Creativity demands change. Change demands creativity. In a year of surprising and sometimes disorienting change, New Music USA continued its creative evolution to support our constituency in new and relevant ways while confirming our unshakeable commitment to three core values.

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 in terms of gender, race, age, location, national origin, sexual orientation, religion, socio-economic status, and artistic practice — difference is not a threat; it’s an opportunity, a chance to hear a new voice, see a new perspective, feel a new inspiration.

Following on the value of inclusivity, we have doubled down on our commitment to being a national organization that supports the entirety of the new music community without restriction according to musical practice or personal identity. As you continue to read through our Year in Review, you will see this commitment manifested throughout.

Our national reach is exemplified by Antenna Studies for Splinter Reeds at Blue Sage Center for the Arts, which will bring a new and exciting piece by Paula Matthusen to Paonia, Colorado. And by a project for the Omaha-based free improvisation quartet Screaming Plastic to record a debut album. Our commitment to defining new music broadly and engaging everyone within that broad definition is clear from projects such as Rennie Harris’s Lifted, which brings hip hop dance to the stage, and Devesh Chandra’s From Our Roots, which explores the similarities between Indian classical music and music from the Oneida tribe. Our desire to engage with everyone in the new music community is demonstrated by Sign & Sing – Visible Speech, a project to commission a new work by and for people who are deaf. And by the pairing of NewMusicBox article “Composing and Motherhood,” by Emily Doolittle, with a project by Allison Loggins-Hull that explores “the duality of being a mother and an artist.”

During the 2016-17 season, New Music USA’s programming evolved in a number of important ways. We began a new round of our orchestra residency program Music Alive and proceeded through a second year of our New Music Impact Fund, a program supporting small ensembles, presenters, and venues. And furthering our mission to serve the field through virtual means, we built toward our goal of a web platform that allows us to make powerful, integrated use of our remarkable collection of content from NewMusicBox, Counterstream Radio, and our grantmaking programs.

This Year In Review only contains a small sampling of the work we’ve done for the new music community over the past year. I invite you to visit newmusicusa.org and explore the enormous scope of new music in the USA today.

Ed Harsh
President and CEO

Launched in 2016, the New York City New Music Impact Fund utilizes collaboration, connectivity, and New Music USA’s platform to advance the cultural position of New York’s D.I.Y. new music sector. In 2017 we added an additional nine organizations to the initial cohort of 24 awarded previously. All of these groups receive general operating support, as well as marketing assistance and tools, for the duration of the program. We also provide opportunities for residencies between a select group of ensembles and presenters.

Over the past year we saw the significant benefits that come from bringing these different groups together to collaborate. For example, the emerging ensemble TAK’s residency with So Percussion resulted in a range of opportunities. So Percussion provided TAK with access to their space for up to 80 hours of rehearsal time, and, they also provided five consultation sessions which covered areas of practical logistics subjects such as financial management, concert booking, marketing and publicity, grant applications, and applying for 501(c)3 status. In the upcoming year, we are exploring new ways for the organizations to collaborate with one another, leveraging their respective experiences and skills for the mutual benefit of all involved.

The New York City New Music Impact Fund is supported by a $495,000 three-year grant from The Scherman Foundation’s Katharine S. and Axel G. Rosin Fund. The program continues our long history of support to small, DIY new music ensembles and venues in New York City while also helping the cohort of awarded organizations market themselves and the entire DIY new music field as a cohesive sector.

Our goal for the Impact Fund is to use this first round as a model for future, similar projects in other parts of the United States, that are customized through an iterative process that allows the grantees to participate in determining the project design.

LINKS:

• Impact Fund Cohort

In his NewMusicBox article “Who Is In the Club?,” Ohio-based composer Jeffrey Mumford provides insights into racial bias in the new music field, pointing out that the first barrier when dealing with this problem is people’s assumptions. One major way to move the dial, Mumford writes, is to shift our definition of the canon and its contributors. Specifically, he challenges classical radio stations and leaders of orchestras, opera companies, and other organizations that host performances, to program more works by black composers.

But Mumford also encourages practitioners of color to work hard to push past bias in order to affect change. Mumford calls on composers who have been preemptively stylistically pigeonholed to ignore these restrictions and defiantly “speak in their own voice.”

It seems that in certain parts of our culture we have not been “given permission” to embrace what touches us despite it not coinciding with that which others may define as “Black enough.” What is that actually? What causes this disconnect?

His call for constant diligence is not limited to those already active in the field, but includes young people:

I regularly tell my students to notice who is not included on a concert program as much as who is, and then to ask themselves why. Our work in this field is an ever-evolving odyssey which celebrates the best in us as a culture but sadly, if you were to peruse any given season’s offerings by major symphony orchestras or chamber music series, the voices of our artists in this business — particularly composers — are, if not absent, unjustifiably quiet.

Mumford hails change-makers such as Chi-chi Nwanoku, who founded Chineke, an orchestra made up of musicians of color, for creating opportunity not only for the members of the ensemble, but for inspiring those who may not yet be known and making them feel welcomed. But he warns that there is much more to be done.

There is much to applaud, but there is still much more to do. We must remain vigilant and undeterred. Our voices must be heard and added to the greater conversation to make the mix richer and deeper in resonance. As an African-American composer, I take my position and responsibility seriously. When I teach, I encourage all of my students to speak with their own voice and not succumb to the limitations others may try to give them. I believe that for too long, African Americans (and many others) have been pigeonholed (both by their own constituency and by others) by limited assumptions of the scope of their creative activity. I want to explode this. I believe that the artist must be a citizen aware of the context in which he/she lives, both politically and culturally. Then he or she must define his or her own world with frames of reference unique to him or herself and invite people into that world at appropriate times.

LINKS:

• Who Is In The Club? Article

While historically Western classical musicians have often been considered the vehicle more than the focus of performance, in her NewMusicBox article, Jessica Aszodi examines contemporary approaches in concert music that place greater focus on the performing artist and “on the body as performing subject.”

Explorations of a performer’s physical life or subjectivity over, say, traditional instrumentality or vocality, has a deep history manifest in a range of artistic streams that flow through twentieth-century experimental traditions (Dada, Situationism, Fluxus, Cage, Cunningham, et al.), performance and installation art (Acconci, Moorman, Westerkamp, Cardiff, et al.), European and American art-music (Kagel, Berberian, Globokar, et al.), and opera (Stockhausen, Ashley, Lucier, et al.). Performers from theater, performance art, dance, and visual arts backgrounds have long embraced these influences. Concert music has been somewhat reluctant to get on board. Practitioners of serious music have often neglected to take their physical selves seriously as the material through which meaning is conveyed—beyond what might be required to produce the desired sounds and images for their notations, interpretations, or publicity photographs.

This way of working that accounts for the corporeal body was termed “The New Discipline” in 2016 by composer/performer Jennifer Walshe. Throughout her NewMusicBox article, Aszodi describes a number of artists who are working within The New Discipline and notes that the work of these artists is incredibly diverse and united only through their focus on the body as well as the music.

One of the strengths of this way of working is its flexibility. This is a music that can create situations for performers and audiences that utilize both immediate experience and signification in ways absolute music cannot. Through it we can explore new corners of the interior experience of music making, community kinetics, directionality, interpersonal relationships, sexual hierarchies, the specifics of site, or references to any cultural artifact you can tie down.

Despite the numerous benefits that can result from working this way, Aszodi warns that it has to be done seriously and conscientiously and that there will be a learning curve for musicians who have not thought about this aspect of performance before:

Musicians are trained to critique and evaluate “music” but our criteria for judging the effective communication of the bodies, lights, spaces, images, movement, and taction required for this *music* is far less well developed. As we go about solving our musical-theatrical problems, musicians should accept the challenge of ensuring the extra-musical work we do is as nuanced, connected, and effective as the stuff we’ve all been trained for.

LINKS:

• Undisciplined Music Article

Since its establishment more than eighteen years ago, NewMusicBox has been driven by a core commitment to providing members of the new music community with a platform from which to speak thoughtfully about the truths they see. Following the 2016 presidential election, NewMusicBox ran a series entitled Speak Now which asked music makers to share what they were thinking about — both in their roles as artists and community members. We wanted to hear a range of viewpoints and felt that it was natural and organic for us to provide a place to share personal views of the moment at hand.

In his Speak Now essay, “Our Job As Composers Has Now Changed,” composer/journalist Mohammed Fairouz argues for the importance of creativity, creation, and innovation:

There’s a lot of talk about opposing extremism and intolerance in the world and it’s fine to oppose violence and destruction through developing a counter-narrative or developing a cogent military strategy (those are vital things), but the ultimate response of resistance to violence and destruction is creation. It’s a simple statement of fact that creation is the polar opposite to destruction. That means building a city or composing a symphony or sending a mission to Mars. Creation and invention are the ultimate “show me” forms of opposition to violence.
Music and the arts and poetry are essentially a training field for innovation and empathy.

Later in the essay, Fairouz describes how the work of composers is even more important now than it was before, not for furthering certain ideals or messages, but simply because of the value that comes from unmitigated self-expression:

Previously our profession was important. Today it is existentially vital. This is not a call to propaganda. It is a call to truth. My aim here is not to promote a message but to urge you all to promote an infinite variety of messages and to never shy away from self-expression.

I’ll end … with President Kennedy:

“Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society — in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of having ‘nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.’”

LINKS:

• Speak Now: Our Job As Composers Has Now Changed

In October 2016, New Music USA collaborated with the Chicago Ear Taxi Festival to produce special content live and online that would enhance, highlight, and celebrate the unique and diverse community of artists participating in the programming.

As a part of our series on Chicago new music in the lead up to the 2016 Ear Taxi Festival, Chicago-based composer, educator, and writer Michael Lewanski contributed an “insider’s” long-form essay on why people outside of Chicago seem to be so interested in the city’s new music scene.

What comes to mind when I describe the character of Chicago new music are words like “provisional” and “transient” and “conditional” and “contingent” and “fragmented.”

A quintessential work of Chicago new music is something like George Lewis’s Assemblage, which he wrote for Ensemble Dal Niente (which I conduct) in 2013. It’s quintessential to Chicago new music because it was written for the Bowling Green New Music Festival by a Chicago-born improviser/scholar/composer/computer musician living in New York for a new music ensemble started ten years ago by a bunch of mostly students without jobs, composed in a style that references many other musics, and cast in a form that encourages the listener to “catch the bus and go along for the ride.” Thus, the city of Chicago is essential to the work’s creation, but its presence cannot be readily pointed to. The essence of its Chicago-ness, if one may say so, is the not-exactly-there-ness of Chicago.

Lewanski describes that the Chicago new music community is in ways defined by contradiction: it’s there but it’s also not there, it is “highly cosmopolitan and deeply provinicial.” Lewanski also argues that the finances behind Chicago new music play a significant role in what the community looks like. He describes how there are many musicians in Chicago but not many full-time jobs, so it’s hard to make a living as a musician. Despite the challenges associated with this, it allows artists to develop authentically without significant outside pressure.

Throughout the article, Lewanski gives examples of ensembles, pieces, and events that he feels embody the state of Chicago new music. That being said, in the conclusion he notes:

Here I feel that I have reached a satisfying conclusion; I have sketched the essence, or the rather, the process, of Chicago new music’s transient state…On the one hand, everything I write above is consonant with my experience and so deeply felt that I’ve restlessly redefined my career trajectory because I feel inspired by the exciting work I see on a daily basis… On the other hand, it’s painfully clear that there’s an awful lot I’m leaving out. I’m aware that I haven’t mentioned a number of Chicago new music organizations: Chicago Composers Orchestra, Fulcrum Point New Music Project, Eighth Blackbird, Contempo, CSO’s MusicNOW… There are vast numbers of complicating factors, and only the embrace of these will give us a fleeting glimpse of the reality of the situation: that there is not a unified whole to be grasped.

LINKS:

• Chicago New Music As Assemblage; Or, Why Are We Doing This? Article

Advocating for new music and the community of performers, composers, and appreciators who make up the field is the overarching theme of New Music USA’s work. Through our grantmaking programs, our media programs, and the rest of the work we do, we seek to create a stronger, more robust new music community and to advocate for and advance the position of the new music field at large.
In addition to our programs that advance the field, we also participate in more traditional forms of advocacy in order to promote American new music both nationally and internationally. We represent the United States as members of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), for which our Composer Advocate Frank J. Oteri serves on the Executive Committee, as well as the International Association of Music Information Centres (IAMIC), for which our President and CEO Ed Harsh serves as Secretary, with Frank serving as the Chair of the Communications Committee.

Ed also serves as Secretary of the Performing Arts Alliance, the national policy advocate, leadership forum, and learning network for America’s nonprofit performing arts organizations, artists, and allies. In this capacity he has been actively engaged in the Alliance’s work in Washington, D.C. this year. For example, he took part as one of a record-breaking number of leaders participating in visits to Capitol Hill as part of Arts Advocacy Day in March 2017.

Over the past year, Frank traveled to numerous places in the U.S. to attend conferences/music festivals/new music reading sessions and to advocate for new American music. He served as a moderator for EarShot events with the Buffalo Philharmonic in Buffalo, New York, and with the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra in Indianapolis, Indiana. Frank was also a guest speaker at Indiana University’s “Well-Advised Luncheon” Series in Bloomington, Indiana, and co-moderated an event with Director of Content and NewMusicBox Co-Editor, Molly Sheridan at the Ear Taxi Festival in Chicago, Illinois. Frank was a guest speaker at the Decolonizing Music Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, was a mentor for new attendees at the Chamber Music America National Conference in New York, New York, and was a panelist at the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Finally, Frank was a moderator at the Classical:NEXT festival in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and at the Music Publishers Association Annual Meeting in Redbury, New York.

Additionally, Scott Winship, our Director of Grantmaking, gave a talk to the Kresge Fellows in Detroit, appeared twice on the “Music Publishing Podcast,” and served on a panel for the New York State Association of Performing Arts Professionals.

New Music USA’s grantmaking staff attended this year’s League of American Orchestras’ conference in Detroit, Michigan, and helped lead a session titled “Activating and Nurturing Community Alliances.” Multiple staff members attended the third edition of the New Music Gathering, in Bowling Green, Ohio, with Ed presenting as part of a panel titled “Using Software to Support Artists.”

There are thousands of composers living and working across the United States today, and each one of them is a unique individual with their own history, background, interests, and stories. Through our online magazine NewMusicBox, we’ve built a platform where artists can speak in their own voices not only about their music but also about their lives and all of the factors that make them who they are and inform their music.

Over the past year, a number of composers have written in-depth posts exploring how they put their lives together. For example, in September, Ed Windels contributed a series of posts about his decision to have a day job and compose after work and on days off (what he calls being a “5-to-9 composer”). Throughout the series, he provides tips and advice on how to compose while also having a day job. Perhaps more importantly, he also gives advice about how to embrace this approach to being a composer and not feel marginalized compared to those who have decided to compose full-time.

In counterpoint to Ed Windels’ posts, a few months later Dennis Tobenski wrote about his decision to quit his day job and become a full-time composer. In his series of posts, he discusses the extensive preparation he did before making the change, the problems that still arose despite the preparation, and what he did in response. Throughout the series of four articles, Tobenski provides first-hand advice as well as resources for those who are thinking about freelancing full-time.

All musicians have to make many decisions about how to structure their lives throughout their careers. Presenting different perspectives on how to approach this can assist all of us — musicians and appreciators alike — in making informed decisions about how to arrange our lives around our passions.

LINKS:

• Taking The Plunge Article
• Coming Out (As A 5-to-9 Composer)