“New Music” TM
In 2018, I stumbled into the Twitter “New Music” scene. Somehow I hadn’t kept up with the contemporary classical scene after leaving college, and I barely kept up with it then. (Of course, not counting the wind band world, which has an amazing appetite for new music!) While growing up, the contemporary classical music being taught to me was Stravinsky and Schoenberg from 100 years ago, with brief trips to the music of Cage, Reich, and Glass.
To be fair, the music history books I learned from weren’t exactly hot off the presses. Composers have to make their mark before they can be written up in the textbooks. I get that. But for some reason, even in casual conversation, my true contemporaries weren’t discussed. I imagine they were discussed in certain circles, but not mine. I only realized what was actually happening in today’s “New Music” scene by joining twitter after committing myself to composing full time.
It took me a while to: a) learn twitter, and b) get connected with the community, but once I did, I met a huge number of people writing great music right now. And also, a wonderfully rich performance community that is fostering the development of the composers who are actually my contemporaries!
If you ever want to get me talking, ask me about some of the awesome compositional voices that are out there writing great music right now!
By the way, I have had a few discussions in real life and witnessed a few online about the term “New Music”. Some people call it “contemporary classical”, some people “New Music”, as well as many other names. My thoughts on it are that everything was new music when it was written, from Perotin, to Beethoven, to Jennifer Jolley. (Jennifer tweeted once, calling it the current scene “New Music tm” and I always loved it) If you google New Music, you get all kinds of things that aren’t contemporary classical, which can confuse the subject. If you google contemporary classical there are many entries about people writing music now, but at the same time, you might see someone programming an “all contemporary” concert lineup and it will be filled with composers who have been dead for almost 100 years. There is no right answer to what the current title should be, so when searching you have to dig through the weeds a bit. Sorry about that.
Getting into the New Music scene made me want to be a composer/performer for the first time ever. In college I never imagined wanting to perform for people, other than as a member of a trumpet section in a concert or jazz band. But now I am writing chamber music that I want to play myself! I blame Philip Glass for this desire. He formed his own group early in his career so that he would have the ability to play his music any time he wanted, and now I want to do the same! (anybody have some loft space in Northwest Arkansas that they want to let me borrow a few times a week?)
If you had told me two years ago that I would be starting my own chamber group, and that I would be playing piano, I would have never believed you, but here we are. I initially contacted some people to get it started so that I could showcase my own music, but then I found all these amazing living composers through social media and I am absolutely loving getting to work on their music (as well as a little of my own).
I’m not entirely sure when the group will get off the ground, but if you follow me on social media, I’m sure you’ll hear about it.
To sum up, there is a lot of amazing music being written as you read this, so seek it out and support it! Without the support of the music community as a whole, the composers of 2019 (and beyond) may never make it into the music history textbooks so that someone can complain about how it isn’t actually contemporary in another hundred years.
