Meredith Monk, John Luther Adams, Anthony Braxton, John Kander, William Kraft, Pacific Serenades, the JACK Quartet, and the Grand Canyon Music Festival’s Native American Composers Apprentice Project were honored by New Music USA during a private ceremony at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City on May 13, 2013.

Composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel has been named the new artistic director of the American Composers Orchestra commencing with the 2013-14 season. He succeeds composer Robert Beaser who has been ACO’s artistic director since 2000 and was ACO’s artistic advisor from 1993.

Going through my mother’s effects has been like traversing an emotionally charged landscape that unrolls to reveal a fascinating design of discovered and rediscovered possessions of a person I’ve known from the start of my life. The material that currently has my attention is vinyl.

My first introduction to Oklahoma was driving up I-35 in 2003 the day after a previous tornado had hit Moore. When I left, however, my impressions were not of windswept plains but of a surprisingly strong community of musicians and audiences who are open to performing and hearing new music.

A performer friend and I were recently daydreaming about new possibilities for music commissioning—of chamber music, in particular. What if commissioning music were more a part of everyday life?

I come to generalize about an entire cohort of composers, based solely—sample size be damned—on the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s May 17 concert at Jordan Hall.

We all know what is meant when the accusation of academicism is lobbed: that person (or their line of thinking) is cloistered, out of touch, has little bearing on the real world. But really, there is no “real world” and no “general public.” They are ghosts we chase or sticks with which we composers use to beat ourselves up.

Ten young composers received cash prizes totaling $20,000 during the 61st Annual BMI Student Composer Awards. Among the winners were Juan Pablo Contreras who received the William Schuman Prize, the top honor, and Michael D. Parsons who received the Carlos Surinach Prize, awarded to the competition’s youngest winner, for the second consecutive year.

I may know better than to judge a CD by its cover, but it was hard to resist the poetic allure of the graphic score which unfolds across the front of Voyage in a White Building 1, a New World Records-issued recording of three pieces by Burr Van Nostrand.

The centerpiece of the concert I attended on Saturday night was Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, a piece of music that is performed almost every season by virtually every orchestra in the world. While I attended the concert because of a new work on the program, I have to admit that most of the people in the audience wanted to hear Tchaikovsky.