work that a colleague of mine had written for our university’s commencement ceremony a few weeks ago. Since we had both attended the ceremony—me as an enrobed faculty member, she as a staff photographer—I knew that she had heard the same work and performance that I had. She responded that, while she liked the work overall, the unbalanced lighting on the choir caused by their placement in the auditorium made it difficult for her to fully enjoy the performance.

Then last week I had the wonderful opportunity to reunite with two of my good friends and classmates from my time in the USC film scoring program. As with any gathering of composers, once dinner and drinks were finished and the evening wore on, we ended up playing recordings of our recent works for each other. While we all had great fun catching up musically, what really stuck out for me was how these two top-notch composers who worked primarily in film and television interpreted my chamber and large ensemble works as if they were film scores. Their comments on how they could “see” a particular scene or how they could hear certain influences didn’t phase me a bit (since that mindset is very much a natural state with most composers in Hollywood), and, to be honest, it wasn’t long before I was hearing dramatic arcs in my own works that I was unaware had existed.

Both of these episodes were already resonating in my mind as I read Richard Dare’s article “The Awfulness of Classical Music Explained” which was published earlier this week on the Huffington Post. In the article, Dare—the newly minted CEO of the beleaguered Brooklyn Philharmonic—attempts to describe what a typical orchestral concert experience feels like from the viewpoint of a “typical” audience member accompanied by a “guide” affiliated with the orchestra giving the concert. The primary complaints that Dare brings up included the process of buying tickets at the ticket counter, the reverence his guide seems to place on the concert hall itself, his frustration at not being able to express his feelings for the music being performed by clapping, laughing, or shouting during a piece, his interpretation of the audience as deferential and “possibly catatonic,” and his guide’s seeming ignorance of his own confusion as to the concert-going experience.

From these experiences, Dare then extrapolates outward, making broad statements as to what is wrong with the genre of classical music. After looking back at the (supposedly) halcyon days of Beethoven and early 19th-century Vienna, Dare compares our current concert traditions, including the (supposedly) strong emphasis on the conductor as high priest to, well, I should just let his words speak for themselves:

The most common practices in classical musical venues today represent a contrite response to a totalitarian belief system no one in America buys into anymore. To participate obediently is to act as a slave. It is counter to our culture. And it is not, I am certain, what composers would have wanted: A musical North Korea. Who but a bondservant would desire such a ghastly fate? Quickly now: Rise to your feet and applaud. The Dear Leader is coming on stage to conduct. He will guide us, ever so worshipfully through the necrocracy of composers we are obliged to forever adore.

This “once more unto the breach, dear friends” concept of rallying the HuffPo-reading masses, Occupy-style, to demand the removal of our silence-laden shackles and the “de-maestro-ization” of the conductor (classical music’s seemingly obvious analog to the “1%”) is both passionate and timely. Dare’s statements about composers being “real people” who “bleed like the rest of us”, while not exactly new, are well-intended and a breath of fresh air coming from an orchestra administrator. If one squints enough to miss that it was composers such as Wagner and Mahler who were some of the first to impose those evil distraction-free traditions on audiences so the focus might be directed towards the music being performed (which was mentioned in the Wikipedia entry on concert etiquette Dare links to in his piece), his overall zeal for changing the concert-going experience is both visceral and convincing.

The common thread that runs through my earlier anecdotes and Dare’s article is that all three are examples of the effect of filters—namely, a straightforward musical event being filtered through the eyes, ears, and experiences of an individual. There were probably hundreds of people who attended the same concert as Dare and, because of previous concert attendance and their attitude towards the environment, it is quite likely that many would have had a completely opposite reaction.

There has been an explosion of reactions to Dare’s article (which was, of course, one of the points of the article) in the comments section, as well as on Facebook and Twitter, and it is there that one finds the clearest example of these experiential “filters”. What is surprising with the reactions is not that they lean heavily one way or the other, but that there seem to be just as many detractors as there are supporters—for every “Amen” there seems to be a “WTF?” Not only that, but the reactions seem to exist irrespective of background or profession—non-professionals in the article’s comment section fall on both sides, but I’ve also seen examples of performers, composers, and even conductors who have come out strongly both for and against Dare’s article.

I’m sure one could draw comparisons to our current American political climate where our country has been seemingly bifurcated along party lines with neither understanding how the other can have the opposing view on exactly the same person/policy/event/etc. But inasmuch as our own expansive and inclusive artistic community is concerned, this binary “good/bad” knee-jerk reaction is as unwise as it is common.

Concert music has been dealing with its own three-way tug-of-war between those who enjoy music that is experimental, pop-influenced, or traditional in nature for many years now, and many of the arguments are just as surface-based as Dare’s rant against the totalitarian state of the concert hall. After all this time, we still haven’t figured out that there is enough room in our culture for each style, each genre, each musical language to not only stand on its own, but for others to present and interpret the music in new and unique ways. Hopefully, one day, we will realize that we do have our own filters, move on, and enjoy whatever music we wish in the manner of our own choosing.

Repeat Audiences

Posted on May 29, 2012 by - Columns

If you’re reading this column, chances are that you love experimental music. You probably attend or perform on at least a dozen concerts every year and likely own an extensive collection of new music recordings. You viscerally enjoy this repertoire—at least a substantial subset thereof—and want everyone to share the excitement you experience when listening to it. You prefer orchestral or chamber music to pop songs, and while you accept that most people prefer to hear Justin Bieber over Heinrich Biber and the Engelbert Humperdinck of “After the Lovin” to that of Hänsel und Gretel, you simply don’t empathize with the appeal of the more recent of these pairs of artists. Of course, those of us who share this position reside outside society’s mainstream, but I take comfort in knowing that we can populate this remote neighborhood with people who share aesthetic predilections similar to our own.

Often, I find myself marveling at how difficult it can be for practitioners of new music to attract an audience. Since I’ve been in Baltimore, I’ve been at sublime concerts by world-class musicians with a mere handful of fellow listeners. It seems that a moderately successful local band can easily field audiences numbering in the hundreds or thousands, while even the best experimental performers can’t rely on attracting a mere dozen people to hear them while on tour. I often ask composition students to consider starting a band and touring instead of pursuing the path of writing down music, because the DIY option will allow them to reach more interested souls.

There are many factors that serve to limit the potential number of tickets we can sell for concerts of new music, from the comfort that we gain from the familiar to our isolation from the larger artistic community; from the competition of amplified concerts to the silly rituals of the classical concert. We can solve many of these problems, and many of the best contemporary musicians and ensembles revisit the elemental nature of their concert presentations in order to remove the unnecessary accouterments that limit their reach. Even so, it appears that each year experimental music continues to lose ground and to become further marginalized within our society.

One inherent problem with building an audience for new music is the very fact that the listeners want to hear music that is new to them. When we go to concerts by our favorite bands, we generally expect them to repeat the same dozen selections from their catalog over and over again. A local group can fill clubs in a single town several times a year without any changes to their set list; their followers often will take comfort in hearing replicated repertoire each time and will complain about any deviation from this norm. This ability to attract audience through repetition eases the process of filling seats because a limited but dedicated fan base will reliably appear multiple times to hear the same band play the same songs in the same city. Unfortunately, ensembles dedicated to experimental music cannot rely on this sort of repeat business. Fans of the new want to have unique experiences. They will flock in droves to unrepeatable grand spectacles of Xenakis in Central Park, John Luther Adams in the Armory, and Andriessen at the National Gallery, but they won’t go to hear the same repertoire twice. Paradoxically, even though these audiences require one-of-a-kind concert experiences, they are significantly more comfortable buying tickets when they know and trust the performers and composers.

This creates a practical difficulty for our new music organizations. They need to learn new repertoire for each concert or to visit new locales for each performance. Unlike a band that can learn a single set list and bring it to club after club, these ensembles must expend significant resources rehearsing or traveling before each public presentation. When these musicians find themselves in a place that’s new to them, the local denizens often are unaware of the reputation of the artists visiting their town, and can ignore opportunities to attend these concerts. Many promising projects never get off the ground due to their inability to attract enough followers.

While there isn’t a simple solution to this situation, each of us can play a small part in helping new music thrive in our communities. We can follow our local concert listings and can make an effort to attend performances by musicians who are unknown to us, especially when they are presented by organizations that we’ve come to trust. We can support the crowdfunding ventures of our favorite artists. When our area’s musicians tour, we can contact friends in the places they plan to visit who might be interested in hearing the concerts. And, when we hear transcendent music, we might consider attending a repeat performance.