Category: Articles

Different Cities Different Voices – Boston

Landscape of downtown Boston

For our latest edition of Different Cities Different Voices, a series from NewMusicBox that explores music communities across the US through the voices of local creators and innovators, we are putting the spotlight on Boston. The series is meant to spark conversation and appreciation for those working to support new music in the US, so please continue the conversation online about who else should be spotlighted in each city and tag @NewMusicBox.

Ashleigh Gordon surrounded by trees.

Ashleigh Gordon (photo by Daniel Callahan)

Ashleigh Gordon

I came to Boston in 2006, doe-eyed, impressionable, and excited to start my Masters in Viola at the New England Conservatory. While I was initially attracted to the city’s quaint charm, its throughline to key people, places, and moments in history have kept me here so long. There’s no shortage of museums to get lost in, stories to recount, and histories to explore and draw inspiration from. Plenty to feed my curiosity (which is a happy coincidence as it also feeds my creativity as a performer and artistic director).

Boston also introduced me to my good friend, NEC classmate, and composer/social justice artist Anthony R. Green. As two Black, twenty-somethings interested in new music/chamber music — and who just so happened to be alphabetical neighbors come graduation time — our paths were destined to cross. With an abundance of youthful energy, collective passion, and mutual interest in exploring culture and history, we created Castle of our Skins, a concert and education series dedicated to celebrating Black artistry. A decade later, I still get to feed my curiosity and explore culture as the organization’s Artistic/Executive Director and violist.

This Small Town-Big City has more arts and culture nonprofits per capita than New York City. More than 1,500 orgs ranging from the niche and widely varied to storied and well endowed. There’s seemingly a group for just about anything and an audience to follow it. While saturated to the point of being overcrowded (especially as it relates to dollars…), Boston has a way of making room for new ideas and voices, something Anthony and I were fortunate for ten years ago when we had an idea. You can hear one of those new ideas and up-and-coming voices below.

Like in any long-term relationship, Boston and I have had plenty of “love-to-hate” you moments over the nearly two decades of knowing each other! But Boston came through to support its creative workers over these pandemic years and continues to do so. While an arduous time filled with great uncertainty and responsibility as a non-profit leader, it also proved to be a creativity-inducing period filled with experimentation, due in no small part to the support I received from Boston and beyond. It still makes space for the interesting and new while keeping its sense of history – the good, bad, and complicated – in the forefront.

Music tracks
Anthony R. Green: On Top of a Frosted Hill
performed by Ashleigh Gordon (viola) and Joy Cline Phinney (piano)

Nebulous String Quartet featuring Kely Pinheiro: Berklee Two Track I Gratitude


Oliver Caplan

An outside photo of a group of musicians with various instruments with composer Oliver Caplan standing in the middle.

Oliver Caplan (standing in the center) with the musicians of Juventas.

I moved to Boston in 2004 for my graduate studies at the Boston Conservatory. Immediately, I fell in love with the city’s sense of place, a dynamic convergence of old and new. This is mirrored in Boston’s vibrant music scene, which is known for its unique strengths in both early and contemporary music. I suspect that Boston has the most classical music per capita of any U.S. city (using “classical” in the broadest sense of the word). On the contemporary front alone, we are home to over 40 ensembles with a mission that specifically includes new music!

Navigating Juventas through the pandemic has been challenging, but also thrilling. Our ensemble members share a deep conviction that it is essential to keep making music to help our community cope through this difficult time. In March 2020, during the initial lockdown, we quickly launched “Stay Home with Juventas,” a weekly solo concert, live-streamed from musicians’ homes. Most of us had never live-streamed anything before. Later that spring, in June 2020, we were one of the first ensembles in the world to reunite musicians in the same room for a live-streamed chamber concert. Our 2020-21 season was entirely virtual, broadcast from a recording studio in Boston, with CD quality audio and high definition video feeds from six cameras. Even though it was super scary, we kept the performances 100% live to maintain the special thrill and audience connection of live performance. While constantly adapting, we found silver linings. One of our live-stream concerts was viewed by over 7,000 people, an audience that was previously unimaginable for our small organization. In June 2021, eager to welcome back an in-person audience, we designed “Music in Bloom,” an outdoor performance experience at the New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill. Over 1,000 people joined us in-person for a program of contemporary music by composers that are not broadly known to the general populace. We are bringing “Music in Bloom” back for a third year in 2023. Behind these successes has been an incredible amount of un-glamorous grunt work by our team. There was a point in the pandemic when we had trouble finding a space that would let us in to rehearse. We ended up rehearsing in an unheated church, musicians bundled up in long underwear, our pianist Julia working on an extremely out-of-tune piano. This is how much everyone cared.

With my own composing, one of the deepest disappointments was the necessary postponement of a 2020 program of my choral music, a special collaboration between Juventas and the New Hampshire Master Chorale. I had just finished several new works for the occasion and found myself waiting years to hear them. But I funneled my energy into recording a new album, Watershed, with chamber music inspired by favorite walks in nature. And that choral concert is now finally happening this fall, October 29, at Tuft’s Granoff Music Center in Medford, MA; and October 30 at the Colonial Theater in Laconia, NH!

My first work sample is a live performance of Watershed, Movement II “Calm,” the title work on my new album. I wrote this piece during the pandemic as an homage to the Mystic River, a place where I find solace and inspiration.

Nick Southwick, flute
Wolcott Humphrey, clarinet
Anne Howarth, horn
Minjin Chung, cello
Julia Scott Carey, piano

My second offering is an excerpt of Michael Gandolfi’s Line Drawings, performed live by Juventas in September 2019. Michael is a backbone of the Boston music scene, and one of my very favorite composers.

Wolcott Humphrey, clarinet
Olga Patramanska-Bell, violin
Julia Carey, piano


Aliana de la Guardia

Aliana de la Guardia

Aliana De La Guardia

Boston and I chose each other. I went there for school and that’s where my closest collaborations formed. It was the exact right place for me during my young adulthood and I received the kind of mentorship I needed to become who I am as an artist. I live outside the city now, but still consider myself a Boston-based artist. I return there often to present and perform new work.

Boston is my community, so of course I’m going to be partial. I haven’t been a part of any other community to compare it to, and I don’t really feel the need. It’s a collegial community, and so many of us perform together in various different ensembles. There’s always someone you know on the gig. It’s almost like one big shifting ensemble.

For Guerilla Opera, the pandemic was problematic, but we were inventive in our own way. We’re not the type of group that presents aria concerts or song recitals. Everything is about new and experimental work development and driving those works toward a fully designed, fully theatrical performance. So we experimented with works that were smaller in scale, with one two and three performers total. We experimented with film and video projects. We re-ran past productions and introduced a whole body of repertoire to new audiences. We experimented with online programming, including a performance series, streaming programs pairing short works together, virtual meet-ups, creative workshops for artists, and we were quite busy. Every month we had at least one event to bring our community together, and that is what it was really about for us -bringing the community together.

Music Recommendations:

Scene 1 from Marti Epstein’s Rumpelstiltskin (Guerilla Opera’s January 2022 Release)

Hannah Selin: Mid-Day featuring soprano Stephanie Lamprea


Neil Leonard playing a saxophone.

Neil Leonard

Neil Leonard

I came to Boston to study at New England Conservatory.  But my journey to Boston opened so many new doors for me.  While I love the saxophone and actively play solo and ensemble concerts, my first job out of school was at an art school.  While working in the computer arts lab at Massachusetts College of Art, I became involved in transdisciplinary art, and the early development of electronic music education in the age affordable computers. Being at an art college led to me creating music for multimedia collaborations with Tony Oursler, Magdalena Campos, and Sam Durant. I produced a concert by George Lewis and participated in studio visits with John Cage. At the same time, I spent weekend nights at Wally’s Cafe in Roxbury, where I played with Greg Osby, Terri Lyne Carrington, and Terence Blanchard. Within a few years, I developed a practice as a transdisciplinary artist, and it was my work in electronic music and multimedia installation that brought me to Berklee College of Music, where I have been a professor for 30 years, and the Artistic Director of the Berklee Interdisciplinary Art Institute.

Boston is home to a unique community of musicians, artists, curators and researchers, who come from all over the world, to work in colleges and universities in the area. A steady flow of fantastic guest lecturers and artists provides me with the opportunity to experience new art works and talk with compelling creators constantly.  Through collaborations from Boston I have worked in more than a dozen countries around the world, where I have played saxophone, composed music, and presented interdisciplinary work.  Recently, Fujiko Nakaya, a Japanese artist known for her fog sculptures, and member of the influential Experiments in Art and Technology group, heard my concert Sounding the Cloud with Scanner and Steven Vitiello, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. She asked me to make the quadraphonic sound composition Lavender Ruins, for her 12-week, outdoor fog sculpture, at the ruins of Frederic Law Olmstead’s athletic pavilion where Duke Ellington gave annual free concerts. Right before the pandemic, Williams College Museum of Art invited me to create Sonance for the Precession, a sound installation that was situated on top of Hopkins Observatory, the nation’s oldest extant observatory, and provided a context to reflect on how Hindu and Greek theories of astronomy and acoustics developed through intercultural exchange. I find that Boston’s artistic community encourages the experimentation, research-based practice, and site-specific work that I have been drawn to.

Some of the best young artists in the world come to develop their practice here, particularly those interested in contemporary music and art. I enjoy helping students, contributing to this critical stage of their growth and having them become colleagues after they leave. About twelve years ago, Berklee asked me to be the founding artistic director the college’s Interdisciplinary Arts Institute. Last fall, my students performed with the Harvard New Music. Later the same semester, my students collaborated in premiering original works made in collaboration with students at MIT’s Opera of the Future lab. The same semester, Miguel Cardona, the U.S. Secretary of Education visited our seminar and observed a student performance. Boston has been an excellent location for helping students learn to build cultural connections between artists from diverse communities and artistic backgrounds.

The post-Covid era presents a unique opportunity for work within the arts that can support local, national and global healing. My professional practice began with the intention of collaborating with artists from around the world, and across all artistic practices. Boston is a good base to pursue this work and involve young people in process of celebrating our shared humanity through the arts.

Here’s a recording of the recent sound installation of mine at Williams College that I mentioned…

Dave Bryant: “Lime Pickle” from Night Visitors


Madison Simpson

Madison Simpson

Madison Simpson

Boston holds a lot of history for me – I was born here, and spent most of my childhood driving back and forth from New Hampshire visiting extended family. During my teenage years, I saw many concerts in Boston, and when it was time to pick a college I looked primarily in and around the city. Although I initially moved back to Boston for school and expected to move elsewhere after I completed my degree, the incredible DIY music scene here is what has made me stay.

Because Boston is, in some ways, a huge college town, there is a constantly changing flow of creatives running through its neighborhoods. My friends and I joke about the “Allston to Brooklyn pipeline”, as many of our musical collaborators have moved from the popular Boston artist’s neighborhood to NYC postgrad. However, even with these constant changeovers, there is an incredibly strong group of people dedicated to making Boston’s music and art scene great. We have independent record labels such as Disposable America, art and culture publications like Boston Hassle and Allston Pudding, and a thriving house show scene that encompasses mostly the Allston/Brighton neighborhoods but extends into Jamaica Plain and Dorchester. I’ve been very fortunate to have toured now along the east coast, out into the Midwest, and along the coast of California, and I can confidently say that Boston has one of the strongest DIY scenes in the country. I believe so deeply in this community and I’m so excited to continue to watch it grow post-pandemic.

I’m very lucky to be in two amazing bands: Sweet Petunia, my folk duo with collaborator Mairead Guy, and a rock band called Winkler. Both bands have seen great success in the DIY scene, and I’ve met many amazing people through each that I’m so happy to call my friends. With Sweet Petunia, one challenge has been carving out a space in a community that is mostly indie rock-centric. Amazingly, though, we have met a lot of people who have taken a chance on us and therefore we’ve played some really interesting, genre-diverse bills over the years. During Covid, both of my bands had members move back home to be with family, and therefore another one of the biggest challenges we faced was continuing to write and collaborate with each other long distance. The third largest problem that we have currently in Boston is a lack of small, traditional venues. With the closing of Great Scott during Covid, we lost one of the most important small venues our city had to offer. Although there are many DIY venues to play, options above that for a band that has begun to grow in following are slim. That has begun to change, though, due to the efforts of promoters like Once and Alex Pickert of Get to the Gig Boston. I believe with time we will continue to grow this aspect of our community! I’m excited to continue to live and work in Boston and to see how our DIY community continues to strengthen.

A track featuring me: “Early Morning Blues” by Sweet Petunia

A track from a local favorite: “Villain of my Mind” by Clay Aching

Composer Advocacy Journal: On The Road Again

It’s been two weeks since I returned from Aotearoa New Zealand where I was attending the overlapping International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) World New Music Days and Asian Composers League festivals in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and Ōtautahi Christchurch. But given all the things I’ve plunged into since returning, while fighting jetlag from the 16-hour time difference and the grueling 27 1/2-hour door-to-door journey back to New York City, I still haven’t been able to completely wrap my brain around everything I experienced during the 12 days I was there.

First, a little background. Part of my work for New Music USA, in my role as Composer Advocate, is to advocate for our programs and values both nationally and internationally through various member-based networks, such as the ISCM and the International Association of Music Centres (IAMIC). Prior to the global pandemic, the members of these networks met annually to compare practices for supporting and advocating for music as well as to share music with each other. ISCM meetings occur in a different city somewhere in the world every year concurrently with a multi-concert festival called the World (New) Music Days (WNMD) which features music from each of the countries represented in the network. (The “New” is in parenthesis since some hosts call the festival simply “World Music Days.”) Since 2019, I have served on the boards of both organizations but, since the pandemic, that has meant meeting on Zoom often at less than optimal hours (sometimes at 6:00 A.M. or after Midnight for me) to accommodate the time zones of all the participants. However, in May, IAMIC held its first in-person conference in three years, which took place in multiple cities in Germany (Hamburg, Bonn, and Cologne). And in August, the ISCM finally convened in New Zealand for the first time, an event that had originally been scheduled for April 2020. (Before I was elected to ISCM’s Executive Committee, I wrote several very detailed reports of these annual festivals; to get a better sense of what a WNMD is like, you might enjoy reading the last of these, my account of the 2016 Festival in Tongyeong, South Korea, in which I attempted to explain the cultural milieu of the ISCM by comparing it to the Wizarding world as described in the Harry Potter novels.)

My trip to Germany in May for the 2022 IAMIC Conference was the first time I had left the country since the pandemic, and I was filled with anxiety a great deal of the time. But aside from the discomfort of wearing a mask everywhere including on a long overnight flight, the suitcase containing clothing I had brought for the trip not catching up with me until the night before I flew back home (which offered me an experience I otherwise never would have had of very quickly shopping for overpriced poorly fitting clothing in a Hamburg department store–don’t ask), and one of the delegates getting COVID (thankfully everyone diligently tested every day and it didn’t spread further), it was an extremely worthwhile week. I am particularly proud of a panel I moderated at the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn which focused on the extremely generous pandemic-era funding for creative artists based in Germany which made the delegates attending from everywhere else in the world extremely envious.

IAMIC Board of Directors and Cloud Chamber Bowls.

The IAMIC Board of Directors at the headquarters of Ensemble Musikfabrik in Cologne, Germany in May 2022. Pictured left to right are Deborah Keyser, Jonathan Grimes, Radvilė Buivydienė, Peter Baros, Diana Marsh, Stephan Schulmeistrat, Agnieszka Cieślak-Krupa, and FJO. (Note the replicas of Harry Partch’s Cloud Chamber Bowls on the far right.)

By the time August rolled around and I journeyed to New Zealand, I was a seasoned pandemic traveler. But nothing (not even having travelled there once before, 15 years ago, for a IAMIC conference) is sufficient physical or psychological preparation for a flight from the West Coast of North America across the Pacific Ocean and far down into the Earth’s other hemisphere to finally reach Auckland. It’s a 13-hour flight that, if coming from NYC, must be proceeded by a 6-hour flight to get to the West Coast as well as a massive trek between terminals which, even though there’s a more than two-hour layover, is a race against the clock, made even more challenging when masked. (In September, now that I’m back, Air New Zealand just introduced a brand new direct New York JFK-Auckland flight which lasts nearly 18 hours, though I’m not sure whether a direct flight or two long flights with a very long walk in between is worse.)

Maori sculptures surround one of the walls in the international arrival terminal of the Auckland Airport.

Among the first things visitors see after arriving in the Auckland Airport after an extremely long international flight. (They also pipe in a recording of Maori traditional chants.)

Before I continue, I’d like to offer a small disclaimer. Given the role I now have within ISCM, it seems somewhat of a conflict of interest for me to be singing the praises of the World New Music Days in an expansive report, so this should not be construed as that. Nevertheless, it seems appropriate to offer some information here on each of the American pieces that were performed, offer a few observations about what made this particular edition unique (especially since it is the first one that took place in more than three years), and to give readers here a sense of what I’ve been up to recently.

Although it had to be somewhat scaled down from what had originally been planned for 2020, the 2022 ISCM World New Music Days, which took place concurrently with a festival of the Asian Composers League, was a major undertaking that seemed to happen through sheer force of will, mainly on the part of the festival’s Artistic Director, Glenda Keam, who also happens to be the President of ISCM. All in all, 20 of the submitted works that had originally been chosen for performance (among them, sadly, Katherine Balch‘s extraordinary string quartet drip music which was a submission from the League of Composers, the official ISCM USA Section), could not be presented this year, plus two additional works listed in the program (that were not from ISCM submissions) had to be cancelled. In addition, due to the ongoing uncertainties of the global pandemic, many delegates could not attend (our general assembly meetings were an often challenging hybrid of in-person and Zoom), so many of the concerts were not as well attended as they should have been. Still, as in previous editions of the WNMD, the festival offered a fascinating cross section of music by composers hailing from six continents. (Despite a fascinating exhibit devoted to Antarctic exploration in the Canterbury Museum, which was around the corner from some of the concerts in Christchurch, a viable new music scene has yet to develop there.)

The members of the ISCM Executive Committee sitting around a table, all masked.

The ISCM Executive Committee met in all day meetings during the weekend before the 2022 World New Music Days began. (Pictured left to right are David Pay, FJO, Oľga Smetanová, Wolfgang Renzl, Irina Hasnaş, George Kentros, and Tomoko Fukui.)

In both cities where the festival took place, before any of the concerts there was a formal welcome (Mihi whakatau) featuring speeches and music from members of the local Māori community, the indigenous people who have inhabited Aotearoa New Zealand long before the en masse arrival of British settlers in the early 19th century and the Māori still make up approximately 16.5% of the country’s population.  It was thrilling to hear live performances by Māori musicians on taonga pūoro (the traditional musical instruments of the Māori which have only been revived in recent decades), particularly (and, for a contemporary music festival, very appropriately) the blaring tone clusters that resulted from the simultaneous blowing of pūkaea and pūtātara, trumpet-like instruments made from wood and conch shells respectively, during the first of these welcomes which took place in the courtyard outside the School of Music at the University of Auckland. Admittedly, though, it was somewhat frustrating to listen to the speeches in Māori which were mostly left untranslated. But the solution to that is to learn the language one day! (I must point out that NZ’s overall embrace of Māori heritage and its attempt at establishing a bicultural society is extremely impressive and it has gone well beyond what I previously witnessed when I visited Wellington back in 2007. That said, apart from a few exciting compositions by composers of Māori heritage, such as Takarei Komene, whose 2019 Ngā Roimata o te Tūrama for unaccompanied mixed chorus and whistling was a highlight of a performance by the Auckland Chamber Choir, members of the Māori community did not seem to be part of the “contemporary music” scene in New Zealand. It should be pointed out, however, that the composers from New Zealand whose music was featured on the festival come from extremely diverse cultural backgrounds, ranging from Greece to East Asia.)

Māori musicians playing taonga pūoro

Here are the Māori musicians who greeted all of the ISCM delegates with marvelous tone clusters on taonga pūoro.

The first two concerts of the festival were devoted to music involving electronics. Seven fixed media works (two involving video as well as audio) were presented at the first one, in Auckland’s Audio Foundation, a sub-basement venue located in a neighborhood that is a steep walk from the University. One of the two works involving a video element was Lithuanian composer Albertas Navickas‘s fascinating Silences (2016), which featured fragments of footage of an older woman speaking accompanied by a pre-recorded ensemble which re-enforced the pitch content of her words (a la Scott Johnson’s John Somebody or Steve Reich’s Different Trains). The other was White Heron Dance, a haunting 2017 studio piece by American electronic music pioneer Alice Shields, accompanied by abstract animation (created by Thomas Barratt), which was submitted for inclusion in the festival by the Roger Shapiro Fund for New Music. It was a challenge to distinguish the other pieces since they were not clearly identified during the presentation, which perhaps was part of the gestalt of this very DIY space, but it was nevertheless somewhat frustrating. The second concert, back at the University, involved live electronics and included two works from composers based in the United States: In the Middle of the Room, Jeff Morris‘s 2017 audio-video manipulation of a song by Elisabeth Blair, submitted by ISCM’s Full Associate Member, based at Stephen F. Austin State University, which promotes the music of Texas-based composers; and PS Quartet No. 1, also from 2017, by Korean-born, Michigan-based composer Joo Won Park, in which four performers manipulate audio and video via PlayStation controllers–which was very entertaining both to see and hear. Full disclosure: the latter was the piece among six submitted by New Music USA (it was funded by a Project Grant) which was chosen for performance in the festival. (All ISCM member organizations can submit up to six pieces for consideration in each year’s WNMD and if the submissions are in at least 4 different instrumentation categories, the festival must perform one of them.)

Computer terminals with visuals and audio triggered by 4 PlayStation controllers during a performance of Joo Won Park's PS Quartet No. 1

An action shot from the performance of Joo Won Park’s PS Quartet No. 1 at the University of Auckland during the 2022 ISCM World New Music Days.

On the second day of the festival there were two concerts, both at the University of Auckland. The first was a tour de force afternoon recital by percussionist Justin DeHart, a transplant to New Zealand who originally hails from Sacramento, California. In a group of seven pieces from Canada, Portugal, and New Zealand, he demonstrated the extraordinary range of sounds that can be made by just one person striking many different kinds of objects (though at times the sounds he made were enhanced by pre-recorded electronics). The evening concert was devoted to mostly unaccompanied choral works (for one, a harp was added) performed by the aforementioned Auckland Chamber Choir, a group based at the University. The concert opened with the inventive and challenging Sonata form denatured prose (2014) by Swedish-born Norwegian-based composer Maja Linderoth (b. 1989), who was named the winner of the ISCM Young Composer Award at the end of the festival; the first time a female composer had received the award since 2011.

The next day the ISCM delegates travelled to the West Auckland suburb of Titirangi for a concert, again devoted to electronic music, in the Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery. Lukas Ligeti, an Austrian-born composer who currently divides his time between Florida and Johannesburg, South Africa, performed his Labyrinth of Stars: The Far Southeast (2014), an improvisatory solo for the Donald Buchla-designed marimba lumina. The material for the piece is derived from the composer’s earlier concerto for marimba lumina and orchestra titled Labyrinth of Clouds.  In his prefatory comments, Ligeti stated that this new version of the music was inspired by his seeing stars that are visible in this part of the world which are not visible in the Northern Hemisphere and the resultant music juxtaposed a series of diatonic ostinatos with some surprising chromatic intrusions. (I was hoping to see some of those stars, too, but most of the evenings I was there were cloudy, plus most of the time I was too close to city lights to be able to appreciate them.) That concert also featured Interdependencies (2018), a trippy live manipulation of eight interconnected tone generators by Danish composer Christian Skjødt which he said was just part one of a work that is twice as long; I’m eager to hear the rest of it one day. Unfortunately, because I failed to sign up for it in time, I missed Polish composer Mikolaj Laskowski‘s 2018 Deep Relaxation No. 4: Self-Care, an audience participatory piece involving sound objects and yoga mats that was presented twice but was limited to just 12 attendees each time.

A very large tree in Auckland NZ

While I never saw many stars in NZ, I did see this amazing tree in a park while walking from my hotel to the University of Auckland for ISCM meetings and concerts.

Later in the week, Polish-born New Zealand-based pianist Gabriela Glapska gave a very convincing recital comprised of nine works from eight countries, the most intriguing of which, at least for me, were three selections from Japanese composer Matoharu Kawashima‘s 2017 Action Music, in particular the last one in which the pianist mimics the famous opening of Tchaikovsky’s overplayed first piano concerto, ultimately closing the lid and continuing to play. I was also very taken with a duo recital by violinist/violist Andrew Beer and pianist Sarah Watkins at the hip Loft Q Theatre on Auckland’s busy Queen Street. Everything they played they turned into something extraordinary, but I really loved the brave beauty of Canadian composer Rodney Sharman‘s 2016 viola/piano duo Gratitude and Swiss composer Esther Flückiger‘s often jazzy 2017 Guarda i lumi for violin and piano and will want to hear both works again many times. (Luckily three of the NZ pieces featured on the program were on a CD of the duo I bought the last night of the festival, though I was already familiar with the 2011 miniature Tōrua by Gillian Whitehead, one of NZ’s most prominent composers, since it was one of the Encore Pieces commissioned and recorded by Hilary Hahn.)

I skipped the concluding Auckland event, a screening of a virtual concert by the Australian new music ensemble ELISION who were originally scheduled to participate in person before COVID-related travel restrictions threw a monkey wrench into the plan. But since they plan to post all their virtual performances to their YouTube channel, I hope to catch up with it when they do. Unfortunately the few other programs I wound up missing for a variety of reasons, some having to do with the complexities of navigating Auckland’s challengingly hilly terrain, were mostly not streamed and archived online. After a couple of years of virtual performances becoming a lifeline to musical experiences with the concurrent benefit of these concerts being able to attract audiences from all over world who otherwise could not have experienced them, it seems a shame not to set up even a smartphone (many of which have better audio and video reproduction capabilities than some so-called professional camcorders from 20 years ago) to preserve all performances and make them available to as many people as possible.

Tables filled with CDs and tables filled with LPs further in the back.

The days and nights were pretty tightly packed with meetings and concerts, but there was a gap of a couple of hours one morning so of course I went shopping for LPs and CDs at Penny Lane Records, which thankfully opens quite early.

Although the Festival program in Christchurch lasted a mere four days, it seems like there were twice as many concerts. This is because in addition to concerts featuring repertoire selected from ISCM submissions, there were also concerts devoted to repertoire chosen from the member organizations in the Asian Composers League. It’s far too much music to write about here in a way that won’t seem completely overwhelming, but I would like to call attention to a few things that left a lasting impression.

The Christchurch Youth Orchestra played a very short concert (only about 37 minutes) consisting of five works. Still it was nice to see and hear such a group performing on an important international music festival in front of an audience of people from all over the world and two of the works–Ogham (2018) by Irish composer Ryan Molloy and Distant Lights (2017) by Hong Kong composer Richard Tsang–contained some really exciting orchestration that I’d love to study in greater detail. Another of the pieces, Surcos a la tierra by Chilean composer René Silva, would be a big hit at The Midwest Clinic if Silva were to rearrange it for wind band. Two of the nation’s leading chamber music groups, the New Zealand String Quartet and the NZTrio, offered very wide ranging concert programs. The former, which took place in the 19th century Great Hall in Christchurch’s historic Arts Centre, a real time portal, included an intense 2015 quartet, inside voice, by Kurt Rohde, submitted by ISCM Full Associate member Florida International University, which brought everyone back into modern times. The latter concert, which took place in a posh new venue called The Piano, which was built since the massive 2011 Earthquake, did not include any American pieces, but British composer Joe Cutler‘s clever 2016 McNulty was inspired by the American TV drama series The Wire. Other works on the program included the very effective ACL-commissioned Elehiya Para sa mga Biktima ng Masaker sa Maguindanao (Elegy for the Victims of the Maguindanao Massacre) by Philippine composer Ryle Custodio, winner of the ACL’s 2018 Young Composer Prize, and the rhythmically intriguing Der Tanz by NZ composer Tabea Squire, one of the only works on the festival that was composed this year (since most of the programming was carried over from the postponed 2020 festival).

An orchestra onstage in a concert hall.

The Christchurch Youth Orchestra conducted by Helen Renaud during their performance at Margaret College’s Charles Luney Auditorium in Christchurch NZ.

Another concert held at The Piano the night before the NZTrio appeared there featured seven very different compositions including the melancholy 2009 What gathers, what lingers by American composer Anna Weesner, another Roger Shapiro Fund submission. A concert at the tiny Recital Room in the University of Canterbury’s Arts Centre, which with two grand pianos seemed like very tight quarters, offered a variety of works which explored inside the piano sonorities. I loved Lauschgut (2019) by German composer Charlotte Seither whom, as luck would have it, was on the panel I moderated at the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn during the public day of the IAMIC Conference (small world). And though it was completed seven years before Putin’s invasion, Forest Cover (2015) by Ukrainian composer Mykola Khshanovskyi, in which the explosive sonorities emanating from the piano are enhanced by pre-recorded and live electronics, sounded extremely timely. Yifan Yang, a piano student at the University of Canterbury, gave a breathtaking account of it.

Charlotte Seither and Frank J. Oteri

From my panel talk with Charlotte Seither during the public day of the IAMIC Conference at the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn back in May (photo by Nathan Dreessen-of the MIZ)

On the final day there was another concert in the Recital Room devoted to eleven string trios from young composers based in 11 different countries represented within the Asian Composers League. The simultaneously deft and fun handling of numerous extended techniques in bouncing, sliding, spinning (2019) by Thai composer Piyawat Louilarpprasert, who is now based at Cornell, earned him the YCL’s 2022 Young Composer Award, but I was also quite taken with New Zealand composer Glen Downie‘s almost static Two Variations on an Original Chorale (2019). The performances, by two different string trios, felt like a triathlon, particularly when Johnny Chang and Mark Bennett as well as Mark Menzies (who was a ubiquitous onstage presence at the Christchurch concerts) and Rakuto Kurano switched between violin and viola, though at one point Menzies forgot which instrument he was supposed to play. But maybe he was just joking. Either way, it was as compelling visually as it was sonically.

Taonga pūoro displayed on a table.

The taonga pūoro that Alistair Frasier performed on during his duo concert with flutist Bridget Douglas.

But the real highlight of the Christchurch events for me was the duo of Alistair Fraser and Bridget Douglas performing on taonga pūoro and Western (silver) flutes, also in the Recital Room. Particularly intriguing were Gareth Farr‘s Silver Stone Wood Bone and Briar Prastiti‘s Terra Firma, both composed in 2019, the latter of which contained passages in which it was sometimes hard to tell which instrument was playing what. It was nevertheless a shame that no members of the Māori community were involved in either the composition or performance of a group of works which were all about bridging the divide between Māori and European cultures. Is it possible that no one in that community has created any music like that yet?

A billboard with a poster that says "I WILL NOT SPEAK MAORI" in all capital letters.

Once upon a time Māori people were forced to recite the line “I will not speak Māori” as part of the Anglicization process during their early schooling. It is something that still haunts the current population of Aotearoa New Zealand.

As I wrote at the onset, I’m still trying to wrap my brain around all of this. In particular, how a festival of contemporary music can truly be representative of what is currently being created all around the world and how such a festival could reach a broader and more diverse audience. Also, are such festivals, which, in the case of the ISCM, have been going on for a century, still feasible in a world that can be shut down by a global pandemic as well as by war and the vagaries of climate change? The ISCM was created a few years after the end of the First World War in an attempt to bring the fractured world together through music, yet in the beginning that world consisted just of countries in Europe plus the United States. As time went on, the ISCM eventually brought in members from South America, Asia, Oceania, and Africa, but 2022 marked only the second time in its history that the festival took place in the Southern Hemisphere. We’re hoping, to mark the centenary of the very first ISCM festival, to meet next year in South Africa, the first time on the African continent, an undertaking which has a great many challenges. But maintaining a festival that takes place every year in a different location in the world might prove to be an even greater challenge.

Flight departures at Auckland's international terminal.

Of course, the trip back home is as long as the trip there…

 

 

The End of the World? We’ll Compose It.

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.

Empowering Teenagers to Compose: A Guide for Educators

A pen and a notebook with handwritten notes, a CD and a smartphone with a display of a video of music performance overlayed with the New Music Toolbox logo

Although K-12 music standards call for students to develop skills in composition, I often hear educators express that they feel ill-equipped to support their students in this endeavor. Many music teachers do not get trained on how to facilitate composition projects in the classroom, and their own experience with composing can be quite limited if their studies placed an emphasis on performance. As a result, instead of giving students the confidence to express themselves through their own works, many composition projects can turn out to be theory assessments in disguise.

Though these assignments can serve a purpose, they often do little to develop a young musician’s creativity, and at times, they can even stifle students’ artistry by implying that there is a “right” or “wrong” way to compose. Instead, students need activities that empower them to make their own artistic choices and explore music creation at any stage of their development. This is especially crucial in music programs where many students’ only access to formal music instruction is in the classroom, where their studies are typically not as individualized as they would be in a private lesson setting.

This article is a collection of actionable tips primarily from my own experience as a composer-educator and founder of the You(th) Can Compose! Summer Workshop. These strategies can be adapted to group or private lesson settings and don’t require that educators have extensive background in composition. Though these approaches are geared towards middle and high school students, many of these tips can be adapted to create lessons for students of different age groups.

Cultivate a practice of observation and discussion.

Eric Booth, in his book The Music Teaching Artist’s Bible, advises that we need to guide students in practicing observation before defaulting to interpretation or judgment – a discipline that we also need to cultivate in our own practice.1 This approach enables students to learn a great deal from the music that they listen to, yet it also gives them an ability to ask insightful questions of themselves while they are in the process of realizing their own ideas.

If a student listens to a new piece and responds with “This piece makes me feel as if I am watching a cartoon,” giving a follow up question such as “What about the music reminds you of watching a cartoon?” can help them to return their focus to aspects such as the instrumentation or texture of the piece.

When we model questions that focus on observation, this empowers students to practice asking themselves more insightful questions during the composition process. For instance, a student who is dissatisfied with how their melody resolves can ask themselves, “What about this melody makes it sound incomplete?” However, if they immediately judge the melody as something that is “no good,” they will likely abandon their original ideas, and the opportunity to learn from their experiences will be missed.

Even if the student ultimately decides to scrap their composition and start over, taking a moment to pause and observe what they have created so far can give them the insight needed to accomplish what they set out to write the next time around.

Focus on one element of music at a time.

In the You(th) Can Compose! Summer Workshop, one of our topics during the first week of classes is a lesson on the elements of music. When we give students the vocabulary to talk about elements such as rhythm, pitch, and texture, they become better equipped to make observations about the music that they are listening to. That way, they are less dependent on interpretations and judgment.

Even if students are having trouble finding the right terminology to use in the midst of a discussion, it can be helpful to invite them to describe what they are observing to the best of their abilities without having to utilize the proper musical term right away. The vocabulary can always be taught later, and the students’ findings can be great ways to open up conversations around new terminology.

Aside from listening exercises, composition projects that focus on a singular element of music are great for narrowing the scope of a lesson while allowing plenty of room for creativity. For example, I’ve often used the Sonic Scavenger Hunt by composer-educator Danny Clay as a starting point for students to explore the concept of timbre.

Experiment with many approaches to composition.

When students can try their hand at a variety of approaches to composing, they will eventually choose a writing process that is most inspiring to them. Just as there are no right or wrong notes in a composition, there is no right or wrong way to compose a piece. They may even decide to change their approach based on the result that they are trying to accomplish in a given project.

Though a new approach may be uncomfortable at first, sometimes, students can actually be inspired in unexpected ways. I’ve taught workshops where students work together to compose chance music; however, I always tell them that even if they set up a system for choosing the notes, they are always free to break their own rules and edit the piece if they are dissatisfied with the result.

After using a die, a coin, or a picker wheel to determine certain elements of a piece, often, they will become quite opinionated about which notes to change and why they are changing them–another great opportunity for conversation.

Bringing in guest composers to teach a class (either in-person or virtually) or finding videos of composers talking about their creative process can motivate students to try something new. Though some students may initially feel that processes such as rolling a die or turning their name into musical notes are not legitimate ways to write music, when they discover that there are many established composers who have created masterpieces with similar strategies, they will feel validated in their own creative process.

Many of the reasons for introducing a variety of approaches to composition also apply to experimenting with different styles of notation. Another great aspect of Danny Clay’s Sonic Scavenger Hunt is that it is a great example of a graphic score – a concept that is fit for beginners and more experienced students alike.

Students can also explore projects that don’t require any notation, such as composing a fixed media piece in a program like Audacity. Young composers tend to fixate on pitches and rhythms, but these alternatives to traditional notation can be useful exercises in developing elements such as timbre, texture, and dynamics when students might not have focused on them before.

Use technology to your advantage…

Even simpler apps, such as voice notes or a video camera that’s included with a mobile device, can be useful tools for composing. When I teach composition, I often encourage students to record their ideas as they go. That way, they don’t have to worry about forgetting concepts that they are experimenting with – a strategy that I often use in my own work before I begin to notate my ideas. Documenting the composition process can also enable students to better reflect on their experiences since it will be easier to see how the piece evolves over time.

Aside from being a way to introduce students to other artists and composers, watching and discussing videos of performances, interviews, and demonstrations can be a great way for students to witness how sounds can be created in innovative ways. For instance this performance of Zaka by Jennifer Higdon has been a great conversation starter amongst my students since it demonstrates the concept of extended techniques. Additionally, this profile of Angélica Negrón has piqued my students’ curiosity about electronic music and found sounds.

…but be mindful of where technology has its limits. 

At times, introducing certain technology too early in our students’ development can encourage them to “color inside the lines” in unintended ways. I have often seen this happen to students who begin to use notation software long before they have started to get comfortable demonstrating their ideas on an instrument or writing sketches by hand, however imperfect these methods may be at first.

In a lot of notation software, such as Noteflight, MuseScore, or Sibelius, to name a few, users are asked to specify parameters such as the meter and key signature before they begin to enter the piece itself. Changing these options later on can become a barrier if students aren’t aware of how to work around these limitations or if they are not aware that their tools are imposing such limitations in the first place. This often results in melodies and rhythms that sound too “square” and pieces that can become too redundant.

One way that I counteract this is by encouraging students to improvise their ideas on their instrument while they record themselves on their devices. Then, I guide them in transcribing their improvisations to the best of their abilities.

For students who have a limited fluency in written notation, this approach can be modified by using graphic or text-based notation, focusing on transcribing elements such as pitch or rhythm alone, or omitting the notation aspect altogether and allowing the student to memorize, perform, and even record finished versions their work.

Some verbal and graphic notes for a musical composition that can be used instead of music notation

Save the theory assessments for another time.

When composition projects are primarily intended to examine whether your students can write an eight-bar melody in D Major, for example, they are much more likely to become fixated on whether they are choosing the “right” notes and pleasing their teacher. Instead, opt for open-ended projects that enable students to explore and define their musical tastes.

Students who feel empowered to envision and realize their own ideas will gain a sense of confidence that can be applied to any profession whether they choose to continue in their musical development or move on to other endeavors. On the other hand, if they feel insecure about their ability to make creative decisions, this paralyzing mindset can be carried well into adulthood.

Alice Kanack, the pioneer of Creative Ability Development, has a very helpful formula to refer to when structuring creative exercises for students:

Freedom of choice or Freedom from criticism + Disciplined practice and repetition of making choices = Creative Ability2

Whether I am teaching composition in my own studio or I am visiting another teacher’s class to do a workshop, I’ve found it much more empowering to encourage students to express their intentions and their artistic vision so that we can explore how they might accomplish what they intended. This is another reason why lessons that incorporate plenty of time for discussion and reflection are so important.

Embrace imperfection.

As educators, we can enable students to take creative risks and break free of a fixation on choosing “right” versus “wrong” notes by creating multiple opportunities for them to share works-in-progress. Often, I will set a short timer (e.g. 5-10 minutes) for students to respond to a prompt that is very narrow in scope. Then, they will have an opportunity to share what they came up with and express their intentions for their work as they go forward.

Even though there will often be at least one student who is too shy to share their unfinished works, I’ve found that simply inviting them to reflect on what the experience of composing was like can gain their trust. More often than not, they ultimately decide to present the music itself.

That being said, it is crucial to create a safe space for them to be vulnerable in this way, especially if they are in a group setting with their peers. All students need an environment where they are taken seriously and their creative ideas are not dismissed as being too weird, too simple, or too ridiculous, to name a few. This goes for all parties involved — their peers, their teachers, and even parents or guardians who are supporting them in their studies.3

Because of this, modeling what it’s like to embrace imperfection can be a powerful tool. When I give students an opportunity to work independently during class, I will often use the time to compose ideas for the same prompt and demonstrate what it’s like to share my own imperfect, unfinished work. This includes verbalizing my thoughts on how I feel about the creation at the moment. Whether I am excited about moving forward with my ideas or I feel ambivalent and want to scrap them, I make a habit of sharing these reflections with my students so that they can feel safe to do so as well.

Connect lessons to real-world experiences.

Introducing our students to living composers, whether it is via a live workshop or through pre-recorded media, can illustrate the many ways in which a career in music can take shape.

This can easily become a starting point for activities that give students a taste of what the music profession can be like. For instance, prompts such as writing a short solo for a classmate to perform can give students a glimpse into the process of writing a commission.

As part of the You(th) Can Compose! Summer Workshop, Samantha Hogan, has visited our class to share excerpts from her concert works as well as selections that she wrote for games and film. After her presentation, she facilitated a lesson in which the students created music to portray characters from I Wish I Were A Butterfly, a children’s book by James Howe. This kind of activity is a great way to introduce students to the idea of telling stories with music.

Aside from empowering students to make creative choices in the music itself, encouraging students to assist in the production of their work can give them confidence to initiate their own projects later on. Tasks such as recruiting performers, designing art for a concert program, or creating posters to advertise a performance are great ways to empower students to make creative choices and make their vision become a reality – skills that are vital for the career of any artist in today’s world.

One of Sakari's online composition lessons.

Conclusion

As you begin to apply these practices, my hope is that you will feel more confident to share the art of music composition with your students, even if you have little formal training in composition or you do not identify as a composer. Though an emphasis on observation and experimentation will take much more time than prompting students to “color inside the lines,” approaching the study of composition in this manner will offer more enriching opportunities for us to learn alongside our students, inviting them to take risks and explore new territories in their creative practice.

Sources

  1. Eric Booth, The Music Teaching Artist’s Bible: Becoming a Virtuoso Educator (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 33.
  2. Alice Kay Kanack, Fun Improvisation for Violin: The Philosophy and Method of Creative Ability Development (USA: Summy-Birchard Music, 1996), 15.
  3. Kanack, 20.

 

20 Predictions for the Music Business in 10 Years

Ted Gioia photo in Out of The Box banner

The ideas below came to me in a dream. Some of them seem a little unusual—I should probably apologize for that. I had a couple glasses of a very fine Barolo from the Monforte region of northern Italy before falling asleep, so maybe that played a factor. But I’m determined to share what I heard exactly as it was told to me in my sleep.

Ten years from now. . .

1. A major Silicon Valley company will announce that it has created the ‘next Beethoven’ with quantum computing technology.

2. A legitimate musical counterculture will arise, with a cadre of new artists achieving superstar status while rejecting the roles of influencer and content provider. The motto “music comes first” will be a key part of their marketing message. The movement will have a name, but that word doesn’t exist yet.

3. YouTube fans will fondly recall the days when they only had to sit through two short commercials before watching a music video.

4. Web platforms will have destroyed record labels—which will no longer play a meaningful role in building the careers of new artists.

5. A reality TV show will launch a very popular song competition. But only children under the age of 8 will be allowed to vote. The success of the show will create a popular new genre known as TDM (Toddler Dance Music). It will even get its own Grammy category.

6. Musicians will find ways to capture 80-90% of the revenue from their music. This is already happening at Bandcamp, but the trend will spread rapidly. A whole host of other platforms will emerge that give most of the money to the artist and only keep a small percentage for themselves.

7. AI-driven Robots will increasingly replace DJs at dance clubs. Club owners will insist that the algorithm is better at pleasing customers than a human being.

8. The President of the United States will launch a curated playlist on a major music platform. At first music industry insiders will ridicule it, but change their tune after 40 million people sign up as subscribers. All proceeds will go to support animal rights organizations.

9. A song composed entirely by artificial intelligence will reach the number one spot on the Billboard chart. The music video (also AI-created) will be a major contributor to its success.

10. Trombone sales will skyrocket after the instrument is implicated in a high-profile celebrity scandal.

11. Before a hot new album by a major star is released, each track will be auctioned off as a separate non-fungible token. A prominent hedge fund manager who is famous for his large portfolio of music NFTs will become personal financial advisor to many leading rappers and pop stars. His nickname on Wall Street will be DJ Blockchain.

12. Individuals who can identify rising talent will set up their web channels, and fill the role once played by the A&R department at a record label. But there’s one big difference: they can do everything themselves without a huge corporation behind them. If these talent scouts have a web channel with a few million subscribers, they will have more clout than Sony (which, by the way, currently has a pathetic 40 thousand subscribers to its YouTube channel) or most other labels. They can sign artists, showcase them online, and build their audience—acting as sole operators, but with the influence of a big business.

13. A hit song by a K-Pop band will still be in the top 40 after four years.

14. Streamed music events will generate more income than live concerts.

15. The only child of the CEO of Google/Alphabet will date a musician with no discernible talent, but who now suddenly shows up everywhere on search engine results and even wins a prominent music industry award.

16. Spotify threatens to delist every track that doesn’t get at least one thousand streams per year, unless the artist pays a stiff annual fee.

17. Record labels won’t disappear, but will live mostly off the income from their publishing catalogs (which they are in a mad frenzy to acquire right now) and the old music in their archives. They will start to fear impending copyright expirations that threaten much of their cash flow, and try (unsuccessfully) to get legislators to extend IP protection for music.

18. The most discussed movie soundtrack of the year will feature complete silence—except for 12 seconds of music at a dramatic point in the story.

19. New music industry power players will emerge in Asia and other non English-speaking regions. New York, London, and Los Angeles will still be centers of activity, but hardly as dominant as they once were. The savvier music companies will be in a mad scramble to expand their presence in Seoul, Kinshasa, Jakarta, etc.

20. The TV audience for the Grammy Awards will fall to a new low. Instead, the music event with the highest TV ratings that year will be a live broadcast of the 90th birthday concert of a famous rock/pop star.

Different Cities Different Voices – Portland OR

Header for the Portland Oregon edition of Different Cities Different Voices showing an image of the Sky Tram

Different Cities Different Voices is a series from NewMusicBox that explores music communities across the US through the voices of local creators and innovators. Discover what is unique about each city’s new music scene through a set of personal essays written by people living and creating there, and hear their music as well as music from local artists selected by each essayist. For our latest edition we are putting the spotlight on Portland, Oregon. The series is meant to spark conversation and appreciation for those working to support new music in the US, so please continue the conversation online about who else should be spotlighted in each city and tag @NewMusicBox.


Amelia Lukas

Amelia Lukas (photo by Rachel Hadiashar)

Amelia Lukas (photo by Rachel Hadiashar)

I relocated to Portland in 2014, hoping to shift the “hustle culture” I had adopted in New York City and create a new framework for myself that emphasized balance and a slower pace. I grew up in Boston and have since lived in London, San Francisco, and New York – all incredibly rich cultural epicenters that I fully enjoyed being a part of – but the magic and beauty of the Pacific Northwest had always beckoned. The access to nature here is incredible (something I highly value), and for a smaller city, Portland is home to a remarkable number of talented artists and musicians.

The spirit of the Pacific Northwest emphasizes innovation and social responsibility. The synchronicities, connections, and integrations that abound in this community, and its strong sense of place and presence, are extremely special. Portland’s signature “maker mindset” and love of all things handcrafted carries over into the way we approach music. Energized by creating something new, both in the music itself and in the models through which we experience it, musicians here tend to program with meaning, intention, and a desire to connect deeply with the community. For example, I’m proud to be a member of Fear No Music, an organization that highlights the music of living composers while leveraging its platforms for healing, activism, and social justice. Also, the brand new Patricia Reser Center for the Arts just offered an impeccably curated grand opening spring season featuring all kinds of new music from around the world, dissolving boundaries and emphasizing inclusivity.

Although Oregon is a state that values the arts, Portland faces some challenges, including a dearth of appropriate venues for intimate multi-media performances. Thankfully, potential barriers only serve to fuel the resourcefulness and creativity of local musicians. As the PR representative for SoundsTruck NW, I’m supporting the launch of an unconventional mobile venue that will bring live concerts and enrichment programming into neighborhoods and institutions, increasing access and connection to the arts with a focus on underserved areas. Chamber Music Northwest also adds fantastic variety to the mix with their New@Night series, featuring shorter, early evening performances in the lobby of a major theater. These types of creative, modernized concert experiences sustain a vibrant new music scene.

As an artist whose career is split between freelance performance and running Aligned Artistry (the arts PR company I founded in 2018), the pandemic was very difficult. I lost all of my performing overnight, as did the vast majority of my clients. It was devastating and overwhelming; I applied for and received several artist relief grants, including one from New Music USA, which proved to be both financially and emotionally supportive, and for that I’m very grateful. With my performing at a standstill, I focused my energy on Aligned Artistry, working closely with each individual client to assess the best path forward, whether that involved putting agreements on hold, or creating new platforms to share work. At the outset of the pandemic, I felt a strong urge to make productive use of my time, and to try to “figure out” what the new paradigm should be and how to implement it. But a louder inner voice told me it was time to slow down and listen. Only after lots of observation, processing, and reflection did I feel equipped to break through the explosion of digital content, recontextualize my clients’ needs within this new framework, and develop what I hoped would be effective, thoughtful solutions that were also meaningful and sustainable. Through this process, I navigated very successful album releases (one of which received a JUNO Award nomination for Classical Album of the Year, solo artist – go Catherine Lee!!); helped clients secure transformative levels of funding; managed transitions to virtual seasons that resulted in exponential audience growth; and have begun to serve clients nationally and even internationally through Aligned Artistry. I’m passionate about using my knowledge and skills to help clients expand the impact of their work, and by staying the course and trusting in the process even when things became quite scary, I ultimately expanded my own impact and business. It’s my great privilege and joy to experience life as an artist, and I hope that my perspective, dedication, and uniquely aligned artistry adds to this community’s depth and resiliency.

Music Picks

My performance of Carlos Simon’s move it for alto flute

Recommendation: Remote Together by Catherine Lee; music for oboe, oboe d’amore and English horn with electronics, field recordings and fixed media by Canadian and American composers residing in the Pacific Northwest


Darrell Grant

Darrel Grant sitting in front of a grand piano

Darrel Grant (photo by Thomas Teal)

I moved to Portland in 1997 to join the music faculty at Portland State University after ten years as a touring and recording jazz artist based in New York City. Ironically, I was not looking for a career change when I decided to make the move. I was seeking a sense of community and to feel like my work was making an impact. The series of serendipitous events that led to me accepting a tenure-track teaching position in Portland have always made my being here seem a bit predestined, despite my trepidation about saying goodbye to the New York jazz scene. A friend gave me an important piece of advice at the time that I have remembered ever since. “You don’t need to go in search of a scene,” he said. “Wherever you go, YOU are the scene.”

In my twenty-five plus years here, that has meant using music as a means to build connections, explore stories and history, and invest in serving the needs of this community by cultivating a practice of artistic engagement that promotes positive change. I have driven pianos deep into state forests to support the environment, arranged protest anthems, and shared the stage with Nobel laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu. I have curated live performances, started a record label (Lair Hill Records), launched jazz venues (The Typhoon Lounge and LV’s Uptown) and created a Jazz institute at Portland State. Being in Portland has also allowed me to shift outside the jazz genre as a composer. My 2012 chamber jazz commission “The Territory” explores the state’s geology and cultural history. A Black history month commission for the 100th anniversary of Portland’s Reed College spawned “Step By Step: The Ruby Bridges Suite,” a concert piece based on the life of the civil-rights icon Ruby Bridges. In 2017, I was commissioned by Portland’s Third Angle New Music to compose “Sanctuaries” a chamber opera exploring the racial and political underpinnings of gentrification and the experience of displaced residents of color in Portland, Oregon’s historically black Albina district.

The music scene here reflects a great deal about the city’s ethos. Portland’s progressive reputation attracts creative people of all stripes to the region. It is a large city that feels like a small town. Instead of six degrees of separation, there are usually no more than two. That interconnectedness and proximity makes for some strikingly original ensembles, and has presented opportunities for me to interact with urban planners, scientists, political activists, entrepreneurs, winemakers, coffee roasters, chefs, and artisans from many fields. Added to this is Portland’s DIY culture, which makes for a fertile environment in which to start and incubate new projects. On the downside, the lack of a substantial philanthropic base can make it hard to scale those projects beyond the startup phase.

Its dubious distinction as the whitest city of its size in America means Portland also has plenty of historical and cultural baggage to address. As a Black artist, I often have to look outside my own locale for artists with whom I share cultural identity. At the same time, I have had opportunities to share my voice at tables where folks are reimagining Portland’s future in terms of public space, policy and funding. These encounters have given rise to projects like The Soul Restoration Project’s Albina Arts Salon, a six-month residency in which I activated a historic space in the heart of Portland’s Black community that transformed a vacant storefront into an ongoing hub of arts and cultural activity. In all I’m grateful for the reception and recognition my work has received here. I was inducted into the Jazz Society of Oregon Hall of Fame in 2009. And was named Portland Jazz Hero by the Jazz Journalists Association in 2019. In 2020, I received the Governor’s Arts Award, Oregon’s highest arts honor.

In many ways Portland is still reeling from the twin pandemics of COVID and racial unrest that started in 2020. Our boarded up downtown still bears the signs of protests that turned our streets into an “anarchist jurisdiction”, and the economic impacts that increased homelessness. The past two years have also brought clarity regarding the critical role the arts have to play in reimagining our cities and healing the traumas we face as communities, as well as deepening my engagement with communities of color and my own role in challenging systemic racism. Even as these efforts have drawn me back to my roots in jazz, I have been fortunate to expand my own circle with creators of color from a number of artforms . I am seeing some organizational transitions from performative acts of inclusion to meaningful equity, and I am interested to see how the city navigates the rechartering of its leadership after the vote this fall.

Music Picks

Here is a link to the title track for my upcoming CD entitled The New Black. This piece is both a retrospective of my early years in New York City, and a statement of identity that celebrates the joy and unfettered possibility of Black artistic expression.

This is a link to a track from the latest CD by Blue Cranes, one of my favorite bands that embodies the ethos of generosity, collaboration and genre-crossing expression that defines Portland to me. From their 2021 album Voices, this piece “Tatehuari” is a collaboration with Mexican-American vocalist/composer Edna Vazquez, with whom I created a 2018 performance project around immigration called “21 Cartas.


Kerry Politzer

Kerry Politzer at the piano

Kerry Politzer

I moved to Portland in 2011 because my husband, George Colligan, accepted a position as Jazz Area Coordinator at Portland State University. Currently, I serve there as an adjunct on the jazz faculty as well as at the University of Portland.

As far as what makes Portland unique, there are a lot of creative, innovative artists here fusing different genres and mediums; I think that’s really exciting. One organization that is tremendously supportive of original music and projects is the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble (PJCE), which operates a record label (PJCE Records) and is also associated with the ten-year-old Montavilla Jazz Festival. This local festival features a wide variety and diversity of Portland-based artists. I will be headlining it this year with my quintet, as we are about to release my seventh album, In a Heartbeat (PJCE Records).

The pandemic has been challenging for all of us, of course. Many venues closed, and we really missed social and artistic connections. I had received a grant from Portland State University to host the excellent Brazilian pianist Cassio Vianna for a concert and master class, but everything went virtual. So, I instead enlisted the help of several musicians (including Cassio) to put together a YouTube mini-series about Brazilian piano legends.

During the summer of 2020, when things seemed to be at their most dire, I purchased a battery-powered amplifier and started hosting jazz concerts in my driveway. This turned into The Driveway Jazz Series, which is now in its third year and has received grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. The free series is live-streamed and continues to bring the jazz community together, not just in Portland, but around the country. The pandemic really brought home to me how important it is to build community and to share music together.

Music Picks

Here’s a track from my most recent album (not the one that will be released in October):

And here is a recommendation for my endlessly prolific pianist/drummer/trumpeter husband! (I designed the album cover.)


Jay Derderian

Jay Derderian

Jay Derderian

Below my feet are the glistening slabs of concrete leading me towards the waterfront. From my right arrives the compounded smells of 20 different food carts, each offering tastes of their own little worlds. To my left is “Big Pink,” the iconic pink skyscraper so often seen in Portland’s skyline. In front of me about five or six blocks down is the waterfront. If I were to follow the Willamette River along the waterfront towards the north, I could find myself at Saturday Market – a site for local artisans, artists, and food vendors to show off their goods, for folks to mingle, meet, learn, and support these artists – an open-air tapestry of creation. If I were instead to follow the river south, I could eventually find myself passing Salmon Street Fountain and arrive at the Hawthorne Bridge. From there, the entire East Side.

These are paths I’ve walked countless times, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get tired of them. But at the moment I still haven’t moved – instead, I’m looking at the concrete below my feet. There are these little chunks of glass embedded in it. They’re smokey with an airy hue of purple, and offer the faintest hint of what’s below the surface. As it turns out, this smokey glass was the only source of natural light for this section of Portland’s infamous Shanghai Tunnels. Right below my feet are the remnants of Portland’s darker pasts with a present day firebrand of activism that saw 150 nights of protests against the police built on top of it. This feels, and will always feel, at least for me, like the perfect place to compose.

I’ve performed in Portland State’s recital hall, a dance studio, a grocery store, a decommissioned steam boat, the middle of several fields, street corners, a graveyard, a warehouse, living rooms, coffee houses, and many, many other places across this city. I’ve been involved with a local new music organization called Cascadia Composers since 2008. They’ve been absolutely instrumental in getting tons of new music by local composers performed, and are just some of the loveliest people. I’ve also been incredibly fortunate to work with FearNoMusic and Third Angle – two absolutely top tier new music ensembles, both of whom have been leading the way in championing new voices locally and abroad. New Music is alive and well in this city, and remarkably adaptive to our world and our collective circumstances.

For myself, I’m currently in the middle of a graduate program in Computer Science. This has been my adaptation to the last 2 years. I suffered from major burnout at the start of 2020. I couldn’t compose, couldn’t build off old ideas, nor hear anything coming from that internal ether. It just… went silent. Like so many others, I also saw major projects fall apart, plans get canceled, opportunities vanish. The trajectory of the last decade and a half of my life suddenly stagnated. This was all in conjunction with losing my day job, so I needed to find a way to stay above water, if not for myself but for my daughter’s sake. Enter computers.

I’m a long way away from being done with music. I don’t think I ever will be. I still play nearly every day, and have managed to scribble some fragments here and there. I’ve spent the last two years using the skills learned through my CS program to develop algorithmic composition tools to aid me in my creative efforts. I can generate anything from purely random compositions to poly-rhythmic/modal canons (or really any process based composition) in seconds. I’ve been able to use these tools to generate hundreds of facsimiles – there will be ideas forever, and I plan to keep on building this framework. If the last two years have given me anything, it’s the ability to adapt and evolve my creative processes.

Portland is my home. The energy of this city has always fueled me, and I think it always will.

Music Picks

The People They Think We Are (2018) for piano, video, and fixed media. (Me). Performed by Kathy Supové

Your Absence, from Like Water, Like Sound, Like Breath by Bonnie Miksch. Performed by Renée Favand-See, mezzo soprano; Amelia Bierly, cello; Lisa Marsh, piano


Monica Ohuchi

Monica Ohuchi

Monica Ohuchi

I grew up in Seattle, so the Pacific Northwest has always felt like home to me. My husband, composer Kenji Bunch, is originally from Portland, so when we first met in New York City, we connected about this common background and shared desire to return one day. Soon after the birth of our first child, we took a leap of faith and decided to move back to be closer to our families. In a whirlwind, our Brooklyn condo sold in one weekend, I flew out and made an offer on a house, and just a few months later we found ourselves moving to Portland without any concrete work lined up, fingers tightly crossed that things would work out.  We’re both so grateful to have landed on our feet fairly quickly, and were welcomed with open arms by the vibrant music community here. We’ve now been living and working in Portland for nine years, and moving home to the PNW is the best decision we have ever made.  I’m currently wrapping up my eighth season as Executive Director and Pianist of Fear No Music, and my first as Program Director of Music Performance at Reed College.

Portland is well known for its vigorous DIY ethos that embraces creativity and grass-roots initiatives with a cheerful lack of regard for the credentials that traditionally grant “permission” for such undertakings. Everywhere you turn, someone is brewing their own beer, bottling their own hot sauce, writing a novel, or building their social justice-driven non-profit from the ground up. The spirit of imaginative resourcefulness that keeps Portland “weird” and alive is exactly the reason the new music scene thrives. The music community is intimate and supportive of one another. Portland new music groups mostly pull from the same roster of musicians, so we all feel like one big family and celebrate each other’s successes. And just as Portlanders love their books, there’s also a voracious appetite for experiencing live music, and open minds eager to discover new sounds and ideas.

While recognizing the tremendous difficulties so many of us faced during the pandemic, our music non-profit, Fear No Music, fared as well as we could have hoped. There were challenges at the beginning of the lockdown period, given the need for an immediate pivot to online-everything, and the steep learning curve and trial-and-error process to find the right people and resources to help solve various unforeseen difficulties. However, Fear No Music is a relatively small organization, which allowed us to be nimble enough to adapt quickly to the necessary changes, and as a result, we were able to flourish moving forward. Of course, in addition to the pandemic, the nationwide reckoning of our racial history and present-day culture has caused a tremendous upheaval in the music world, bringing long-overdue attention to composers and musicians traditionally overlooked from mainstream audiences. For our organization, this has meant an even greater push for equity and diversity in our programs and initiatives, and a move to a donation-based ticketing model for our concerts, to promote accessibility, while still maintaining excellence in our programming.

Music Picks

Fear No Music: Monica Ohuchi, piano, performing BQE by Hiromi Uehara:

Portland Taiko performing Dango Jiru by Kenji Bunch:


Alex Arnold a.k.a. !mindparade

Alex Arnold a.k.a. !mindparade

Alex Arnold a.k.a. !mindparade

I moved to Portland from my home town of Bloomington, Indiana in 2017. I’m a multi-instrumentalist, one of those musicians that played in multiple bands for years. I was lucky enough to travel and see much of the US via touring and independent road trips. I always felt drawn to the PNW; the mystical feeling of the mountains and the dynamic landscapes appealed to me. The mist whispered something important to me. I decided it was time to move to a major city with a larger music scene to grow my band/songwriting project !mindparade. As an outdoorsy person, I thought, well, if I’m going to move my whole life, I should probably move near mountains. I’m so glad I made that choice. As soon as I honed in on Portland as a potential place to live, I began applying for jobs here, and landed an internship at a music licensing music company that I had signed to as an recording artist. I moved as soon as I had the opportunity, and threw myself into every aspect of music in Portland that I could. I didn’t really know anyone here when I arrived, and just started biking around to shows, meeting musicians.

There is a high level of musicianship in the scene here. So many great artists doing their thing, and in so many different genres of music. The city lacks a robust music industry compared to places like NYC and LA, or Nashville or Austin. That means there are less of those kinds of industry jobs, less labels, etc., but maybe that means people in music here may be in it for other reasons than money or prestige. I’ve found people in this community to be genuine and passionate. People like experimentalism and nerdiness here. It’s cool to be nice here. It seems like so many people you meet are in a band or are music fans, and that means more people to connect with. The location is incredible as well, as the surrounding nature provides endless perspective and inspiration. The city is nestled between very tall mountains and a very deep ocean.

Moving here was definitely a good choice for me overall. I was lucky to find an inspiring and engaging community. When everything stopped during the pandemic, I found myself focused on songwriting. I’ve worked up around 4 albums of !mindparade material that I am now chiseling into completion. It wasn’t necessarily a choice I made, it was most likely a coping mechanism. It was definitely a challenge to not play live for so long, which is something I’m so happy is happening again. There is really nothing else in life like live music.

Music Picks

Here’s one of my songs to include…

(!mindparade: “The Vision”)

And a local recommendation:

(Paper Gates: “Ophiuchus”)

On the Value of Time

Not too long ago, I received an email invitation to apply for an opportunity to work with an established ensemble. The application was a highly involved process and would make considerable demands on my time—including a trip out of state. If awarded the appointment, the position would require many obligations in addition to composing, including outreach, lectures, and a series of curated concerts.

The only mention of money? “We’re in the process of securing some grants,” the email read. Oh, okay.

I politely declined the invitation, explaining that I was already fully committed for the season in question (which was true). But, the more I contemplated the massive time commitment requested by the organization, the more troubled I became. How was it remotely appropriate to contact a person about a highly specialized, complex job—which also required a time-consuming, rigorous application process—without mentioning compensation?

This kind of treatment is rampant throughout our industry, and I know that performers certainly experience their own versions of the above scenario. Our field is plagued by an aversion toward discussing money, and this problem exists on both sides of the hiring equation. For composers, however, this issue is compounded by the very nature of our work. Because composers’ processes are diverse and often opaque, potential commissioners sometimes don’t know how to value what we do. This lack of understanding can result in a reluctance to discuss compensation and often justifies gross demands on our time and abilities.

Out of all the wacky things that composers do, money ought to be the most uncomplicated and straightforward component. When you approach a composer about a potential commission or collaboration, funding should be among the first issues you address. While it may feel distasteful to discuss money alongside your artistic vision, know that avoiding the topic—and even placing the impetus on the composer to inquire—is enormously disrespectful. Most composers wouldn’t claim to be in this business for the money, but we do expect to be treated professionally and compensated appropriately.

So. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you approach a composer and begin a conversation about a project:

Reach out to us in advance. Way in advance. Composition is a time-consuming activity. I do not write my music in “real” time, and I often plan my projects up to two years in advance. While there are exceptions, I typically can’t take on last-minute projects. Definitely reach out and ask us, but keep in mind that we’re often planning a season or two (or more!) ahead.

Be up front about the amount and source of your funding. This is critically important, regardless of your budget size. If you’re working with a low budget, unsure of your resources, or unable to pay—don’t misrepresent your financial limitations. We’ll respect your honesty, and if we can’t work with you this time, we’ll be more likely to consider future projects.

Directly address the work that you and/or your organization are putting in. Programming, performances, promotion, recording—what’s your investment? What are you contributing to make this project worthwhile for both parties?

Understand that demands on time separate from composing must be compensated. Community outreach? Masterclasses? A meet-and-greet with donors and subscribers? Great! Some musicians might offer these services for free or as part of their commitment; however, you should not make this assumption. Our time is valuable, and we need to be paid for our time.

Speaking of non-composing tasks: Address the time, effort, and expense that goes into engraving and preparing parts. This one is different for everyone—some composers consider engraving and parts preparation integral parts of their compositional process. Others don’t, and many composers outsource this work. Either way, budget both time and money to accommodate this phase.

Don’t act surprised or attempt to guilt us when we don’t offer a service for free or for a low/discounted fee. I’m frequently approached by individuals seeking music critiques, new arrangements of current works, business and marketing advice, and copyediting—with the expectation that I offer these services for free. When I indicate otherwise, I’m often met with incredulous responses like “But this will only take a few minutes!” Right, cool, but since when do you get to determine the value of my time?

Composers, I encourage you to examine how you spend your time and how you offer it to others. It is imperative to understand collaborators’ expectations before agreeing to a project (and always make sure your exact responsibilities are detailed in a contract). Guard your time, and don’t be afraid to set firm boundaries.

Time is valuable. This is something that I remember every day when I sit down to compose—truly, respect for others’ time is demanded by the very nature of my craft. The time that an audience member spends listening to my music ought to be worthwhile, and that’s the standard that I strive to uphold.

In short: We, as composers, respect your time. Please respect ours.

Music For Tomorrow’s World

Out of the Box banner with embedded headshot photo of Jessie Cox by Adrien H. Tillmann

Reflections of the future as digs to uncover what the present holds, maybe as possibility, maybe as impossibility, but surely a practice that sounds an open totality, that is to say improvisation as togetherness, or maybe, consent not to be a single being.[1] Rather than communing in formations, out of and with information as data, or bodies, or domains—sovereign authorities in general—this writing is an attempt to think through the prompt: “…our community ponder aspects of what music will be like ten years into the future,”[2] not only towards a future, but from a future, one I can hear, but also one I might already live in, that radically shifts notions of community, time, and space, under the heading of, and through music, as thought refigured. In listening to the present as an archeological dig,[3] as a site incomplete and still improvising itself out and in, like writing and reading onto and out-from this page, musical thinking can allow a shift in relation. When relation, to time, space, and others, becomes poetic, that is opaque and at the same time fully inseparable, then thinking with the future becomes a reflection of a future: like stars that shine from a past long gone, and mirror us into positions of futurity. It is through music that in this elaboration time is reflected, redirected, so as to allow for another kind of direction, another point of attraction, and maybe we can do away with the point as limit, and point becomes hieroglyphics of sound in motion/relation.

All of this is to say that in this essay I engage the future not as something that comes later on, that replaces a complete and whole present, but rather that the future is a method of thinking that shows something that is already here. In other words, I see the task of such a practice as the task of practicing, of playing, in the present, or maybe in front of an audience, that which I want to matter. As Marshall Allen poignantly said, “You want a better world. You create a better world.”[4] It is thus not so much a thinking through of time but rather a thinking through of music as world-building, as space-time creation: music as a tool to be together (with oneself and with others at the same time, that is also where this distinction as contradistinction becomes irrelevant) in space-time, which is itself that music as poetics of relation. What follows is simply the elaboration of what this means because it requires, on the one hand, a radical shift, and on the other, simply a remembering. Ultimately, this writing is something like a devotional practice,[5] maybe we can call it a meditation, or a recitation of those sincerities of sounding that remind of what is at stake, of being together (in an apartness)[6] through writing (sounds), and a giving thanks to and for those musicians that provide a possibility for spaces to resound this.

Charles Uzor’s work 8’46” subtitled George Floyd in Memoriam is a work written in 2020, from the geopolitical space of Switzerland, shortly after George Floyd’s murder and the incipient of global Black Lives Matter protests. It consists of 7 minutes and 46 seconds of breathing sounds (no instrumental playing) followed by one minute of silence. 8’46” is the first of two works written for George Floyd since 2020 by Uzor and it demonstrates (and places petitions for such thinking) new music’s relation to such protests. Together the two works uncover music’s (and as a specific case new music’s) entanglement with and in blackness. Its title references John Cage’s 4’33” through its similarity in appearance, while at the same time pointing to global protests under the heading of this duration, which was the initial duration used in court in the trial against Derek Chauvin, the police officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck, for what later was revised to well over 9 minutes, killing him.

It is in this poetics of relation played out by composer Charles Uzor that a possibility of new music becomes amplified (and maybe refined): under the heading of this experimental practice a radical shifting of the world can take place. On the one hand the piece points with this duration, as well as its sounds, to an antiblack world, while, at the same time, speaking of another world: one announced by the work in form of the duration as symbol for the mattering of Black lives. The music becomes staging ground for a performative assertion that black lives indeed do matter. Uzor’s 8’46” reflects a sociality, in the breathing sounds made by the performers, as well as in their silences (which both appear also under the heading of a reflection of observers listening as it is in 4’33”), announced in blackness.

In this scene Music, or music we might bring forth under a heading of new music, is stage to rework our relation to the world—whether that is combating antiblack structures or a coming together in/as/with blackness. In this sense it is music and it is blackness, it is improvised sociality, that is to say a consent not to be a single being, it is an impossibility to be without being in poetic relation. Music becomes a space within which people can be themselves in a common that is founded on and with each member’s unique ways—this I’ve learned from musicians such as Cecil Taylor. In Nina Fukuoka’s Sugar, Spice, and All Things Nice this space is shaped too, and what becomes revealed is how such space-formation is always also an act of reworking spaces around this music—from the music’s seemingly more immediate institutional conditions, to larger questions for this planet. A work that takes accounts of experiences of sexism in the music-world as its basis, collected in, and as, the process of compositions in dialogues with others, Sugar, Spice, and All Things Nice’s life moves by way of the social lives entangled in the composer and the music. Music becomes entrenched in lives. Thus this work takes the task of making music as simultaneously a task of being with others in sociality, and does such alongside an aim of revealing and combating sexism—antisocial brutalities. In recounting such brutalities the performers, the composer Fukuoka, and those whose voices flow into the work, reveal this musical work (this working in and with music) as part of social lives—the music cannot be separated, it does not stand by itself because by listening to it we always engage a complex set of entanglements, lives lived in sound, music as living with things. Thus while at once bringing to the fore how women are being discriminated against in the music field the piece also points to, as example, how music has the potential to be that space which allows for flowering of lives. In addressing the problems surrounding it, the music becomes space for that which is denied: (women’s) lives lived in music. Sugar, Spice, and All Things Nice redoubles this fact in its sounding through the use of textures moving out from and in excess of words spoken, and vice versa—not even in the act of performing or listening can these lives be held.

It is in these two examples that I hear what project of futurity I want to partake in. Music as a world redrawing act, as a process of living in poetic relation with each other and oneself (which is not one any longer), that remaps this world, into something else already here, behind a wormhole, some kind of alterdestiny[7] that was always already present but that we can maybe hear better by looking into the stars, to a future and a past as the present. As skins clash, the sound of drums brings a remembering—a reminder, remainder, and rejoining—of that which music always was, how meeting and departing are always the same—sounds in music. Sounds cease to be of relevance as moments in-between and become that which is always already stronger than itself[8] or any self, or selves in or out of touch. It is music, that blackness beyond wholes with holes as holds. “This is the theme of the stargazers, stargazers in the sky. This is the song of tomorrow’s world, a cosmic paradise.”[9]

NOTES

The article’s title is playing on the Sun Ra Arkestra’s record title Music From Tomorrow’s World.

1. Referencing here Fred Moten’s particular engagement with such translation by Christopher Winks of Édouard Glissant’s phrase “consent à n’être plus un seul.” In Moten’s formulation the consent is not given by a subject but is rather more something like what I would like to call a remembering of what was already there behind the veil.

2. This excerpt is from the email by Frank J. Oteri where he inquired with me as to whether I’d like to write this text.

3. Kodwo Eshun’s seminal article “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism” explores the ways in which afrofuturistic practices use the future to rework the present. To this aim he writes out from the notion of the archeological dig—his paper opens with future life-forms digging in their past, our present.

4. Allen, Marshall. 2019. “Out There A Minute With Marshall Allen.” PWPvideo. May 23, 2019. Audio, 5:02 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdTR-fiLfwQ).

5. I have to acknowledge here the origin of this word thought as writing coming out from my conversations with Fred Moten.

6. I’m playing with Karen Barad’s brilliant neologism together-a-part that plays out so beautifully the impossibility of actually being apart or together because of, to put it very oversimplified, entanglement, which is also to say, for me, because there is no single entity to be by itself or with someone else. I’m also thinking here of the ways in which this pandemic has played out and upon this together-apart complication. I invoke with such reminder my longterm collaborator and partner Lucy Clifford with whom I’ve learned of this in grooves of sound and life.

7. This term comes from Sun Ra’s philosophical thought.

8. I’m referencing here George E. Lewis’ A Power Stronger Than Itself, not particularly because of the title’s words but rather because of the book and what it documents: the AACM as a musical collective where music was, and still is, vehicle for lives as well as transformation of spaces and worlds.

9. Sun Ra Arkestra, “Theme of the Stargazers.”

 

Different Cities Different Voices – Austin

The skyline of Austin, TX

Different Cities Different Voices is a series from NewMusicBox that explores music communities across the US through the voices of local creators and innovators. Discover what is unique about each city’s new music scene through a set of personal essays written by people living and creating there, and hear their music as well as music from local artists selected by each essayist. The series is meant to spark conversation and appreciation for those working to support new music in the US, so please continue the conversation online about who else should be spotlighted in each city and tag @NewMusicBox.

Since folks from all over the world made their first post-pandemic pilgrimage to Austin for SXSW in mid-March, we waited a bit for the dust to settle so we could shine light on some of the extraordinarily creative people who are an important part of the Austin music scene all year round. – FJO

Kenzie Slottow

Kenzie Slottow

Kenzie Slottow

I came to Austin from Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2010 to study flute at the University of Texas. The composition department and electronic music departments especially at the UT Butler School of Music were full of creative, collaborative and bold students and professors – there used to be an annual showcase called Ears, Eyes and Feet, in which composers, choreographers and media artists from three different departments worked together to create multi-disciplinary performances. I didn’t know at the time that Austin had only a few new music ensembles playing very experimental stuff, and there wasn’t a big contemporary classical scene. However, there was some spark at UT in those few years – several of my colleagues at UT went on to start contemporary classical / new music organizations and collectives themselves (Fast Forward Austin, Density512, Tetractys, Line Upon Line Percussion), and some spectacular crossover classical groups came to town as well and stayed (Invoke Sound, Kraken Quartet), intermingling with the existing long-standing organizations that already championed experimental music and cross-disciplinary collaboration in Austin (Church of the Friendly Ghost, Fusebox Festival, and others). It felt like the beginning of a special period of growth for the Austin new music scene, and it has just continued to blossom since then. I was very moved by this year’s ATX Composers Showcase at SXSW, 12 years later, where many of these groups played on the same stage. Especially 2 years into the pandemic, it felt like a joyful reunion and celebration remembering that yes, we are committed and excited to make wild and strange music and soundscapes and improvisations in our city.

Part of the magic of Austin for me is its open mics. I’ve heard it’s not the same in other cities – they are an extremely collaborative and supportive environment with wildly talented musicians playing almost always original songs. I briefly moved away from Austin after doing my masters at UT and returned as I was starting to write my own music, and every week there were at least 4 incredibly welcoming open mics I could go to and try out my new tunes and arrangements, with a lot of the same supportive, friendly faces frequenting each one. I felt so comfortable finding and refining my musical voice in that environment, and met many friends, future collaborators and even partners. Now you can find that vibe at Mozart’s and Opa’s, with the same open incredibly welcoming and enthusiastic open mic leaders ushering in musicians new to Austin or new to writing their own stuff.

And then there’s the fact that I’ve always been able to find creative projects here. Austin’s known for lots of styles of music and its growing tech scene, but along with that there’s so much other creative activity that happens here – film, dance, visual art, improv comedy all have these vibrant communities around them. If I don’t have a project, and if I didn’t have a network of people to check and see what they were up to, I know I could always go to one of the many amazing local coffee shops and meet an artist or a musician, or if I’m in a more film/theater mood I could find a pre-production meeting happening at least one table. I also love that I can reasonably expect there to be a guitar to jam on in anyone’s house (or at the very least, a ukulele). There’s a vibrancy here of people just generally being excited to make art. I hope this energy can continue to flourish as Austin grows rapidly as a city (which, even without a pandemic, can be hard on creatives). It’s been incredibly challenging during the pandemic as early on, gigs disappeared, and then later venues – even iconic ones – have had to shut down. There is energy and determination here for collective action among artists though, and a few great organizations to support and advocate for musicians (Austin Music Foundation, HAAM), and I hope that we can continue to push for this city to financially support its artists.

I actually ended up finding a new Austin community and creative outlet during the early part of the pandemic. The Hideout Theatre, Austin’s longest running improv theater, moved all its classes and shows online within a couple of months of March 2020. At the time I had just produced and conducted a big experimental concert of improvised chamber music in person, before the shutdown. I was taking inspiration from theatrical improv and improv comedy to see how cross-genre musicians might relate to and connect with each other to improvise in large groups. The Hideout community was so full of creative determination and energy, and they invited me to experiment with livescoring narratives with groups of improvising instrumentalists ONLINE. It was a great feeling to bring many of my musician collaborators into the new improv community I’d entered. Since most of us suddenly had a lot of time on our hands, there was creative fuel and really talented people who would otherwise be busy gigging and touring and whatever, available to experiment with online performance art forms. With some incredible collaborators, I ended up taking part in some projects that really pushed virtual theatre boundaries in 2020 and 2021, and I like to think we’ll all bring the insights and the deep connection we found in those challenges into our work back in person in 2022.

You never know what kind of creative work or wonderful people you’re going to find around the corner here, and as a person who thrives with a variety of creative activities and values community, I can’t think of a place I’d rather call home than Austin. The sunshine also helps! While the various artistic communities haven’t really deeply cross-pollinated much up to this point, there’s definitely a lot of energy of coming together, and room for interweaving those communities, which is something I look forward to in Austin’s current chapter.

Music picks…

Kenzie Slottow: “Neverland” from the EP Hold It Up to the Sun

Cassandra Elese: “Coming In Hot”


Craig Hella Johnson

Craig Hella Johnson conducting

Craig Hella Johnson (photo by Scott Van Osdol)

Austin kind of chose me through a job offer from The University of Texas. I was just finishing a doctoral program at Yale and I had an interview which I decided to do just for fun. I never thought I would actually live in Texas as I had a funky, terrible Northerner’s bias. I enjoyed the interview and had a great time visiting this city. It surprised me with all of its green and beautiful places and all the diversity of music happening. I was offered the job and the rest is history.

Austin seemed like a really great place to set up camp. Much to my delight and surprise, I worked for 10ish years as the Director of Choral Activities at The University of Texas and made many friends there. I got to know so many musicians during that time and also began Conspirare during that period around 1993.  Someone told me something once which was very helpful. I remember it and live by it today: “Welcome to Austin. In Austin we take our work and passions seriously, but we don’t take ourselves seriously.” This was fabulous input for me and I have found that to be true of Austin cultural generally.  It makes it a really pleasurable place to live and work.

I experience a sense of play, curiosity, and exploration that weaves together Austin’s new music scene. There’s a spirit in which all of these musics, and I am saying that deliberately as a plural, kind of comingle together. The classical music scene here feels quite naturally at home next to the indie scene and next to the country and blues and soul and rock and roll and Americana. I think it’s just beginning to almost explode in a wonderful way just like the rest of the city.

The cancellation of SXSW trumpeted the arrival of the pandemic in Austin. For me, it meant more time at home, more time to have that interior relationship with my soul, my heart and my interests. There were times when even though it was very busy there could also be time for reflection and pause.

At Conspirare we were dedicated from the first day we knew this was happening to doing everything we could to continue to engage our artists, to offer them work that could be creative and meaningful but also to just be able pay them and help support them through this period. I feel immensely grateful that we were able to do that. Throughout the pandemic period we created concerts at great distances from one another for online presentations. It felt like the demands of this medium called us out to expand the boundaries of the choral music. I got to meet some wonderful new collaborators –editors, filmmakers, videographers, and creatives of all types. Even as we all felt the great burden of this time, we continued to make art, to express ourselves, and to support people in remembering that we are still here, we’re still alive, we still have beating hearts. There is still a need for art that continues to support us moving forward in our lives and invites us into more awareness and the deeper experience of what it means to be human, to be alive.

Music picks…

Craig Hella Johnson: “We Tell Each Other Stories” from Considering Matthew Shepard

Eliza Gilkyson: “Reunion”
She is a favorite singer-songwriter and a cherished friend


Omar Thomas

Omar Thomas

Omar Thomas (photo by Izzy Berdan Photography)

I moved to Austin mid 2020 to begin an appointment as Assistant Professor of Composition and Jazz Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to moving here, I had completed two separate residencies as the featured composer for the UT Wind Ensemble and the UT Symphony Band. Having participated in many composer residencies all across the country, one of the standout aspects of my UT residency was Austin itself, being a place that feels uniquely its own with amazing culinary offerings as diverse and ubiquitous as its live music venues.

Working predominantly in the wind ensemble field these days, Austin offers a special and unique combination of a world-class conservatory-style music institution surrounded by (and increasingly incorporating) local and popular music styles, while being centrally located among some of the strongest educational music programs and performing ensembles in the country. The wind ensemble field is one that is leading the way in the creation of new works for the medium, and Austin offers access to some of the nation’s leading ensembles who are willing to breathe life into these pieces on some of the field’s largest performance arenas.

The largest challenge of the past two years in my field has been navigating creating music safely (or at all) with ensembles that average forty musicians blowing air through instruments – clearly not ideal for helping to curb the spread of a respiratory virus. It has been truly amazing (and exhausting) to watch large ensemble instrumental and choral music adapt, as composers came together to create music designed to be played by any combination of very few instruments, conductors reached out via Zoom to inspirational figures within the field and beyond to keep musicians motivated as we waited for the opportunity to safely return to making music, and students took it upon themselves to use technology to not only connect with one another via virtual performances, but also to create music that capitalized on our virtual reality. We kept each other motivated long enough to make it to out current moment where we are back sharing space, art, connection, and community with one another and with audiences, grounded
by deeper gratitude than any of us has ever felt.

Music picks…

Mine:
“I Am” performed by the Omar Thomas Large Ensemble

Austin:
John Mackey: “Immortal Thread, So Weak” from Wine Dark Sea (Symphony for Band): performed by the University of Texas Wind Ensemble conducted by Jerry Junkin


Stephanie Bergara

Stephanie Bergara on stage singing with a microphone.

Stephanie Bergara (photo by Jake Rabin)

I’m a born and raised Austinite, so for myself, working and living as an Austin musician has always just been, The Way. It was invested in to my heart and mind at an early age that musicians deserve respect. I have been consuming live music for so long, I couldn’t even tell you what my first concert was. It had just always been the thing that you do. When my son was born, just over four years ago, I knew I Austin would be home forever, or until he finishes school. I love Austin, I am Austin, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

There is just a different unique energy that runs through this town in a way I haven’t quite seen anywhere else. I worked in the music industry for nearly ten years before starting my band where I got to travel the globe, and playing music has allowed me to tour in some of the greatest music cities in America. When the band travels to different places, and we tell people we are Austin musicians, that comes with it’s own branding, it’s own meaning. It’s special, it means something.

Musicians were the first members of the work force to be asked to stop working and they have been the last to be asked to come back to work in any pre-covid capacity. It’s been hard, we’ve been forced to get creative, learn new skills, leave old business models behind and be quick to adapt to change. I also chose to release my first solo effort during the pandemic, which was not ideal, but it was time. The Banda has been lucky to continue to play across the country. We’ve relied heavily on social media to stay in touch with fans and are working through mediums like TikTok to stay active with our audience. Onward through the fog, as they say.

Music picks…

My two selections are my song, “Rear View” —

And a song from Austin band Nané, (who’s lead singer, Daniel Sahad, passed away just two weeks ago) called “Ladybird.”


Alan Retamozo

Alan Retamozo

Alan Retamozo

I moved to Austin about 12 years ago and have since been working across various music and art scenes as a performer, composer, administrator, and teacher. As a jazz guitarist and composer, I’ve worked with various small groups, big bands, and my own conducted group improvisation octets and chamber ensembles. Some of the more experimental and classical Austin ensembles and organizations I’ve worked with include Church of the Friendly Ghost (COTFG), Less Than 10 Music, Collide Arts, and Future Traditions Festival.

Even in my own short time here, the city has gone through dramatic changes. Like most large and mid-sized American cities, Austin has continuing––and in many cases worsening–– problems with gentrification, racism, lack of affordability, inherited and perpetuated segregation, and problems with police brutality. But, Austin is also home to a great variety of community and activist organizations fighting tirelessly against the systemic oppression of our state and sometimes local governments. As Austin booms and tremendous amounts of money comes in through tech and other industries, artists see firsthand the way that that money, and the publicity around it, doesn’t ultimately benefit the communities that give this city its cultural identity. In spite of these challenges, this city generally still takes pride in trying to celebrate inclusivity, acceptance, and counter-culture values, and the artists, ensembles, and organizations that make up our cultural landscape do amazing work. In short, Austin’s economic and social reality is complex and our art communities are forever adapting to the challenges and opportunities presented by these realities.

Austin’s music and art communities are full of the most giving, creative, and determined people I have ever met. And the way that the people of this city embrace and honor music and musicians is truly special. For example, the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians (HAAM) provides health insurance, dental coverage, hearing clinics, access to professional mental health services, housing assistance, and more to Austin-based musicians at no cost. When the pandemic caused the sudden collapse of the entertainment and live performance industries, HAAM and other organizations like Austin Creative Alliance, and the City of Austin itself, provided grants, groceries, and other aid specifically for artists.

The onset of the pandemic brought the momentum and direction of my work––rooted in group improvisation and interaction––to a sudden stop. Being unable to work in person with other musicians was shocking and disorienting (an experience so many of us in the performing arts world can relate to). One of the things that kept me going was the opportunity to join a wonderful group of classical new music friends forming Less Than 10 Music, a new music ensemble producing weekly virtual concerts featuring guest artists from around the country. Just having the communication and weekly concert deadlines really helped keep me going and kept me from falling too far into a sense of aimlessness. Some of the guest highlights and collaborations have included Ocelot, Nina Shekhar, Jason Thorpe Buchanan, and a masterclass with George Lewis.

So, what about the actual music scene?  Well, there’s too much to possibly cover here, but I’ll do my best. Some of the many experimental performing arts organizations and ensembles include: Epistrophy Arts; COTFG; Salvage Vanguard Theater; Rude Mechs; Sonic Transmissions; Liminal Sound Series; New Media Art and Sound Summit; Fusebox Festival; dadageek; OUTsider Fest; and Six Square. In addition to year-round performances and premieres by local artists, these organizations have hosted guest artists including Henry Threadgill, Maria Chavez, The Necks, Thumbscrew, Turning Jewels Into Water, and Peter Brötzmann. Among the ensembles and organizations more closely rooted in classical new music, there are groups such as line upon line, Tetractys, Invoke String Quartet, Austin New Music CO-op, and Density 512. There are music education organizations doing great work with young musicians such as Golden Hornet, Austin Chamber Music Center, Austin Classical Guitar, and Austin Soundwaves. Larger institutions like the Blanton Museum of Art, The Contemporary Austin, and Big Medium have recently commissioned and hosted large scale sound installation works by local and international artists like Steve Parker. KMFA, our classical radio station, has a wonderful new concert and recording space where they frequently host and promote new music performances. The University of Texas Butler School of Music composition departments and Electronic Music Studios (UTEMS) do a great job fostering up-and-coming composers and performers from around the world.

Of course, Austin also has a vibrant jazz scene with various weekly jam sessions and performance opportunities. Spaces like The Elephant Room, Parker Jazz Club, and Monks Jazz Club host a year-round lineup of local and touring artists, big bands premiering new works, and live recordings. We are also blessed to have luminary jazz artists and mentors in our community such as trombonist Andre Hayward and pianist/composer Dr. James Polk, among others. Vocalist, Joshua Banbury, splits his time between Austin and New York and has recently worked with The American Lyric Theater, The National Black Theater, The Kennedy Center, and made his solo debut at Lincoln Center with the New York Philharmonic. I’ve attached a link for him below, and I extremely encourage all to listen. Local jazz musicians frequently play and tour as band members in the pop music industry and during Austin City Limits Festival, SXSW and more. I couldn’t even begin to cover that side of the music scene, let alone our thriving dance, visual, and performing arts, food, and improv comedy scenes, in this short essay. Lastly, I can’t forget to mention the amazing Indian Classical Music scene here, supported by organizations like The Indian Classical Music Circle of Austin (ICMCA).

Recently, at a SXSW show featuring Austin composers, I was deeply moved, running into so many people I hadn’t seen in person in years. It was a wonderful experience and sparked a new sense of enthusiasm and hope for continuing my own work that had been dampened for some time. As we sort of continue to emerge from the ups and downs of the last two pandemic years, I’m feeling hopeful about who will be coming through town and what we will be creating together in the coming years.

Music picks…

Ghost Play
Alan Retamozo (guitar, electronics) and Katherine Vaughn (dance)

Brightest and Best
Forgotten Folklore featuring Joshua Banbury and Kevin Sherwin


Tara Bhattacharya

A costumed Tara Bhattacharya holding a small radio and standing near a group of foghorns.

Tara Bhattacharya in the performance of Steve Parker’s Foghorn Elegy (2021) at The Contemporary Austin, Laguna Gloria. (Photo by Brian Fitzsimmons)

I moved to Austin around a decade ago to live and work with experimental composer and synthesizer player Rick Reed. His releases can be found on the local Austin music label, Elevator Bath. We were married for about four years and he was the reason I started playing the ARP Odyssey. Some of my most fruitful collaborations have been with Rick including live scoring for the films of Aldo Tambellini (at the Austin Film Society), Andy Warhol’s Batman Dracula (at Alamo Drafthouse) and composing work together for Ken Jacobs’s Nervous Magic Lantern Festival (at Anthology Film Archives and Secret Project Robot in New York City as well as First Street Studio in Austin).

I was born and raised in London, U.K. to Bengali parents and my early musical exposure is of great importance to my work. My musical training started as a child with Indian music; my mother is a well-known Tagorean artist and she taught me how to play harmonium and learn all the songs from Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali. Throughout school, I learnt to play flute and sang in chamber choir. Also, since I grew up around a large Afro-Caribbean Diaspora in West London, I witnessed the Notting Hill Carnival annually and became closely familiarized with the traditions of reggae and calypso. Both traditions play an important role with the rhythmic aspect of my music, as subtle as it is. By my late teens, l started to experiment with guitar feedback and radio art and started following the Onkyo music scene from Japan. Onkyo expanded my understanding of electroacoustic music, prepared instruments, and analogue synthesizers.  As a curator, I brought Toshimaru Nakamura and Tetuzi Akiyama to play in Austin in 2015, which was a total dream come true.

Before I moved to the U.S.A. in the late ’90s, I worked for British guitarist Derek Bailey whose book, Improvisation, which was later turned into a Channel 4 docuseries of the same name, seen throughout many households in the U.K. when I was a child.  I worked for him and his wife Karen Brookman at their label Incus Records for a few years. I was 18 years old when he convinced me to move to NYC. I did and have lived in the US for almost 25 years now. He passed away in 2005. I thought about Derek a lot during the pandemic and what he would’ve felt about it, had he been alive. He preferred playing with other people, much more than playing solo. I share a similar sentiment to him. Playing on my own is a dull activity. Not being able to play with folks because of the pandemic and hospitalization numbers going up and down so rapidly really brought down my spirit and stymied my creative output for about two years. I strive to partake in musical banter with my peers. The pandemic frustrates me because it took away those opportunities.

Also, I missed seeing live music performed. Before the pandemic you could see music every night. Austin is a tight knit community of musical creators and producers. There are lots of organizations in this town dedicated to presenting and promoting non-commercial music in favor of free jazz/improvisation, contemporary classical and experimental genres.  Keep Austin Weird? Actively weird?  Yup, we most definitely have!!!

When I first moved to Austin around 10 years ago, I went to a lot of Church Of The Friendly Ghost (COTFG) events at Salvage Vanguard. COTFG also organizes the NMASS festival (New Music Art and Sound Summit), a genre defying local and national festival of multimedia. This festival continues to this day. Also, throughout the years, I’ve had the great pleasure of attending new music concerts performed by folks like Panoramic Voices, New Music Co-op, Line Upon Line, and Atlas Maior etc. Organizations such as Epistrophy Arts and festivals such as No Idea and Sonic Transmissions have also brought in some of the best national and international free jazz acts to town. Also, in recent years more locally curated music labels have been sprouting up more regularly. Labels such as Astral Spirits, Aural Canyon, and Holodeck Records have done numerous tape releases throughout the years (sold in local stores) in addition to releasing material digitally on Bandcamp. Running any kind of a label is super impressive to me and an essential activity for performing artists.

The one thing Austinites were having a really hard time grappling with prior to the pandemic was gentrification. It had started to become a huge problem in our creative communities and shows very little sign in slowing down, of course. The most well-known casualty (in our experimental music community) of that “first wave” of gentrification was Church Of The Friendly Ghost, who lost their home, The Salvage Vanguard Theater in East Austin. Many smaller spaces stepped in and continued facilitating art, music, and culture. One such example is the local D.I.Y. space and stalwart, The Museum of Human Achievement, which has consistently supported locals film screenings, experimental music, theater, performance art throughout the years.  Other thoughtfully curated spaces such as Dimension Gallery, Co-Lab Projects, Cloud Tree Studios, Volstead Lounge and Ground Floor Theater also carried their weight in supporting the scene. I’m so thankful to belong to this community of folks.

I hope that these venues and support for one another continues to thrive post-pandemic. Rent has sky-rocketed through Austin, TX in the last few months alone.  Big music venues have shuttered through the pandemic. Finding performance spaces continues to be a consistent struggle for artists and presenters alike.

I have been a curator in Austin, TX since 2014. I have organized experimental film screenings with the Experimental Response Cinema collective under Scott Stark. I have also curated my own music events and sound installations under the name Antumbra Events + Installations. I started Antumbra in 2013 to present performance art and sound projects from across the globe.

I did manage to do some really cool and meaningful things during the pandemic.  I organized my festival online called Interference Fest-Women Making Noise in December 2020. The festival headlined a mix of multimedia artists and musicians including Angel Bat Dawid and Sistazz of Tha Nitty Gritty, Yuliya Lanina, and Amanda Gutierrez w/Norman Long. I invited local and national artists to partake and every single person who participated gave it their all. I felt so honored and so amazed by everyone on it. The festival was plagued by technical difficulties and was delayed two weeks from its original date. The themes I had in mind for 2020 were care, consideration, and concern. December 2020 was a particularly bleak period during the pandemic and I wanted to bring myself and people out in the world some joy. The festival aims to be an inclusive space for free expression and artistic experimentation in all forms/genres including film, video, movement, poetry, music, sound, and even mind-body practices. Online wasn’t a perfect scenario, but it was the best I could offer, given the state of the world, at that moment. I actually organized Interference Fest in-person at North Door (now shuttered) in 2019, which was also a very heartfelt festival. I hope to resume to in-person this year. As a curator, as well as someone who is concerned first and foremost with the well-being of others, I don’t want my participants or audience members to get sick from Covid-19 and so that’s why I’m waiting to announce the dates for 2022.

Due to grief and depression from losing friends and family during the pandemic and for being isolated on my own for almost two years, I have started to learn Tai’Chi with local dancer/choreographer Heloise Gold, progenitor of Deep Listening Retreats. Her collaborator and friend was Houston-born composer Pauline Oliveros. Heloise in one of Austin’s most famed residents and her movement-based training has impacted countless artists throughout the years. I am proud to be her pupil and hope to heal from her tutelage.

Music picks…

Here is my collaboration with Rick Reed; a live score for Ken Jacobs’s Nervous Magic Lantern Festival at Anthology Film Archives in 2016. It was one of my proudest moments as an electronic musician:

Ken Jacobs / Rick Reed & Tara Bhattacharya @The Nervous Magic Lantern Festival 2016 from Ken Jacobs on Vimeo.

This is work by one of my very favorite musicians in Austin, TX. Her name is Henna Chou. She is one of the original founders and main curators at Church Of The Friendly Ghost and the NMASS Festival:

Out of the Box: In Defense of Analog Criticism

Geeta Dayal

[Ed. note: This is our third installment of “Out of the Box.” For this series, which follows New Music USA’s tenth anniversary this past November and marks the start of our second decade, we are asking a group of deep musical thinkers to ponder what the landscape for new music will be ten years from now. We aim for this series to spark important discussions in our community as well as to raise important journalistic voices from all around the country. The previous installments of this series featured essays by University of Florida-based musicologist and bassoonist Dr. Imani Mosley and Brooklyn-based violinist and arts journalist Vanessa Ague. For our third, we asked San Francisco Bay Area-based music, art, technology and culture journalist/critic Geeta Dayal to ponder possible futures for music journalism.-FJO]

What will music journalism look like ten years from now? Will the role of the music critic be obsolete? The signs are not encouraging. Many of the best writers I know have left the field behind, embarking on more lucrative careers as lawyers, businesspeople, or professors. Many magazines and alternative weeklies across the United States have folded. Other publications have cut their staff, trying in vain to create the same publication with a fraction of the workforce, overworking the editors and writers that remain. Arts sections in newspapers are becoming thinner; freelance budgets are being slashed. For the past twenty years, I’ve continued to push forward as an arts critic and journalist despite the obstacles, because I believe that I can contribute new and useful ideas to the wider culture.

The prevailing narrative is that social media and digital streaming services have taken over the space that critics once inhabited. But I would like to present a more optimistic concept of the future, which we could build by reframing music criticism’s cultural value.

Consider that the analog revival is in full swing. In 2020, vinyl record sales surged 29% to $626 million, and that number continues to rise. Vinyl record pressing plants are overloaded, with wait times of several months to manufacture an album. Vintage analog synthesizers currently fetch eye-watering prices on auction sites like eBay. In other categories besides music, “bespoke” has become a popular buzzword, along with custom-made, tailored, and personalized. In a landscape that feels increasingly automated, consumers are quite understandably in search of things that feel special.

With this renewed interest in the charms of analog technology, I propose that we also renew our interest in another time-honored innovation: music writing. In this essay, I introduce the term “analog criticism.” Criticism is an art form, created by humans, not by AI. Analog criticism refers to long, perceptive essays and reviews, thoughtfully crafted by writers who have immersed themselves deeply in the field.

Spotify and other digital streaming services supply a quick fix. Users want to listen to a song, and they want it now. “If you like this, you might also like this,” these services suggest. This, in itself, is a form of criticism — automated, digital criticism, that tells you what to listen to next. This technology has made a very small number of people very rich. While streaming services might be convenient on the go, they can also lead to a diminished musical experience. Earlier this year, Spotify came under fire by prominent rock bands such as My Bloody Valentine for listing wildly incorrect lyrics alongside certain songs. Most listeners probably didn’t notice, because very little context is provided to the listener, if there is any at all. The perfunctory descriptions next to the albums are basically ad copy, not serious writing. Album credits are often missing or incomplete, and entire hidden histories of music are lost in the process.

Analog criticism means articulately explaining why you think something is worthwhile or why you don’t like something. Algorithms can’t do that; only people can. Analog criticism means presenting an articulate, persuasive argument. Analog criticism means drawing unlikely connections and doing real research. And smart, deeply felt writing builds a true connection with the reader. A lot of major publications like the Village Voice, where I got my start, were crucial forums where critics presented vibrant, intelligent arguments on a weekly basis. You felt like you knew these writers, even if you had never met them.

Mainstream magazines and newspapers have to step up, too. These days, most publications are too influenced by ad revenue, market research and page views. Their content is based around what they think people want, rather than setting a bold new agenda. It’s reactive — a defensive stance rather than an offensive one. The great magazines of the past took clear positions. They weren’t afraid of having a distinctive voice. That energy and vitality needs to come back.

Will arts sections in magazines and newspapers still exist in ten years? While there been a lot of talk about building new models for journalism, we must also put forth a strong argument for the value of arts writing, which is often given short shrift in the journalism world. In ten years, will critics still be able to find homes for serious articles on subjects outside the mainstream—and get paid enough to make a living? Crowdfunding sites are vital for sustaining writers through these uncertain times. For me, the ongoing support from readers through Patreon helps me to continue. I predict that more of these types of platforms will proliferate, giving journalists and critics new ways to fund their work.

Criticism, at its best, is the highest form of respect we can pay to art or to music. Instead of ceding ground to streaming services and social media corporations, we should regroup and reconsider the value we bring as critics and writers. Analog criticism gives us a deeper, richer experience. The world of music, and civilization at large, deserves it.