Singing Telegrams

Singing Telegrams

The birthday piece has to be one of the nicer rituals in the world of contemporary composition. No matter how much this cruel colosseum makes us snipe and claw each other over scraps from an already stingy patronage when we ought to be allies rather than competitors, the birthday concert gives us permission to salute unreservedly, together, a composer we admire.

Written By

Colin Holter

The birthday piece has to be one of the nicer rituals in the world of contemporary composition. No matter how much this cruel colosseum makes us snipe and claw each other over scraps from an already stingy patronage when we ought to be allies rather than competitors, the birthday concert gives us permission to salute unreservedly, together, a composer we admire.

In the past year I contributed small pieces for two birthdays, a fiftieth and a sixtieth; in addition to enjoying the garden-variety pleasure of writing music, I relished these opportunities to reaffirm connections within the field. But they also represent a kind of honesty that ordinary pieces might not: Because birthday pieces are, unapologetically, compositions written for other composers, they offer a revealing glimpse into new music’s inside baseball. They are at liberty to be read more closely as documents of the social and professional dynamics of contemporary music than ordinary pieces.

So what, though, right? Why should anybody besides composers and a small minority of musicologists care about that? No reason, I guess—except that it acknowledges that composers inhabit not only their respective geographic communities but also a community of professional practice with its own hierarchies and interrelationships. Composers are often presented to audiences as “people too,” so to speak—that is, people just like you whom you might bump into at the grocery store. That’s certainly true, but I wonder if the more compelling (and equally true) way to conceptualize the composer-as-personality might instead be to present webs of composers of the sort that NMC Records’ music map suggests. We’re not just the people in your neighborhood; we’re also people in a global neighborhood of colleagues, competitors, and friends. Birthday pieces bring this aspect of our kind to light. I find them endlessly fascinating—but of course, I would! Would others?

http://www.nmcrec.co.uk/musicmap