Comments for New Music USA

Comment on Setting the Scene with Sound: (Re)Scoring Silent Film by Jordan Frank

Jordan Frank — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 23:16:08 +0000

As a member of QWW, I’d like to say it is an honor to be included on this list. We did hear a number of scores before we set out to do ours, and did indeed want to try something different. It was designed to be played live by four musicians (five is even better) and we’ve done it a few times and it’s a heck of a lot of fun. The General is one of our favorite films and a it’s a privilege to get to do anything associated with it at all. We enjoyed the article and thanks again for giving our decidedly different score a chance!

Comment on My Bill Evans Problem–Jaded Visions of Jazz and Race by Andrew S Guthrie

Andrew S Guthrie — Thu, 06 May 2021 07:00:07 +0000

If it weren’t for music and the so-called “cross-over audience” who knows how much worse USA’s perpetual post-slavery damnation would be. In my own life, as a white person, those kind of performative spaces have provided much needed relief from the country’s over-riding racial tension, a circumstance well documented in the history of both jazz and rock and roll.
Thank you for your article and allowing us to respond/comment, because I guess all of us think about this a fair amount. For whatever reasons, as a consumer, I have always leaned towards African-American/Caribbean/African music, not exclusively, but for the most part. But I never felt the need to hide any of those proclivities, in fact I promoted them. But I can add that those interests have been, at times, looked on with suspicion by a certain kind of white person . In those cases I was indeed profiled, most likely as a “liberal”. Don’t call me a liberal, I’m a leftist, LOL. If the music moves me, I’m not going to leave it behind.

Comment on An Atheist Composer on Choral Music by Kenneth

Kenneth — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 15:49:48 +0000

Hello, Mari.
I happened to have just performed “When Thunder Comes” on 4/14 as part of a justice concert. I just came across this article (4/20/2021). I was searching for secular music using “spirit”. I found it engaging and akin to my own experience. I am a gay atheist choral conductor in a collegiate setting. There don’t seem to be many gay atheist choral conductors given the number who also work church choirs. I am very conscious of my use of sacred music in my concerts. I tell students that they do not have to believe in a text to convey it. As many of them will be teachers, I tell them that sacred music has to have a place in their programs as that is a significant part of choral history that cannot be ignored. However, they must choose music based on its musical value rather using it to proselytize. I do get tired of the preponderance of new sacred music at reading sessions and at all-state concerts, etc. Do we really need another Kyrie? I know that text can be nothing more than a vehicle for musical expression.
Thank you for your thoughts in the article.
Ken

Comment on Live Sound Processing and Improvisation by Zachery Litchfield

Zachery Litchfield — Tue, 13 Apr 2021 23:44:27 +0000

Hello my name is Zachery Litchfield,
I absolutely loved this article!
I am relatively new to the frontier of electronic/ computer music but I have authored a simple Super Collider (SC) patch that uses live signal to play a synth. Reading was really exciting.

I was wondering if you have discussed or know of anything that discusses this minor deviation from live processing. Rather than processing or effecting the live sound of an instrument, the live instrument is essentially just feeding SC information. So for instance you could speak in the the computer and your words would be indistinguishable because the computer is playing a synth using the pitch and amplitude of your voice but not actually altering the incoming audio.
This is a pretty finicky point but seems interesting to me! Doing this you can create digital instruments that do some really whacky stuff that is unique to both the patch and the instrument feeding it information. Additionally, this can have a direct correlation to the physicality of the input instrument without actually using any of the sound quality of the instrument other than the attack profile.

Comment on This Is Why People Hate Modern Classical Music by Will

Will — Sun, 11 Apr 2021 20:57:25 +0000

Go listen to

* Brian Ferneyhough,
(can recommend “Brian Ferneyhough – ‘Time and Motion Study II’ (1977)” or
“Brian Ferneyhough: Electric Chair Music”)

* Richard Barrett
(can recommend “Furt-Richard Barrett Paul Obermayer (part 1)”, or
“Richard Barrett – Codex XXIII (world premiere) – wasteLAnd”),

* Sam Hayden
(can recommend “Sam Hayden – Le Retour à la Raison (2004) for percussion and live electronics”)
etc.

Oh… and keep this in mind:
* Brian Ferneyhugh won the 2007 International Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, which included a 200,000 euro cash award.

* Richard Barrett won the Chamber Music category of the 2003 British Composer Awards, etc.

* And Sam Hayden… just see wikipedia “His music has won several prestigious prizes and been performed widely at international music festivals”.

Lovely to see good art, being honoured and supported with prizes and money.

Comment on Looking Out For Each Other with The Real Music Wages Database by Philip R White

Philip R White — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 17:29:21 +0000

Congrats on this Gelsey (and everyone else)! The wage and working conditions issue is one close to my heart and I’m really thrilled to see this. I’d like to add a question to the conversation.

Having worked for several years for various small institutions and these past several years as a designer and performer mostly involved with either small companies or individual artists, there are only a few situations I can point to and say “there was extra money and they chose not to pay people fairly” (looking at you LA Phil). What does occur on every project I’ve been involved with is that the artist/company/institution wants to do as much as possible with whatever they have.

In the case of institutions, it’s often expected by the community. When I was at ISSUE and we went from 300 concerts a year down to 100, artists were very upset. And of course they were! That’s so many fewer performance opportunities (both at Issue and in nyc as a whole at that point). But from an organizational side, that 300 shows a year situation was completely untenable both in terms of worker welfare and budget.

Likewise, time and again I’ve been on projects with individual artists who receive a modest chunk of funding and build out a large project in which it’s expected that everyone involved will work for some reduced rate.

Is the problem then that we need better fundraisers? Are we willing to watch our institutions pay higher salaries to hire experienced professionals in hopes that eventually they’ll be successful and that money will flow to artists in the form of better wages? Are we willing to scale back the performance opportunities and give a better wage to fewer people?

Or is there some other aspect that I’m not seeing? (genuine, non-rhetorical question)

No matter what, this wage transparency effort is crucial to getting anywhere.

Again, this is super cool and I look forward to filling in some info on the database when I finally force myself to do taxes 🙂
–Philip White

Comment on The New Polyphony by S Thompson

S Thompson — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 16:04:55 +0000

Alas too many composers only show off ,they desperately want or need recognition that smacks of ambition to be as famous as rock stars. Considering modern musicians are mostly free of Hanoverian royalty bullies who fancied themselves to be musicians,or ignorant tyrants who trusted sycophants to decide what music the people were allowed to hear.What happened to melody?Will foul language be included in the dumbing down of academy standards?Where are the humble with pure hearts like our feathered brethren who throw back their little heads & make the sweetest music of all?

Comment on Online Score Sales for Self-Published Composers by Gary A. Edwards

Gary A. Edwards — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 22:09:04 +0000

You left out MusicNeo.com I use it to publish my PDF scores and they list it in categories like, solo piano, orchestral, Chamber music, etc.

Comment on Composer Commission Pay in the United States by Loretta Notareschi

Loretta Notareschi — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 19:59:07 +0000

Hi Keane, thanks for your interest in the article. We contemplated different definitions of commission, and here is the one we ended up using: “writing music for a specific musician, other than yourself, or musical ensemble, at their request or upon their agreement, for a scheduled live performance within one or two concert seasons of completion of the piece. A commission may be paid or unpaid. For the purposes of this study, music written “on spec,” meaning the composer has written it without a specific request from or agreement with a specific musician or ensemble, is not included, even if it ends up being performed later.” Since we were also interested in music that people were writing by request, but for no money, we did open up the definition to include unpaid works. The question of prestige is an interesting one. To me, the order of prestige for a work goes: paid commission, unpaid commission, work I wrote without anyone asking for it. Personally, I do all three of these in my career.

Comment on Composer Commission Pay in the United States by Chris Sahar

Chris Sahar — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 17:46:59 +0000

On a cursory glance your study shows what many composers over 35 know too well: Majority of commissions go to the recent doctoral grads and often for groups of 1 – 3 performers. Doctorates act as an insurance that you will get a composer with solid skills and an interesting sound. There is nothing else that offers this as with all the developments in music compositions, the accepted approaches and parameters that determines a music composition have exploded in the past 75 years.

The study reveals how narrow the focus of the commissions are although I suspect there is far more than what the study suggests in the areas seemingly underserved. As the authors wrote, more research is needed (just investigating the paid commission in liturgical music would be fascinating).

Look forward to more studies. I just hope they contradict the apparent ageism and educational bias revealed to date in this article.