According to trumpeter Jimmy Owens, recipient of the NEA’s 2012 A. B. Spellman Award for Jazz Advocacy, “None of the jazz clubs you go to, and spend your money at, pay into the musician’s pension fund for the musicians who are working there.”

Between self-publishing, creating performance opportunities through the initiation of new ensembles and concert series, managing commissions, and balancing the various challenges that accompany the life of the freelancing artist, composers find themselves in need of a wide swath of experiences outside of the classroom. Slowly over time, programs have been experimenting with ways to incorporate these additional concepts into an already-packed list of requirements.

There is such a thing as reaching for the next rung of the career ladder too early. Yet there comes a time for every composer when one must either expand or else stifle development. Composers would do well to stay attentive to their own needs right now, and not what their peers, friends, and competitors are doing.

This past Saturday, the Austin Museum of Digital Art presented the most recent concert in their performance series focused on experimental music and digital performance art. Though AMODA has no physical address (and really, isn’t that what you’d expect from a purely digital outfit?), their presence has been felt throughout the Austin area, and I was anxious to see what they had in store.

The more I think about what can happen in a piece of music, and about how many different ways there are to formulate and rationalize and structure and challenge and critique and embrace and magnify and problematize and thematize and reify these things, the less sure I can be that anyone else is liable to apprehend music the same way I do—or, for that matter, that I’ll apprehend a piece the same way one day as I do the next.

Bernard Rands navigates a variety of dualities both in his music and in his personal life. For someone approaching 80-years old, he is amazingly youthful and vigorous. Though he is steadfast in his routines, he’s constantly seeking and engaging with new ideas not only from music but also from art and literature. And all of this inevitably shows up in his own music.

I think that it’s emotionally unhealthy to set goals that lie beyond the realm of what we possibly can control. We can create art that more clearly expresses our ideas, but we absolutely cannot predict how that art will be perceived by any specific audience. I think that it’s important to place our goalposts carefully so that we always will be striving towards creating a better product.

When the recording of Michael Gordon’s Timber dropped last fall, critics justifiably drooled a little on the impressively weighty, laser-etched, inch-thick wooden box that held the CD. It was actually the recent experience of hearing Mantra Percussion play the piece live here in Baltimore, however, that drew me more deeply inside the transfixing power of a score designed for six percussionists and lumber.

When I look at the scores we’ve accumulated at Melodia Women’s Choir, I marvel at the different ways we’ve come across them. Scores have found their way to us through recommendations from the online choral forum choralnet.org; and they’ve arrived in the mail and by e-mail from conductors, composers, and singers. We’ve also sought them out by browsing the repertoire lists of peer choirs online, digging into dictionaries and catalogs, and scouring programs and websites.

The internet has even further accelerated the erosion of regional musical differences that had already begun to deteriorate with the advent of recorded sound, radio, and television during the 20th century. In the 21st century, we are moving more and more toward global music identities, and indeed such music has been the ideal soundtrack to compliment the numerous discussions at MIDEM on Monday and Tuesday about an emerging single global market for music.