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What We Believe

Difference is not a threat. Difference is an opportunity: a chance to hear a new voice, see a new perspective, feel a new inspiration. Even and especially through wrenching change, we’ll remain devoted to our values and be ever watchful of new ways to put them into practice for the benefit of both New Music and the USA.

Written By

Ed Harsh

One of the supreme joys of my position as president and CEO of New Music USA is to have the opportunity to work with twelve brilliant and thoughtful staff colleagues. Yesterday we gathered for two reasons. We marked with a toast the five-year anniversary of the creation of New Music USA in a charmed merger between the American Music Center and Meet The Composer. Then we worked together to put in writing the core values that have driven New Music USA since its inception.

This seems a pointedly good time to be talking about values. The actual anniversary date of our merger was November 8. The events of the election that day have now sent shockwaves across the country and around the planet. Some welcome the disruptions to come, believing that they will restore feelings of security lost over decades of globalized inequality and dizzying social change. For others, those disruptions inspire anxiety, fear, and even despair. Fragile progress toward becoming a more perfect union seems poised to disintegrate before their eyes.

In a world in which the only certainty is constant and sometimes disorienting change, values are the most reliable compass. Our limited ability as individuals to control the course of outside events is balanced by an unlimited power to form and hold deep beliefs. Steadfast service to, and principled defense of those beliefs always serves us and will lead us eventually to a better place than we were before. In that spirit, I’d like to share three core New Music USA values that came to the fore in my conversation with my colleagues. We’ll continue to be guided by them in the days and months and years ahead.

We believe in the fundamental importance of creative artists and their work. A society without respect for its artists is a dead society.

We espouse a broad, open definition of “new music.” Closed borders limit. Openness empowers.

We uphold and embrace principles of inclusivity and equitable treatment in all of our activity and across our nation’s broadly diverse constituency in terms of gender, race, age, location, national origin, sexual orientation, religion, and artistic practice. Difference is not a threat. Difference is an opportunity: a chance to hear a new voice, see a new perspective, feel a new inspiration.

We’re the same people and the same organization today that we were on Monday. Even and especially through wrenching change, we’ll remain devoted to our values and be ever watchful of new ways to put them into practice for the benefit of both New Music and the USA.