Welcome to NewMusicBox 2.0

Welcome to NewMusicBox 2.0

For the past year, we’ve been recreating NewMusicBox from the bottom to the top, making it more intuitive and easier to navigate and giving it a structure that will allow us to update information everywhere on the site more frequently: weekly, daily, hourly! So forget about sleeping…

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.

So, what’s going on here, you might find yourself asking at this point. What’s all this COVER, MATTER, RADAR and CHATTER? What happened to “In The First Person”? What happened to “Hymn & Fuguing Tune”? What did Hymn & Fuguing Tune mean anyway?

For the past year, we’ve been recreating NewMusicBox from the bottom to the top, making it more intuitive and easier to navigate and giving it a structure that will allow us to update information everywhere on the site more frequently: weekly, daily, hourly! So forget about sleeping…

In the section called COVER, we’ll be “covering” (pun intended) key figures and issues in new American music, much as we had done in the past with our In The First Person conversations but taking fuller advantage of our multi-media resources to include concert and rehearsal footage, where possible, and other perspectives, to give greater dimensionality to what we’re covering than just talking heads. There will be a new one of these every month and it will be prominently featured on our cover, get it?

MATTER will contain all kinds of text-based pieces that in the past had populated many different sections of NewMusicBox, the kind of stuff that non-virtual magazines still call printed matter. We will be featuring in-depth analysis articles, along the lines of our one-time “In The Third Person” HyperHistories, as well as our more opinion-oriented Views columns, practical advice ToolBox columns, and the book excerpt and interview feature, InPrint. New material will be added to Matter on a weekly basis, so you’ll have to keep coming back if you want to stay current.

In fact, if you really want to stay current, you’ll have to come back daily to keep up with our new RADAR section which will offer insider reports about new music goings-on all over the country. With this new section, we really hope to fulfill our promise to build and sustain a national community for new music. Also, every day we’ll be featuring a snippet from a recording of new music that’s come to our attention.

What you’re wandering around in right now is CHATTER, which in old NewMusicBox speak is somewhere north of “In The Second Person” and east of “LeadSheet.” It’s somewhat akin to a blog, but hopefully not as self-indulgent, and not quite an unmoderated Forum—we’ll gladly print your comments if they are civil and relevant but the anonymous off-topic rants have worn out their welcome. CHATTER will give us an opportunity to share our thoughts with each other as they happen and promises to be lively and full of debate.

So, if we were a piece of software we’d be saying “Welcome to NewMusicBox 2.0.” We hope you’ll find our new format as inviting and as intriguing as we do. Come back often and tell us what you think!