Into the Academy of the Recent Past
Not long ago I received the following tantalizing notice in my email inbox:
The UMBC Department of Music announces its first annual LIVEWIRE Festival and Symposium (Oct. 28-30, 2010). The theme for 2010 focuses on developments and trends in contemporary music in the first decade of the 21st century. We are soliciting proposals for paper presentations, lecture recitals, and demonstrations related to music making in the first decade of the millennium, including but not limited to uses of technology, performance practice, specific works or composers, trends in any and all musical genres, issues of documentation and dissemination, or issues related to under-represented groups.
Even setting aside for a moment the indisputable fact that UMBC is awesome, this sounds like a very promising event in both breadth and focus. Of particular note is the stipulation that the festival deals explicitly with 21st-century music. My Better Half is putting the finishing touches on a comparative analysis of Schoenberg’s second and Ferneyhough’s fourth quartets; she was considering submitting the paper until she realized that music from the 1990s would actually be too early to qualify for this festival.
To deal only with ten years of music is a very strong limitation—but it makes an equally strong statement about the extent to which very new music is neglected by the scholarly community. I’ve written here before about this imbalance in the areas of theory and musicology; they understand Mozart very well, at this point, but they understand Nono almost not at all. (That said, I read a very cool Nono article in the latest Music Theory Spectrum—props to Jeannie Ma. Guerrero.) Setting the rear boundary of this festival at 2000 throws a welcome spotlight on the newest music available.
It also reminds us how much music has been written in the past ten years, even as the stature of concert music as a feature on the cultural landscape reaches new lows of prestige. There are more composers than ever, more ensembles, more soloists, more concert series, etc. Whether there are also more listeners, however, I don’t know. Middle-class baby-boomers just don’t perceive the patronage of classical music as a sine qua non of upward mobility like their parents did.
At any rate, if you think you might have something to offer to the LIVEWIRE festival—and if you’re reading NewMusicBox, you probably do—please check it out. Tell them NewMusicBox sent you.