It’s a hyperreal world, according to composer Noah Creshevsky—and he’s got its sound sampled, cataloged, deconstructed, and remade.

Orchestras are frequently criticized for not playing enough new music. But less attention is focused on the cost of such “adventurous programming,” both from the viewpoint of orchestras renting new scores and the publishers and composers producing them.

The fact that live performance persists in the face of market pressures speaks to a basic human need that even Adam Smith’s invisible hand can’t slap away.

What does it say about a new music performance when priceless equals free?

There still exist archetypal “American Composers” and “European Composers,” an archetypal “American Audience” and “European Audience,” with roots in decades-old artistic movements, historical contexts, and sets of priorities. However effectively pluralism may be taking over the world, these old national differences are still with us in fundamental ways.

Robert Ashley has been composing new kinds of opera exploring a vast range of techniques for over forty years, but the process of developing each Ashley opera is different.

The parallel developments of minimalism and metal during the past 20 years offer some heady crosstalk.

Composers are writing less and less, being fussy, appearing to be artistic cowards. But are they? Haven’t we created an environment where Mozart is cheap and Birtwistle is expensive?

Nearly two years ago, two of music’s most prominent publishing houses each issued four-volume anthologies of American arias a month apart from each other; how is it that two major music publishers arrived at the same concept at more or less the same time?

What is the defining moment in a “successful” composer’s life that could be called a “tipping point”?