We can’t consider what new music will look like in ten years without asking, first, what the world will look like. As I write this, here in the United States, current events are trending towards the bleak. Maybe I check the news too often, but it feels like the last few years have been little else but bleak. Mass shootings continue on, unchecked, and the legacy of our country’s racist history remains deeply entrenched in, well, everything. Here in California, we face another season of fires and drought, and a statewide housing crisis. Worldwide, our climate continues to change and degrade with increasingly deadly consequences.
I’m not a political analyst or a climatologist; I don’t hold a doctorate, just a master’s degree in Music Composition. Far be it from me, then, to forecast what the next ten years will hold. But as I consider the best and worst possible outcomes for our trajectory and the role music might play, anxiety clouds my vision. Trying to make sense of an abstract future, I imagine a steep drop off. A cliff. A black hole.
What role does music play in all of it, now and in the future? And, on a more optimistic note, what about the music being written now? How is it already helping?
In normal times (Have we ever lived in normal times? Has anyone?) I want music that surprises and delights me. I want music that uses notes and rhythm and lyrics and form and texture and timing to challenge and reframe my perspective. I want to leave every concert altered in some alchemical way.
And even in the worst of times—if, say, climate change brings us temperatures better suited to Death Valley than Los Angeles, or if my country halts its slow progress towards equity and equality and instead regresses to the oppressive value systems of the 1950s—I imagine I’d want the same. Music that surprises and delights, still, but with an accurate, biting fierceness. Music that functions as an emotional tool and a rally for action and a safe haven—not all at once, but in different pieces by different artists. Music that is sometimes an escape, other times a mirror. Now and in ten years, I want to hear this music performed live as often as possible. I want to bask in it until it lives in the very marrow of me, reshaping me, readying me for whatever comes next.
This summer, I taught on faculty at Choral Arts Initiative’s Premiere Project Institute, which brings composers together for world premieres and a week of discussing the business and creative practicalities of composing for chorus. In many of the fifteen works premiered there, I found my own anxieties reflected back to me: music as mirror. Patricia Wallinga’s The Danger set government warnings about long-term radiation: instructions for future generations, telling them to avoid permanent nuclear waste sites. David Walters’s Paradise recognized the devastating effects of the Paradise Fire in Northern California, setting a former resident’s account of visiting the aftermath of the fire. Cooper Baldwin’s Libera Me (as embers singe the tide) wove Baldwin’s own words with a traditional Latin Requiem Mass text and excerpts from 2022 IPCC Report on Climate Change. The resulting piece pleads for a better future than the one we’re facing.
Other recurring themes echoed throughout the concert: staggering responses to personal and collective grief, as well as the desire for a reciprocated love. These were just as welcome as the works about climate change. After all, if we linger in despair for too long—or if we listen to nothing but one musical panic attack after another—we’ll burn out, too exhausted and stressed to accomplish much of anything, let alone create more art.
But when daily horrors are unavoidable, a well-crafted piece about anxiety or grief isn’t a source of exhaustion but a voice that whispers or shouts: You’re not alone. In Los Angeles, whenever I wake up to my blinds shaking and windows rattling, I turn to Twitter first and search “earthquake.” I want to validate my experience and make sure I wasn’t the only one who felt the trembling. There’s comfort in the knowledge that we’re collectively moving through the same fears.
In the next ten years, I believe we’ll need this communal recognition more than ever. We’ll need a musical community that offers reassurances and comforts, however small. I think of partnered grief—how a small, strange advantage to grieving with someone else is that you can trade off who is emotionally incapacitated and who is merely numb. One person reheats dinner while the other sobs on the couch. The next day, maybe, you switch roles. It may be naïve of me to think that music can hold space in a similar same way: a container for sorrow. A vessel to hold our despair, so we don’t have to carry all of it at once. But even if music can’t provide this emotional support, a community of musicians can.
My spouse and I recently decided not to have children, in part because of so many unknowns about our shifting climate—what it will look like in ten, twenty, fifty years. But whenever I’m around younger composers, at a conference or on faculty for a festival or guest-teaching at a university, I feel hopeful. I see so many of us searching for meaning and hope and accuracy and evolution. I see so many distinct ways to create our musical safe havens, our pointed critiques, our unclouded mirrors.
In an ideal world, of course, we’ll reverse the effects of climate change in the next ten years. We’ll all agree on basic human rights. We won’t ever have to carve a path through our worst fears in order to make music.
But even in the bleakest possible outcome, I’d still want to feel recognized and known. So much of the music being written today already provides that solace and recognition. I may not have faith in our world’s ability to fix what is broken, but I have faith in artists. I have faith in those who see what’s crumbling and write about it instead of turning away. I have faith in musicians, period. I don’t anticipate that changing any time in the next ten years.
In normal times (Have we ever lived in normal times? Has anyone?) I want music that surprises and delights me. ... I want to leave every concert altered in some alchemical way.
Dale Trumbore
If we linger in despair for too long—or if we listen to nothing but one musical panic attack after another—we’ll burn out, too exhausted and stressed to accomplish much of anything, let alone create more art.
Dale Trumbore
A well-crafted piece about anxiety or grief isn’t a source of exhaustion but a voice that whispers or shouts: You’re not alone.
Dale Trumbore
Whenever I’m around younger composers, at a conference or on faculty for a festival or guest-teaching at a university, I feel hopeful. I see so many of us searching for meaning and hope and accuracy and evolution.
Dale Trumbore
I may not have faith in our world’s ability to fix what is broken, but I have faith in artists. I have faith in those who see what’s crumbling and write about it instead of turning away.