
Letter From The President and CEO
PROJECTS/MEDIA
A NEW TRADITIONAL HOPI SOUND: NATIVE AMERICAN COMPOSER APPRENTICE PROJECT
SAMUEL ADLER: KNOWING WHAT YOU’RE DOING
WILD RUMPUS: IN TIME
MUSIC ALIVE!
TRIBE: HONORING THE HOMELESS IN MIAMI
EDGEFEST: 2 YEARS
GENERATIONS IN JAZZ
EDMAR CASTAÑEDA: FASCINATINGLY PERCUSSIVE HARP
GELSEY BELL: GET A LITTLE CLOSER
GEORGE LEWIS’S AFTERWORD, THE AACM (AS) OPERA: SONIC GRAPPLINGS WITH HISTORY
SHINICHI IOVA-KOVA: 95 RITUALS (FOR ANNA HALPRIN)
LAURIE SPIEGEL: GRASSROOTS TECHNOLOGY
SUSTAINABILITY AND IMPACT IN NEW YORK
BLACK MOUNTAIN SONGS: CELEBRATING THE BIRTH OF THE AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE
MORMON MUSIC: AFTER THE “MORMON MOMENT”
ADVOCACY AND CONNECTIVITY
RE-SCORING HISTORY: OSCAR MICHEAUX’S 1935 SILENT FILM BODY AND SOUL
THE BANJO FACES ITS SHADOW
PROJECT GRANTS
Organizers
COLLABORATORS
Cary Fund
Panelists
NewMusicBox Articles
Authors
Supporters
FY15 UNAUDITED FINANCIALS
Board of Directors, Councils, and Staff
Photo Credits
Want More New Music?
End of TOC
Dear Friends:
Music needs community. The collective values that give it power grow out of human connections. Our Year in Review’s selection of projects, writings, and activities from New Music USA’s 2014-2015 season illustrates our mission-driven commitment to creating and sustaining a richly diverse network made up not just of practitioners, but of lifelong lovers of new music as well as those with newly blossoming curiosity.
We promote the interactions within that perpetually developing community through NewMusicBox. Profiles highlighted in this booklet of Gelsey Bell, Sheila Jordan, Fay Victor, Jen Shyu, Samuel Adler, and articles such as “Mormon Music: After the ‘Mormon Moment’” and “The Banjo Faces Its Shadow” all are designed to create connection around the voices of those engaged in the work. In the past year, we even did our first experiment in bringing that connection into the physical world, producing an event around music and storytelling by Matana Roberts, Joan Tower, and Gabriel Kahane to bring practitioners and appreciators closer together.
Our grantmaking programs directly support the work that’s at the heart of our world. Projects such as 95 Rituals (For Anna Halprin) and Trimpin’s Music Alive program residency with the Seattle Symphony embody connectivity among different generations of artists and between artists and the public.
In addition to doing the work represented here, we’re always looking ahead to new ways we can build our community further. We’re developing a patron network program that will connect individuals across the country who are passionate about engaging with and supporting new music. And we are also very excited to announce that New Music USA has recently been awarded a three-year grant from the Scherman Foundation that will allow us to build on our past work in supporting the DIY ensemble sector—a key part of our new music ecology.
Please join us in being an active part of this living, growing community! Creating a profile on newmusicusa.org, following a project, signing up for our email newsletter, and participating in a conversation on NewMusicBox are all easy and exciting ways to help grow and engage with the world of new music. There’s no better way to ensure the continued flourishing of American new music than to join with others in community.
Ed Harsh,
President and CEO
“That a teenager living on a remote reservation would not only have the chance to create an original musical composition, but also see it come to life at the hands of a nationally renowned quartet [ETHEL] is thanks to the groundbreaking Native American Composers Apprentice Project,” describes the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program.
Every year, the Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP) brings Native American composers from around the country to the Navajo, Hopi, and Salt River Pima-Maricopa Reservations to spend eight months mentoring high school students in composition. Through various education projects, the organization is helping bridge the space between the canyon and the concert hall by instilling the power and sophistication of Hopi traditional music into the lexicon of contemporary chamber music.
The music that the students write during the program is performed by professionals and recorded at venues across Arizona—including the Navajo Nation and Heard Museums, Scottsdale Community College, Arizona Opera, and the Grand Canyon Music Festival.
New Music USA’s support for the NACAP spans two rounds of project grants. This year, with our funding, the NACAP is partnering with the Arizona Opera on “Stories We Tell,” an initiative that will provide selected students with the opportunity to write micro-operas which the Arizona Opera will workshop twice over the course of the program. Last year, Trevor Reed, one of three current NACAP composers-in-residence, received a New Music USA project grant for a collaboration with composer Clark Tenakhongva and the Grand Canyon Music Festival. Reed works in a style he calls Puhutawi, which synthesizes Hopi music and contemporary chamber music. His piece, Puhutawi: A New Tradition in Hopi Sound, adapts the work of Clark Tenakhongva, a NAMMY-nominated creator of traditional Hopi music, and was previewed at the Grand Canyon Music Festival in September 2015, alongside new works by the participating NACAP students.
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In the tradition of American composer-educators such as Aaron Copland and Serge Koussevitzky, Samuel Adler has mentored a generation of young composers, guiding their training by providing a thorough grounding in the Western tradition. In his 2015 interview with NewMusicBox, Adler reflected both on his composition and teaching careers, saying: “I’m very inspired by my students… I see the problems that students have that I also have. Sometimes I solve them for myself by solving them for the students. That’s a great influence on me, as has being with young people, and always being fed new ideas. This has inspired me all my life.”
The 87-year-old Adler has written six symphonies, five operas, a dozen concertos, and ten string quartets (eight of which he still acknowledges), as well as multiple sonatas and choral pieces while also teaching for 63 years. Adler, who studied with a who’s who of 20th-century American musicians—Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, Randall Thompson, Paul Hindemith, and Serge Koussevitzky—has held positions at The University of North Texas, Eastman, and Juilliard. For those of us in the new music field, Adler’s importance to his students is legendary, and we were reminded of that once again when his April 2015 NewMusicBox Cover Profile was our most viewed of the year and received over 1,000 likes on Facebook and over 5,000 views, largely thanks to his students, current and past, enthusiastically sharing the article via social media. In the interview, Adler talked about what makes a good teacher:
“I feel the teacher’s task is first and foremost to inspire the student to write as much as possible without any consideration for style and things like that. And then, slowly, to see if he or she can be moved to be something very special. And many of them can and do. I’m very happy with the result if you don’t immediately say, ‘I only want 12-tone music’ or ‘I only want tonal music.’ Let them bring you something, and go from there…”
Published on NewMusicBox- April 1, 2015
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Wild Rumpus is a new music collective with roots in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York whose name captures the spirit of their mission: “[By] creating a space for experimentation, risk-taking, and dialogue, we hope to be challenged and excited by the music we make, and to support the artistic/technical growth of the composers who work with us. We want to share this process in a way that sparks the curiosity and intelligence of our audience and draws them into the adventurous, eclectic world of new music.”
This year, Wild Rumpus received a New Music USA project grant for their new recording In Time. Drawing from a multiplicity of styles, Wild Rumpus commissioned composers Jen Wang, Dan VanHassel, Joshua Carro, and Per Bloland.
Referencing poetry, music, and literature from Bali, Argentina, Norway, England, and the United States—sometimes in the same piece—the commissioned works on In Time exemplify the power of American new music to create connections between what seem at first to be unrelated artistic disciplines, musical genres, and global cultural traditions.
Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s poem of the same name, Wang’s Adrogué features “textures [that] coalesce and deform in a vibrant, constantly shifting collage” like “the fragile, elusive images of the poem.” VanHassel’s Incite combines heavy metal and Balinese gamelan, highlighting the shared “emphasis on rhythmic virtuosity, often at high speeds.” Wang’s second piece on the album, Weird Fishes/ Arpeggi, is an adaptation of Radiohead’s 2007 song of the same name whose “rich harmony, hypnotic polyrhythms, and seamless form that slowly builds throughout the piece [lends itself] to adaptation for performance by Wild Rumpus.” Carro’s Spectral Fields In Time is a phenomenological study of sound that explores “the experience of realizing the greater sense and possibilities of sound when not constricted by traditional constructs or expectations,” and Bloland’s Solis Overture reworks traditional Scandinavian music to create the piece that will open his planned opera which “will [chronicle] the fictionalized tale of an actual Norwegian author, Pedr Solis.”
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“[Trimpin’s residency] is such a lesson in creativity… [it demonstrates] that exciting stuff is happening in concert halls,” enthuses Ludovic Morlot, music director of the Seattle Symphony in an April 2015 interview with Seattle reporter Dave Beck. Trimpin’s piece, a site-specific work for the lobby of Benaroya Hall that incorporates prepared piano, kinetic instruments, and a variety of players, is unique even for the Seattle Symphony, which makes it a point to regularly program new music. The applause following Trimpin’s premiere was so enthusiastic that the musicians repeated the third movement of the piece as an encore. Morlot describes that collaborating with Trimpin has “taken me out of my comfort zone,” physically (and metaphorically) moving the symphony out of the hall and forcing both Morlot and the players to expand their understanding of what symphony music can be.
Trimpin’s boundary-breaking residency is one of the current Principal Residencies of Music Alive, a program created and administered by New Music USA in partnership with the League of American Orchestras and made possible through major support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These three-year residencies include premieres of new work, youth engagement activities, and performances from the composer’s existing oeuvre. This year the program also saw fruitful activity at the Albany Symphony in their collaboration with the Sleeping Giants Collective (Timo Andres, Andrew Norman, Jacob Cooper, Christopher Cerrone, Robert Honstein, and Ted Hearne); in Stella Sung’s residency with the Dayton Performing Arts Alliance; with Narong Prangcharoen at the Pacific Symphony; and in Gabriela Lena Frank’s residency with the Detroit Symphony.
In addition to the Principal Residencies, Music Alive also supports shorter residencies, called New Partnerships, that create new relationships among orchestras and composers who previously have not worked together. These are focused, one-week residencies that represent an important step in creating long-lasting working relationships between American orchestras and American composers, ensuring that the music reaches audiences who are ready to embrace it. This year’s list of awardees includes: Clarice Assad and the Boston Landmarks Orchestra, Douglas J. Cuomo and the Grant Park Music Festival, Annie Gosfield and the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, Takuma Itoh and the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, Jingling Luo and the Princeton Symphony Orchestra, Missy Mazzoli and the Boulder Symphonic Orchestra, Rick Robinson and the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra, Carl Schimmel and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, Laura Schwendinger and the Richmond Symphony, Derrick Spiva and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Sumi Tonooka and the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, and finally Dan Visconti and the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra.
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For many of us, homelessness is not a reality we can conceive of—it’s a problem so large and unimaginable that we often ignore and fail to empathize with those whom it befalls. Cuban-born dancer Alexey Taran trained with Havana’s National School of Art before moving to Venezuela, where he and his roommate, who is also a dancer, suddenly found themselves homeless after being evicted from their rooming house. Homelessness is, as Taran later told Miami Art Zine, “something that can happen to anybody […] when we had to sleep, we always took turns. It was very hard.”
After a fortuitous but unsurprising Guggenheim Fellowship relocated Taran and his partner, Carla Forte, to Miami, he began to notice many similarities between Miami and cities he had previously lived in. “It wasn’t only the beautiful things: the beautiful beach, the beautiful face on the city, but there is another city too. Sometimes it’s very frustrating, because you see these people sitting in front of the bank, or sleeping in front of very fancy stores.” The experiences of that difficult period of his life—cast with characters whose hardship “doesn’t discriminate on race, gender identity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation”—became the artistic basis for TRIBE: life in gestures. An examination of homelessness in Miami, the work explores desperation, struggle, and grit through an evocative performance which integrates dance, electronic, and video art. Joining a dance company ultimately saved Taran, and he sought to use his opportunity to honor those less fortunate around him.
For this intensely reflective work, Venezuelan composer and experimental sound artist Gustavo Matamoros crafted a score that uses seedy, bit-crushed sounds, astringent tone oscillations, and a live drummer, who at certain times drives the dancing with frenetic pounding—not unlike a street performer. In other moments, Matamoros chooses silence, allowing the full depth of Taran’s directorial and choreographic vision to come through: “a reflection on compassion and the need to turn our community into a more humane space concerned its most powerless members: a work that draws out the individual within the collective in a search for common ground.”
TRIBE: life in gestures was commissioned by the On.Stage Black Box series at Miami-Dade County Auditorium and presented April 2-5, 2015. In addition to the staged performance, the project included a series of screenings and informal presentations during the months of January and March that took place at Miami-Dade county shelters. New Music USA awarded Taran and Matamoros a project grant for TRIBE, an important social enterprise in fine art and performance that casts a distinct and intense illuminating light on problems we often keep hidden in the dark.
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The slogan of this year’s Edgefest, now in its 19th iteration, “Wake Up Calls From The Edge,” exemplifies the festival’s willingness to examine the blurry edges between musical genres. Held at Kerrytown Concert House in Ann Arbor, Edgefest is a destination for the improvised music community. Focusing each year on a different instrument, Edgefest regularly gathers an incredibly diverse group of composers and players for a weekend of consistently exciting and challenging music.
The October 2015 Edgefest is all about trumpet music, and New Music USA is incredibly excited about the lineup that we’ve helped support, which includes Taylor Ho Bynum, Peter Evans, Joe McPhee, and composer Jason Kao Hwang. Over the past twenty years, “Edgefest has gained a reputation as one of the most innovative music festivals in this country; presenting world-class cutting-edge jazz, creative improvisation, and category-defying music often ignored in the commercial marketplace. The artists/composers who participate in Edgefest and its various outreach activities increase the public’s appreciation for and understanding of this creative and improvisational musical genre, as well as promote their own individual and unique compositions.” We can’t wait to see what the festival does next!
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Few characters in the broad story of American culture are as ubiquitous as the jazz singer. The enormous contributions made by artists such as Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and so many others are still with us today. A look to the worlds of hip-hop and turntablism—for instance, Venetian Snare’s breakbeat re-imagining of Holiday—reveal just how we still consume their music today, even if indirectly through a degree of separation.
For three consecutive weeks in May 2015, NewMusicBox paid tribute to three important female jazz vocalists of diverse styles, whose careers span decades. Our “Singing It—Generations in Jazz” featured conversations with the extraordinary Sheila Jordan, Fay Victor, and composer-vocalist Jen Shyu.
Sheila Jordan: “My heart and soul were totally into this music from the first moment I heard four notes of Charlie Parker’s “Now’s The Time.” That’s the first [jazz] tune I ever heard. That was in high school. Before that I was always a singer. I sang on radio programs, amateur hours, and whatever. I was always singing as a kid. But I never knew what I wanted to sing until I heard “Now’s The Time” by Charlie Parker and his Reboppers. They weren’t even called Beboppers yet. That to me was the beginning. And I knew from that moment, I said, ‘Oh my God, this is the music I’ll dedicate my life to. This is it.’ I was a kid, but it was almost like I was a grown-up person all of a sudden.
… [Charlie Parker] became a very dear friend of mine. And he turned me on to so many things. After I moved from Detroit to New York, I had a wonderful loft where I used to have wonderful sessions. I was studying with Lennie Tristano at the time, but I had known Bird before that and he started coming up to my loft a lot. A couple of times he had an LP under his arm and he said, ‘I want you to hear something.’ He put it on and it had nothing to do with jazz. He turned me on to Hindemith. He turned me on to Béla Bartók. He turned me on to Stravinsky. I used to say, ‘Bird, I tried to play these tunes, but I hear it quicker than I can play it.’ He said, ‘Well, you got million dollar ears, so use your ears.’”
Fay Victor: “My earliest memories of music are probably hearing calypso and reggae and also Indian music… That was a big part, and also African-American music, urban contemporary music, especially of that period—people coming out of the Motown era and the Philly sound and also Aretha Franklin. And also around my house we listened to a bit of classical music, mainly Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky I didn’t really get into, but Beethoven I kind of dug…As it turned out, one of my closest friends as a child, her father was a serious jazz fan…I’d go over to their house, and I’d kind of hear sounds that I liked and that were appealing. But I didn’t know what I was really listening to. When I thought I was listening to jazz, it was things like Bob James or Earl Klugh. That’s what I thought was jazz, usually things I never admit.
Betty [Carter] was trying to be a musician and to improvise like a horn player would. So that was actually more compelling and more interesting. I also began to hear from other people that perhaps I had the dexterity to go that way. Also, the way she led her band. I saw Betty live a few times. The way she handled her band, to make them create in the moment what she wanted to do deeply influenced me. So when I got to have a band, I really made it a point that it wouldn’t be just the way singers have groups: the so-and-so trio, the so-and-so quartet. If you hear a lot of records, across the parameters, they are pretty much the same. The roles of the musicians are the same, regardless of arrangement. I wanted to develop a band in the sense of Betty Carter where I wanted it to have its own sonic universe, whatever that would become. So that became something interesting to work towards.”
In the introduction to the NewMusicBox profile of Jen Shyu, Frank J. Oteri wrote: “Admittedly Jen Shyu’s definition of jazz is extremely broad at this point. She was deeply influenced to go in her current music direction through formidable interactions with multi-instrumentalist Francis Wong, a pioneer of the Asian-American jazz movement, and her many years of performing with the omnivorous Steve Coleman in his group Five Elements. It’s a direction that took her from performing standards ‘wearing very sequiny dresses’ to writing her own material and becoming proficient on many traditional East Asian instruments and in many different traditional vocal techniques, including Indonesian sindhen and Korean p’ansori. In fact, her monodrama Solo Rites: Seven Breaths–which incorporates many of the techniques she acquired through her immersive Asian travels and synthesizes them into a fluid whole—is a far cry from what you might usually hear in most jazz venues. However, the mesmerizing performance I heard her give of it took place at The Jazz Gallery, a non-profit space that showcases experimental jazz. But is it still jazz?”
Jen Shyu: “I always will be trying to break down any preconceived notions of anything that I’m supposedly doing. The word jazz is in there because I do feel tied to the continuum—or the tradition—of innovation, and I think jazz is very unique in that way. It’s such a large and dangerous word, but I still feel like what Randy Weston said is that he’s a fan of the music. I still feel like I’ll always be a fan of it—the study and the honoring of those giants, the deep looking inside of it and knowing these musicians, seeking out elders. I feel tied to jazz in that way, and that has inspired a lot of what I do and how I go about doing it. And vocalist? Voice has become my main instrument, even though I think my first love was dance, and it still is a deep love of mine. But I find that the voice has allowed me passage into meeting people from every part of the world. Even if I don’t speak the language yet, if I explain I’m looking for these older songs, then if I sing a little from another culture, then they’ll understand what I’m looking for, just from hearing that. And then they’ll understand, ‘oh, this isn’t just someone wanting something from our culture.’ There’s a relationship that’s immediately built. I feel like I’m very lucky to have such a tool that can make that connection with people so quickly.”
Published on NewMusicBox- May 6, 13, and 20, 2015
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Colombian folk music and jazz play off each other in beautiful and unexpected ways in Edmar Castañeda’s compositions. Castañeda grew up in Bogotá, playing the Colombian folk harp, or arpa llanera, and dancing joropo, a traditional Colombian folk dance, with his sister. He moved to New York at age 16 to live with his father, who was also a musician, and go to school, where he began his jazz education.
Trained as a trumpet player, because there was no harp in the school band, Castañeda spent his nights playing solo harp in restaurants to support himself. During these evenings, his daytime instruction percolated into his harp playing, inflecting his traditional treatment of the instrument with the idioms of modern jazz. Soon, he was attending jam sessions and, through his playing, dispelling doubts about the role of his beloved instrument in jazz. “Castañeda,” says New York Times critic Nate Chinen, “has a percussive interface with his instrument, saving the sweeping glissandi for special accents and otherwise using a sharp attack, all pluck and strum.” In a Tiny Desk Concert for NPR, Castañeda demonstrated his ability to simultaneously juggle two or three ideas, using momentary lapses in a left hand tumbao to drop in chord coloration, all while following an improvisational thread—an element of jazz mirrored in the llanera music in which he is rooted.
With a grant from New Music USA, Castañeda, trombonist Marshall Gilkes, and drummer/percussionist David Silliman took part in the June 2015 D.C. Jazz Festival. In an interview at the festival, Castañeda explained that for him “jazz is freedom” and playing jazz enables him to “show a different face for the harp” than people are accustomed to. Inspired by the music of Duke Ellington, Paquito de Rivera, and Charlie Parker, Castañeda grooves and improvises with the best of them. In his review of the performance, Malcolm Barnes called Castañeda a “jazz harp angel” and commended his “melodic interludes with deeply mystical sounds that were perfectly complemented by his two sidemen.”
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For Gelsey Bell, musical success is not contingent upon perfection, polish, or even, well, success: “I love an aesthetic of mistakes. I want things to get a little messy. I’m not interested in the sounds of perfection.” Hailed by The New York Times as a “winning soprano,” Bell began as a singer-songwriter, a path she ultimately deviated from in search of a wider, more musically curious range of collaborators. As she opened herself to other kinds of music, Bell found herself increasingly drawn to the experimental music community in New York City. Attracted to its dedication to collaboration, exploration, and openness, Bell found a home in new music, joining the ensemble thingNY and the performance collective Varispeed, among others. Rather than abandoning her past, Bell now uses the song form that she believes in to create the genre-bending work that fits with the experimental music she loves.
NewMusicBox editor Molly Sheridan sat down with Bell in February 2015 for a Spotlight Session, during which they dug into the numerous idiosyncratic aspects of her work. In “Cradle,” Bell “spends some time coaxing the audience [closer] before she begins to sing” into the metallophone nestled lovingly in her arms, her dangling earrings striking the metal keys of the instrument. For a piece like “Bathroom Songs,” Bell invites the audience into the cramped space with her. As she sings, she sways her hips and slinks against the wall. These songs are more than words and music; they are performances in the theatrical sense, where gesture and setting weigh equally with the sonic elements of the work. Given this propensity, Bell thinks extensively about the comfort level of her audience, describing how she works hard to establish boundaries while simultaneously shaping the performance to suit the specific group watching.
Since completing her PhD in performance studies at New York University in January 2015, Bell has increasingly been exploring how to cohesively bring together her background as a singer-songwriter and the experimental music that truly excites her to create daring, boundary-breaking new work:
“I feel like I’m at this place of total exploration and I’m just having faith that I’m going to come out with something. I feel like I’m really in that mode where you’re just like, okay, I’m an artist. I have to let myself fail. I have to try a million things. I have to hate stuff, I have to love stuff, and I have to trust that if I put something on that’s really horrible it won’t be that no one wants to see anything that I do ever again. And just have faith that this kind of dream of some sort of sound that I have in my head that doesn’t have these intense boundaries can happen.”
Published on NewMusicBox- February 18, 2015
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Novels and plays often provide the inspiration for operas; composers from Puccini to Berg have written music for the literature that surrounds them, but we rarely come across operas based on scholastic work that delves deep into the history of a musical movement the way George Lewis’s Afterword, The AACM (as) Opera does with his 2007 book, The AACM: A Power Stronger than Itself. Founded on the South Side of Chicago fifty years ago, the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) was and still is a formidable player in the avant-garde music community, nurturing the early careers of many now-legendary jazz musicians including Jack DeJohnette, Henry Threadgill, Amina Claudine Myers, and Anthony Braxton. Drawing together a range of practitioners steeped in the worlds of avant-garde jazz, classical, and world music and dedicated to creative music based in improvisation, the AACM is devoted to “nurturing, performing, and recording serious, original music.”
An “aesthetic extension” of the organization’s story, Afterword, The AACM (as) Opera, a sprawling stage production created by Lewis and longtime collaborators Catherine Sullivan and Sean Griffin, premiered at Roulette in concert version in May 2015 with support from a New Music USA project grant. Like many 19th-century German novels, Lewis explains that Afterword “is a kind of coming-of-age opera, a bildungsoper. So, I’m looking at the ways people in the AACM came of age and what they faced along the way.”
The Roulette performance featured three singers accompanied by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble. The fully-staged opera will be premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago this coming season and will feature “pre-structured music, text, scenography, and movement in juxtaposition with analogous elements improvised in real time. The opera’s singers will be called upon to act and move, as well as taking on multiple roles, creating and transforming their own appearances and personae.”
New York Times critic Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim applauded Lewis’s cerebral composition, calling the music “bracingly dissonant, with spiky vocal lines and fragmented utterances from the ensemble.” Afterword is an exploratory work that heightens an awareness of the AACM as an important institution where race, genre, politics, and art intersected to create a social and musical movement with deep and lasting roots.
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Anna Halprin’s impact on the world of dance is invaluable: she created seminal pieces that changed how many thought of dance; taught now-legendary dancers such as Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Meredith Monk; and collaborated with already established ones such as Merce Cunningham. A consistently radical innovator, Halprin influenced and collaborated with many artists, regardless of medium, who defined the 1960s, including The Living Theater, artists associated with the Fluxus movement, Allen Ginsberg, musicians such as The Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin, and composers including Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and Morton Subotnick. Speaking movingly on Halprin’s outsized influence, Shinichi Iova-Koga writes, “Anna is the stone, the rock. This rock drops into the pool and we’re all the little ripples that move out from the impact of the rock on the surface of the water.”
Halprin’s practice was highly oriented towards personal creativity and the exploration of anatomy as a method for informing effective movement. Rather than dictating every movement, Halprin eventually developed the technique of using scores to create her dances. This working philosophy served her well in expounding on dance as a very self-oriented activity—one that, beyond an artistic discipline, had important resonance for one’s health and psyche.
In 1971, Halprin was diagnosed with a malignant colon tumor, after which she began to explore dance as ritual, a means by which to confront the difficulties and challenges in one’s life. Her artistic methodology strove to use movement to overcome physical and psychic trauma.
Created in celebration of Halprin’s 95th birthday, Iova-Koga’s 95 Rituals is structured around different scores for rituals (performances with a purpose). Iova-Koga considers 95 Rituals “an opportunity to…examine the forces that shaped her. I believe that working with the fundamental principles that Anna has articulated will yield something unlike what Anna has or would make. This piece will be for Anna.”
After 70 preliminary rituals were publicly tested in May and June 2015, all 95 rituals were presented in July at Hyde Street Pier in San Francisco (with Halprin herself in attendance) in performances that were free and open to the public.
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Folk music usually conjures images of banjos, Bob Dylan, and Middle America; computers rarely come to mind. Yet Dylan went electric, and when NewMusicBox editor Frank J. Oteri chatted with electronic music pioneer Laurie Spiegel in September 2014, she frequently argued that computers are folk instruments just as much as mandolins or washboards.
When Oteri visited Spiegel’s apartment, he found a cavernous Tribeca loft filled with generations of computers and keyboards. In many ways, her apartment serves as a time capsule for her work, with many eras in the progression of technology displayed in a three-dimensional timeline. Spiegel’s living space tells the story of her life as a revolutionary electronic musician and, more than that, it embodies the history of American technology, allowing visitors to step back in time, briefly, and glimpse how we used to see the future.
A pioneering electronic music artist, Spiegel remains humble in the face of her tremendously prolific output. Her sonic realization of Johannes Kepler’s 1619 text Harmonices Mundi was included on a record sent into space as part of the Voyager mission, and her contemporaries and collaborators include a survey of the experimental Bell Laboratories crew of electronic music composers—Morton Subotnick included. In a perhaps more unusual setting, her piece Sediment was featured in a recent installment of The Hunger Games movie franchise.
Spiegel fell in love with machines the first time she saw a mainframe tape-operated computer at Purdue University while on a field trip with her high school physics class and she has been using them ever since. That being said, she began her musical life as a folk guitar player and has never abandoned that music. In fact, she sees common ground between the seemingly oppositional aesthetics of folk traditions and the digital realm.
“The electronic model is very similar to the folk model… People will come up with new lyrics for the same melody, or they’ll change it from a ballad to a dance piece. Nobody can remember what the origin is. There is no single creator. … In the way that electronic sounds go around—people sample things, they do remixes or sampling, they borrow snatches of sound from each other’s pieces—the concept of a finite fixed-form piece with an identifiable creator that is property and a medium of exchange or the embodiment of economic value really disappears … in similar ways. … Prior to electronic instruments, you had to go through the bottleneck of written notation. So electronic music did for getting things from the imagination to the ears of an audience what the internet later did for everybody being able to self-publish, democratizing it in ways that obviously have pros and cons.”
Published on NewMusicBox- November 1, 2014
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New Music USA has long provided general operating support for small artist-run new music ensembles in New York City through a grant program that began with our legacy organization, Meet The Composer. The program started with funding from JP Morgan Trust and continued with a grant from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust. When the Cary Trust spent out its funds in 2009, it made an important award to New Music USA to continue the grant program through 2015. These grants provided essential support to grassroots ensembles and venues in New York, and many, including ICE and Roulette, have grown beyond this program, gaining wide recognition and support for their consistently innovative and compelling work. In 2014, we awarded the final round of grants provided by the original Cary Trust gift. Recipients had the option to receive their grants over one or two years. See a full list of 2014-2015 awardees in the back of the booklet.
Over the years, this program has become increasingly important as the number of do-it-yourself artist-led ensembles has grown, while the number of programs offering general operating grants to arts organizations in NYC has shrunk. Due to this gap, we were particularly motivated to help small new music groups find new creative ways to sustain their work. We started exploring new paths to sustainability for this sector in collaboration with the New York State Council on the Arts as we administered the first round of a technical assistance program for small new music ensembles in New York State.
Based on the feedback we received during a series of convenings in 2014 with members of the community, in 2015 we ran a pilot version of the program that focused on marketing, promotion, and audience-building strategies. Participating ensembles included Musical Feast, Society for New Music, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Ensemble Mise-En, Astoria Music Society, Yarn/Wire, Loadbang, and Look & Listen. During our meetings with many of these ensembles, we were struck by the powerful desire participants expressed to collaborate with each other across multiple realms—creative, marketing, and administrative.
We took the energy behind that desire for collaboration as our inspiration to build a new program and seek funding for it. This resulted in a $495,000 three-year grant to New Music USA from The Scherman Foundation’s Katharine S. and Axel G. Rosin Fund. With this funding, we will implement The NYC New Music Impact Fund, a program that will offer funds for residency pairings and general operations to small DIY new music organizations in New York City, and create a new approach for the collective promotion of the sector through our online platform, newmusicusa.org. We hope to use the NYC New Music Impact Fund as a model for future programs in other cities across the country in the years to come.
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“At North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, erstwhile commune and artistic playground of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and many others, a spirit of radical democracy prevailed. Students and teachers shared roles and work, boundaries between disciplines dissolved, and art bled into life, nurturing an atmosphere of unfettered creative collaboration.”
So read the program notes for Black Mountain Songs, a stunning tribute to the twenty-three year existence of the utopian and experimental school of avant-garde multi-disciplinarians—poets, composers, artists, architects and, above all, pedagogues—whose affections for nature, the human body, and the fraught connection between the two created a profoundly organic space for artistic creation.
Black Mountain Songs was an evening-length multimedia affair including staged choral and instrumental music, dance, projection, and visual design that evoked the work of Black Mountain alumni Cy Twombly, Franz Kline, Buckminster Fuller, and others. These multimedia components and the movement of the chorus in various, nontraditional configurations called forth the spirit that permeated Black Mountain.
The Brooklyn Youth Chorus, led by Dianne Berkun-Menaker, partnered with Bryce Dessner (of the rock band The National) and Joseph Melillo (executive producer at BAM) to program a cross-genre concert honoring Black Mountain College featuring music by composers Caroline Shaw, Richard Reed Parry (Arcade Fire), Aleksandra Vrebalov, Nico Muhly, Tim Hecker, Jherek Bischoff, John King, and Dessner himself.
This project, backed by a New Music USA project grant, stands at the peak of a tremendous body of work by the Youth Chorus. Preceded by a week-long residency at the Fisher Center, which included a multitude of activities engaging school and community groups, the work was premiered at BAM’s Harvey Theater in a three-day run starting November 20, 2014.
“The choral songs at the heart of this work are performed with confidence, energy and tenderness (and from memory) by the 50 skilled singers of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, who are mostly teenagers and mostly girls…The sheer beauty of their singing was captivating.” wrote New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini, who concluded that “it was heartening to see [the group] basking in the standing ovation that ‘Black Mountain Songs’ won from the audience” at BAM Harvey that night, collectively carrying old traditions into the present and richly embodying Black Mountain College’s continuing legacy.
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The 2012 presidential election and the intense spotlight cast on Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s Mormon background precipitated a “Mormon moment” in the United States. This period of heightened inquiry into the relatively young but fertile religion spurred theologians, historians, and cultural critics to re-examine the denomination in the 21st century. Jeremy Grimshaw, a graduate of Salt Lake City’s Brigham Young University, wrote an article for NewMusicBox in September 2014 which broadly details Mormonism’s many luminary composers and musical ontology.
Grimshaw writes that “music was central to the Mormons’ effort to ‘make the desert blossom as a rose’ during their settlement of Utah and nearby regions in the second half of the 19th century. Stories abound of pioneers taking great pains to transport musical instruments across the plains while leaving so many other belongings behind. (My own family tree includes a great-great uncle, John Grimshaw, a multi-instrumentalist who took a liking to the xylophone but, unable to find or afford one in rural southern Utah, used his perfect pitch to carve one out of wagon wheel spokes.) Converts from abroad were encouraged to bring music with them when they emigrated, and a handful of second- and third-generation Mormons made a reverse trek for conservatory training in Europe or the eastern U.S., several of them at the New England Conservatory. Early efforts at cultural cultivation produced a number of local legends in the early 1900s. Evan Stephens (1854-1930), an early director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, penned dozens of hymns and other works. B. Cecil Gates, a grandson of Brigham Young, composed several choral and orchestral works, including an oratorio on the story of Mormon founder Joseph Smith titled The Restoration and a Christmas cantata, The Shepherd’s Vision.”
Grimshaw finds a particularly rich subject in minimalist pioneer La Monte Young; the composer is the subject of Grimshaw’s book, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It. During their first interview, Young declared: “There’s no question in my mind … principles of Mormonism did play an enormous influential role in the shaping of [me] and [my] music…These concepts of eternity, that souls would be able to reunite, these kinds of concepts were especially intriguing to me. And so there’s no doubt in my mind for even a milli-nothing that they didn’t influence my first work with long-sustained tones and certainly my ideas that things could last for a long time. And sure, I was also gradually becoming acquainted with Eastern thought, but this probably began in the mid-’50s sometime, with reading haiku, and reading the Tao. But it was like something that was an old friend because of the way it had already been introduced to me in Mormonism.”
Published on NewMusicBox- September 24, 2014
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At New Music USA, our mission is to serve as advocates for new American music. We do that not only through our grantmaking and media programs, but also as a representative in national and international music networks. New Music USA represents the United States as a member of the International Association of Music Information Centers (IAMIC) and the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), as well as by being one of thirteen members of the Performing Arts Alliance, an organization that brings together nationwide performing arts advocates.
This year, our President and CEO Ed Harsh and Composer Advocate Frank J. Oteri traveled to Wroclaw, Poland, as American representatives at ISCM’s World New Music Days 2014 and IAMIC’s 2014 Annual Meeting, which were timed to coincide and share a number of concerts and activities. Ed and Frank also attended the 24th Annual Underwood New Music Readings in May of 2015, where they participated in the Composer Development Workshop, an insightful set of talks focused on the business of being a composer: Ed participated as a panelist in “Support Structures For Composers,” while Frank moderated the “Publicity and Promotion” workshop.
Earlier in 2015, Frank represented New Music USA at the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute and attended the February meeting of the American Choral Director’s Association (ACDA), which took place in Salt Lake City, Utah. Additionally, New Music USA was represented by Kevin Clark at this year’s New Music Gathering in San Francisco, California. Frank was also present in Detroit at the 2015 DSO EarShot readings, part of the program developed collaboratively by the American Composers Orchestra, the American Composers Forum, the League of American Orchestras, and New Music USA. This year, he moderated the “Composing An(d) Identity” and “Evolution/Revolution or (R)Evolution” panels, and was one of two speakers on “Support Structures for Composers.”
Our Director of Grantmaking Programs, Scott Winship, gave a talk called “Resourcing Your Practice” at the 2014 Kresge Art Fellows meeting in Detroit, Michigan, participated as a panelist at the Jazz Connect Conference in January 2015, and in “New Strategies in Grantmaking: Enriching Communities Through the Arts” at the Support Center for Nonprofit Management.
In Re-Scoring History, producer/artistic director Don DiNicola and composer Renee Baker assert that the 1925 film Body and Soul, which is often written off as an outdated “race film,” delivers a potent and complex message, making it both morally relevant and artistically compelling for viewers in 2015. With support from a New Music USA project grant, Baker wrote a new score for the film, which was directed and written by the groundbreaking Oscar Micheaux and starred the legendary Paul Robeson. Evocative and polished, her score adds depth to the characters, brings to the fore the film’s implicit social commentary, and makes the issues which are still important relatable to contemporary audiences.
Painter Lewis Achenbach wrote warmly of the film’s April 26, 2015 screening and performance at Chicago’s Museum for Contemporary Art, noting that “the score somehow created a wormhole and fused 1925 and 2015 […] The sound and vision was crisp and seamless, the score abstractly holding slightly behind the subject matter, yet portending and nudging like a ripple somehow.”
Crafting a score that fit Micheaux’s direct and unsentimental film was no easy task. “This film is especially important,” DiNicola and Baker emphasize, “[as] the narrative doesn’t rely solely on correcting racial stereotypes of the times. It delivers its message with a complex moral tinge that was frank and honest to the point where even the African-American audience was shocked to see a preacher portrayed in such a morally ambiguous light.”
In his work as a director, Micheaux pushed back against white stereotyping of the time by crafting complex black characters across the social spectrum. The film marks the debut of singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson. He played a runaway prisoner masquerading as Rt. Reverend Isaiah T. Jenkins, a purported man of God, who throughout the film’s progression, steals, rapes, and kills. For a black filmmaker working in the 1920s, including a black character behaving in such a way was a daring move. Elaborating on what is already a complicated work, Baker’s music weaves an added sonorous dimension, such that “the music doesn’t just accompany the film, it embodies the narrative voice, speaks for the characters, and underscores the drama.”
Revisiting Micheaux’s film with a contemporary perspective, DiNicola and Baker give Body and Soul the respect and consideration that it deserves. “Oscar Micheaux was a pioneering filmmaker whose reputation deserves rescuing from the ‘race film’ categorization. This treatment of Body and Soul endeavors to change the dialogue and place Body and Soul squarely where it belongs, as a salient work of art and social commentary in the context of the early silent film era.”
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In an ethnomusicological overview of the banjo, its practitioners, and musical legacy written for NewMusicBox, composer Erik Spangler grapples with the contentious history this beloved instrument carries. Spangler hears echoes of American life dating back to the 19th century in the banjo—the pain and suffering undergone by African Americans and white Americans alike. Navigating what W.E.B. du Bois called “the color line” throughout the article, Spangler ends on a note of hope—that the banjo, inextricable from a history of racism, stereotyping, and injustice in the United States, can provide us with a means for healing and connection and lead us forward to a place of respect and solidarity.
“Is there an instrument that comes with more cultural baggage than the banjo? For many, it evokes a stereotyped image of the rural white Southerner, as in the scary hillbillies of Deliverance and many a comedy sketch. In the 19th century, by contrast, the banjo served as a caricature of enslaved Africans, gaining wide popularity through blackface minstrel shows. The instrument’s deeper story moves around and between the stereotypes. This is a timbre that cuts to some of the deepest seams of America’s past.”
“…I am drawn to the banjo as a means of grounding creative experimentation within a deep history that is relevant to connections that I am trying to make in my music. The legacy of slavery in the United States is one which is pushed fairly far back in our collective consciousness. The trauma of that institution still reverberates today in our economic structure, systems of social control, and self-segregation within our population. The banjo came into its own as an American instrument in the midst of that experience of slavery. It was brought into the white mainstream consciousness through the blackface minstrel show, a format which also continues to reverberate in mainstream American entertainment. In the process of this African instrument being adopted by popular society in America, it also took on the musical heritage of the English, Scottish, and Irish immigrants. It was embraced as an instrument of the Everyman, especially in the hollers and mining towns of Appalachia, where the banjo became a main outlet for expressing life’s troubles as well as a way of laying them aside through homespun entertainment.”
“…The hybrid cultural heritage of the banjo, kept alive by traditional players and continually reinterpreted by musicians from many different backgrounds, may be uniquely equipped to break through the divisions that separate people. It is an instrument that was originally embedded in the lives of enslaved Africans as well as the rural white settlers later on, and it has assimilated musical elements from both cultures. The tangled thread of minstrelsy that endures in popular media to this day is one that needs to be examined and understood in all of its complexity. Artists and musicians should attempt to examine that shadow and address it in a conscious way in contemporary art. The banjo stands squarely at the intersection of Anglo and African cultures at a formative period in American history, spanning different conceptions of heritage. Perhaps it can also be a tool to help to unravel the pain or prejudice and uplift us to better way of coexisting and collaborating in this world.”
Published on NewMusicBox- December 10, 2014
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“A Love Like That”- A New Work for Cantus and High School Choir
Minneapolis, MN
“Heaven’s Dust” – World Premiere by Randy James for 10 Hairy Legs
Highland Park, NJ
“THE LONG WALK” WORLD PREMIERE
Saratoga Springs, NY
2015 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival
Becket, MA
2015 New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival
New York, NY
2015 Ojai Music Festival
Ojai, CA
3 Singers
Chicago, IL
95 RITUALS (for Anna Halprin)
San Francisco, CA
A Cappella
New Brunswick, NJ
A Debut CD: The Music of Eric Nathan
Williamstown, MA
A new work for flute and electronics written for flutist Carla Rees
Denton, TX
A Piano Party for Terry Riley at 80
Berkeley, CA
After The Feast
New York City, NY
Along These Lines
San Francisco, CA
Alternative Guitar Summit
New York, NY
American Composers Orchestra Premieres Motormouth for Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall
Los Angeles, CA
American Notes– Engaging new communities
New York, NY
ANATOMY THEATER
New York, NY
ASO Sound Investment Composer Residency with Paul Desenne
Birmingham, AL
Babbling
San Francisco, CA
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Presents Ten Centennial Celebration Commissions
Baltimore, MD
beaufort scales
Chicago, IL
Beirut Is A House Of Many Names
Muskegon, MI
Black Mountain Songs
Brooklyn , NY
BOSIE
Ann Arbor, MI
Brass Band Blastoff
New York, NY
Breath and Beat
Montclair, NJ
Call & Response 2016
San Francisco, CA
Capriccio
Boston, MA
CAUGHT IN TREETOPS
Austin, TX
Cello Solos Today
New York, NY
Choreographing LeWitt
Brooklyn , NY
Chromatic
New York, NY
Coffee County Tennessee
Austin, TX
Commercial Recording Featuring Solo Piano Works By Timo Andres and Phil Young
Chapel Hill, NC
Contemporaneous presents Self-Portrait, a Fifth Anniversary Celebration
New York , NY
Conversations with Sculptures
Hamilton, NJ
Don’t Look Back
Boston, MA
Dual-national collaboration between Cuatro Puntos and Afghanistan National Institute of Music to record Gullistan-e Nur by Dr. Sadie Harrison
Hartford, CT
Duo Damiana Debut Recording: Adventurous Repertoire for Flute and Guitar
Eugene, OR
Edgefest 2015: Wake Up Calls from the Edge
Ann Arbor, MI
Edmar Castaneda Performance and “Meet the Artist” Event
District of Columbia, DC
ESTHER
Brooklyn, NJ
Face Resection
Culver City, CA
Falling for Prepositions
Teaneck, NJ
Featured Composer Residency with Derek Bermel
San Francisco, CA
flux-mirror for saxophone and electronics
Minneapolis, MN
George Lewis: Afterword, The AACM (as) Opera + International Contemporary Ensemble
Brooklyn, NY
Girl Gods
Seattle, WA
Intimate Instruments Workshop: Building the Linguaphone of Tremulous Communion
Detroit, MI
Iron Shoes
Oakland, CA
Kettle Corn New Music 2014-15: Sandbox Percussion and Lisa Moore
New York, NY
Lisa Renée Coons in Residence at 2015 Women Composers Festival of Hartford
Hartford, CT
Luminous Etudes: Visions of the Black Madonna of Montserrat
Fullerton, CA
Man Forever with TIGUE – Percussion and Vocal Canons
Ridgewood, NY
Matana Roberts: COIN COIN
New York, NY
Meehan/ Perkins Duo Records New American Percussion Works
Chicago, IL
Metafagote
New York, NY
Music Creates and Destroys
Jersey City, NJ
Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP)
Various, AZ
New Work for Avi Avital
New York, NY
New Works for the OpenICE Initiative
New York, NY
No Capacity to Consent
Washington, DC
Old Text Woven New
Baltimore, MD
Omaha Under the Radar 2015
Omaha, NE
Organon Novus: Contemporary Organ Works by American Masters
Chicago, IL
Paradigm Lost
Philadephia, PA
PATIENT(CE)
New York, NY
Pikes Falls Chamber Music Festival: Year 4
Jamaica, VT
Quartet Project sampler
Boston, MA
Qubit Presents SoundArt2016
New York, NY
Radiant Child Video Recording
Chicago, IL
Record Original Jazz/Classical Works for Piano
Roslyn, WA
Recording “Letting Time Circle Through Us”
Cambridge, MA
Re-scoring History
Chicago, IL
Resist/Surrender
San Francisco, CA
RighteousGIRLS
New York, NY
Roomful of Teeth 2015 MASS MoCA Residency
North Adams, MA
Rounder Songs
Pittsburgh, PA
Ruptured Horizon
New York, NY
Same Animal, Different Cages
Brooklyn, NY
SaxoVoce
Cleveland, OH
Second Inversion – Rethink Classical
Seattle, WA
Sher Flash: Fiction Becomes New Music
Austin, TX
Short opera for soprano and baritone
Duluth, MN
Smoke Lines.
Jersey City, NJ
SOLI : Experience
San Antonio, TX
Sonambient Pavilion
Chicago, IL
Song of Silver Geese
Brooklyn, NY
SOUNDIAL
Chapel Hill, NC
Sowah Mensah Commission
New Prague, Northfield, Faribault, Cannon Falls, MN
STEVE COLEMAN: SYNOVIAL JOINTS RECORDING PROJECT
Brooklyn , PA
string quartet and skyscraper
Manhattan, NY
Supporting Student Composers
Randolph, VT
Sympathetic Magic
Helena, MT
Synth Nights: Morton Subotnick
New York, NY
Talujon’s Pocket Gamelan
Brooklyn , NY
The Black Composer Speaks
Chicago, IL
The Black Rose
New York, NY
The Brain Piece
New York, NY
The Debut Series Expanded: Mentorship, Marketing, and Musical Incubation
New York, NY
The Magnetosphere
Austin, TX
The Monadnock Institute at The Walden School
Dublin, NH
The Snow Falls in the Winter
New York, NY
Tonecycle for Blues (2014) Base 30 Hz, 2:3:7 Vocal Version with 3:4 and 6:7
New York, NY
TRAFFIC JAM
Austin, TX
Two Commissions for Arturo O’Farrill
New York, NY
Undine
Los Angeles, CA
Walk to the Beat
Nyack , NY
WALKING WITH ‘TRANE
Brooklyn, NY
Water, Water, Everywhere
Fresno, CA
WAVES
NY and NJ
Wild Rumpus: In Time
San Francisco, CA
Written in Water
Minneapolis, MN
10 Hairy Legs
Highland Park, NJ
Afro Latin Jazz Alliance
New York, NY
Alabama Symphony Orchestra
Birmingham, AL
Richard Aldag
San Francisco, CA
Anna de la Paz
Nyack, NY
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
Baltimore, MD
Matt Barbier
Culver City, CA
Molly Barth
Eugene, OR
Beth Morrison Projects
New York, NY
Brooklyn Youth Chorus
Brooklyn, NY
Sarah Cahill
Berkeley, CA
Cantus
Minneapolis, MN
Carolyn Dorfman Dance
NJ
Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras
Chicago, IL
Jung Hee Choi
New York, NY
Classical KING FM 98.1 / Second Inversion
Seattle, WA
Steve Coleman
Allentown, PA
John Colpitts
Ridgewood, NY
Company Stefanie Batten Bland
New York, NY
Contemporaneous
New York, NY
Cuatro Puntos
Hartford, CT
Danmari – Yass Hakoshima Movement Theatre
Montclair, NJ
DC Jazz Festival
Washington, DC
Amanda DeBoer
Omaha, NE
Diagenesis Duo
Helena, MT
Don DiNicola
New York, NY
Bill Doerrfeld
WA
DRIGGproductions
Experimental Sound Studio
Chicago, IL
Fast Forward Austin
Austin, TX
Festival of New Trumpet Music
New York, NY
David First
Brooklyn, NY
Flyaway Productions
San Francisco, CA
Freespace Dance
Monclair, NJ
Fulcrum Point New Music Project
Chicago, IL
Ellen Fullman
Berkeley, CA
Jeremy Gill
Boston, MA
Grand Canyon Music Festival
Grand Canyon, AZ
Pat Graney
Chris Gross
New York, NY
Randall Harlow
Joel Harrison
Brooklyn, NY
Sungji Hong
Denton, TX
Hybrid Vigor Music, Inc.
Amherst, MA
Ryan Ingebritsen
Chicago, IL
International Contemporary Ensemble
New York, NY
Shinichi Iova-Koga
San Francisco, CA
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival
Becket, MA
Jody Oberfelder Projects
New York, NY
Jenny Olivia Johnson
Cambridge, MA
Molly Joyce
New York, NY
Kerrytown Concert House
Ann Arbor, MI
Kettle Corn New Music
NY
Kitka, Inc.
Oakland, CA
Bernd Klug
Brooklyn, NY
Sam Krahn
Minneapolis, MN
Lake Superior Chamber Orchestra
Duluth, MN
Lar Lubovitch Dance Company
New York, NY
Felipe Lara
New York, NY
Abigail Levine
Brooklyn, NY
Susanna Loewy
Philadelphia, PA
Lunar Ensemble
Baltimore, MD
Lustig Dance Theatre
New Brunswick, NJ
Pamela Madsen
Laguna Beach, CA
Keeril Makan
Cambridge, MA
Martha Graham Dance Company
New York, NY
A.J. McCaffrey
Los Angeles, CA
Meehan/ Perkins Duo
Chicago, IL
Tiffany Mills
Brooklyn, NY
Tim Munro
Chicago, IL
Music-COMP (Music Composition Online Mentoring Program)
Essex Junction, VT
Eric Nathan
Williamstown, MA
New Century Chamber Orchestra
San Francisco, CA
New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival
New York, NY
Nimbus Dance Works
Jersey City, NJ
Northfield Youth Choirs
MN
Ogni Suono Saxophone Duo
Cleveland, OH
Ojai Music Festival
Ojai, CA
Opera Saratoga
Saratoga Springs, NY
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
New York, NY
Steve Parker
Austin, TX
Emily Pinkerton
Pittsburgh, PA
Russell Podgorsek
Austin, TX
Claire Porter
PRISM Quartet, Inc.
New York City, NY and Philadelphia, PA
Qubit
New York, NY
Ragamala Dance
Minneapolis, MN
Chris Reilly
Ann Arbor, MI
RighteousGIRLS
New York, NY
Risa Jaroslow & Dancers
San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Roomful of Teeth
Roulette Intermedium, Inc.
Brooklyn, NY
Seán Curran Company
New York, NY
Shua Group
Jersey City, NJ
Jen Shyu
New York City, NY
SOLI Chamber Ensemble
San Antonio, TX
Anna Sperber
Brooklyn, NY
Splinter Reeds
San Francisco, CA
Matthew Steinke
Austin, TX
Susan Marhsall & Company
New York, NY
Mat Sweeney
Los Angeles, CA
Talujon
New York, NY
The Block
Muskegon, MI
The Jazz Gallery
New York, NY
The Kitchen
New York, NY
The Walden School
Dublin, NH
Third Practice
Washington, DC
Urban Bush Women
Brooklyn, NY
Lee Weisert
Chapel Hill, NC
Wild Rumpus
San Francisco, CA
Women Composers Festival of Hartford
Hartford, CT
Clara Yang
Chapel Hill, NC
Youth Orchestras of Fresno
Fresno, CA
Samuel Adams
Oakland, CA
Julia Adolphe
Andy Akiho
New York, NY
Ambrose Akinmusire
Los Angeles, CA
Albany Records
Joseph Alessi
Elizabeth Alexander
Vicente Alexim
New York, NY
Andy Algire
Dewa Alit
American Composers Orchestra
New York, NY
American Lyric Theater (ALT)
New York, NY
Jeff Anderle
San Francisco, CA
Matthew Andreini
Timo Andres
Brooklyn, NY
Austin New Music Co-op
Austin, TX
Austin SoundWaves
Austin, TX
Austrian Cultural Forum New York
New York, NY
Avi Avital
Dr. Allan Ballinger
East Windsor, CT
Stacey Barelos
Omaha, NE
Ashley Bathgate
New York City, NY
Holly Batt
Jeremy Howard Beck
Floral Park, NY
Michael Begay
Daniel Belcher
Robert Benford
Marla Berg
Derek Bermel
Tim Berne
Ranjit Bhatnagar
Brooklyn, NY
Kevin Bishop
Hartford, CT
Holly Bishop
Hartford, CT
Wojtek Blecharz
San Diego, CA
Olivia Block
Chicago, IL
Per Bloland
Oxford, OH
Suzanne Bocanegra
John Boesche
Chicago, IL
Benjamin Boone
Fresno, CA
Charlotte Bray
Berlin, Germany
Leigh Breslau
Chicago, IL
BRIC
Brooklyn, NY
Nick Brooke
Bennington, VT
Brooklyn Rider
Brooklyn, NY
Courtney Brown
Amiya Brown
Santa Fe, NM
Kyle Bruckmann
Oakland, CA
Douglas Buchanan
Cockeysville, MD
Meaghan Burke
Brooklyn, NY
Patrick Burke
Pittsburgh, PA
Stephen Burns
Chicago, IL
Burnt Sugar Index,LLC
NY, NY
Kayleigh Butcher
Chicago, IL
Aubrey Byerly
Taylor Ho Bynum
New Haven, CT
Cal Performances
Berkeley, CA
Hermes Camacho
Austin, TX
Nerissa Campbell
Brooklyn, NY
Kate Campbell
Oakland, CA
Cindy Capraro
Christian Carey
South Amboy, NJ
Joshua Carro
Los Angeles, CA
Edmar Castenada
Catalyst Quartet
New York, NY
Christopher Cerrone
Brooklyn, NY
Raven Chacon
Anthony Cheung
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Mary Ellen Childs
Minneapolis, MN
Danny Clay
San Francisco, CA
Anna Clyne
Chicago, IL
Benjamin Cold
Minneapolis, MN
David Coll
Oakland, CA
COLLIDE
Austin, TX
Lisa Renée Coons
Kalamazoo , MI
Cordova Quartet
Austin, TX
Heather Cornell
Valley Cottage, NY
Dancers’ Group
San Francisco, CA
Jeanna Dara
Brooklyn, NY
Thanos Daskalopoulos
Degenerate Art Ensemble
Seattle, WA
Amy Denio
Seattle, WA
Paul Desenne
Bryce Dessner
Deviant Septet
New York, NY
Nicholas Deyoe
Alhambra, CA
Natacha Diels
Brooklyn, NY
Mark Dion
New York, NY
Michelle Dorrance
New York, NY
Andrew Drury
Brooklyn, NY
Danny Echevarria
Los Angeles, CA
Aaron Einbond
New York, NY
Either/Or, Inc.
Hadi Eldebek
Brooklyn, NY
Tamzin Ferré Elliott
Annandale on Hudson, NY
Kahil El’Zabar
Matthew Evans
Brooklyn, NY
Peter Evans
Queens, NY
Fabrica Records
Brooklyn, NY
Face the Music
New York, NY
Tim Fain
Los Angeles, CA
Ginger Farley
Chicago, IL
Vicki Fingalson
Dave Fiuczynski
Stephanie Fleischmann
Brooklyn, NY
Ashley Fure
New York, NY
Fusebox
Amy Garapic
Brooklyn, NY
Travis Garrison
Greenville, NC
Sean Griffin
Los Angeles, CA
Satoshi Haga
Sean Hagerty
New York, NY
Joseph Hallman
Philadelphia, PA
Hamilton Live
Sadie Harrison
Shaftesbury, Great Britain
Mary Harron
Brooklyn, NY
Ted Hearne
Brooklyn, NY
Rebekah Heller
Brooklyn, NY
Dieter Hennings
Lexington, KY
Holter Museum of Art
Helena, MT
Geoffrey Hudson
Amherst, MA
Iktus Percussion
Brooklyn, NY
Innova Recordings
St. Paul, MN
Inscape Chamber Orchestra
Bethesda, MD
International Contemporary Ensemble
New York, NY
Bryan Jacobs
Pierre Jalbert
Dana Jessen
Oberlin, OH
Wang Jie
JP Jofre
New York, NY
Scott Johnson
Alan Johsnon
David Merlin Jones (Sidwell Friends School – Music Department)
Bill Kalinkos
Columbia, MO
Ramya Sundaresan Kapadia
Mugiyono Kasido
Surakarta, Indonesia
Howie Kenty
Brooklyn, NY
Marina Kifferstein
New York, NY
Mari Kimura
New York, NY
Jonathon Kirk
Chicago, IL
Knockdown Center
Maspeth, NY
Joshua Kohl
Seattle, WA
Glenn Kotche
Chicago, IL
Morgan Krauss
Chicago, IL
Kronos Quartet
San Francisco, CA
Fides Krucker
Toronto, Canada
Valerie Kuehne
Brooklyn, NY
Christopher Kuhl
Brooklyn , NY
Sam Kulik
Astoria, NY
Janet Kutulas
El Sobrante, CA
La MaMa
New York, NY
La Otra Orilla
Montreal, Canada
David Lang
New York, NY
Anne Lanzilotti
Brooklyn, NY
Felipe Lara
New York, NY
Libby Larsen
Minneapolis, MN
Steve Larson
Winsted, CT
Pascal Le Boeuf
New York, NY
James Lee III
Edgewood, MD
Nolan Lem
New York City, NY
Jonathan Leshnoff
George Lewis
New York, NY
Nathan Lincoln-DeCusatis
New York, NY
Scott Lindroth
Durham, NC
line upon line percussion
Austin, TX
Pete List
Brooklyn, NY
Thomas Loewenheim
Lorelei Ensemble
Cambridge, MA
Jenna Lyle
Chicago, IL
Eric Lyon
Blacksburg, VA
Steven Mackey
Princeton, NJ
Jeffrey Madison
Make Music New York
Brooklyn, NY
Malpaso Dance Company
Havana, Cuba
Wu Man
San Diego, CA
Mat Maneri
Brooklyn, NY
Jessie Reagen Mann
New York, NY
Marina Abramovic Institute
New York, NY
Susan Marshall
Scott Marshall
New York, NY
Fritz Masten
Dylan Mattingly
New Haven, CT
Daniel McBride AKA 13 Hands
Montclair, NJ
Bob McGrath
New York, NY
Joe McPhee
Todd Meehan
Waco, TX
Jack Mehler
MELA Foundation
New York, NY
Sowah Mensah
Miro Quartet
Momenta Quartet
New York, NY
Carson Moody
Lisa Moore
New York, NY
Daphna Mor
Thomas Morgan
New York, NY
Theodore Morrison
Ann Arbor, MI
Erica Mott
Chicago, IL
Nico Muhly
Jeffrey Mumford
Oberlin, OH
NANO Fiction
Austin, TX
Daniel Neumann
Brooklyn, NY
New England Guitar Quartet
West Hartford, CT
Nimbus Dance Works
Jersey City, NJ
NOW Ensemble
New York, NY
Katherine Oakes
Larry Ochs
Berkeley, CA
Suki O’Kane
Oakland, CA
Miles Okazaki
Brooklyn, NY
Laurie Olinder
Jaime Oliver
Pauline Oliveros
Tawnie Olson
New Haven, CT
Thomas O’Neill
Bergen Community College
Steven Osgood
Ossining, NY
Outlier
San Antonio, TX
Margel Overton
Tae Hong Park
Parker Quartet
Boston, MA
Aaron Parks
Richard Reed Parry
Montreal, Canada
David Passmore
Lavinia Pavlish
Jessica Pavone
Brooklyn, NY
Peggy Pearson
Doug Perkins
Chicago, IL
Sebastian Peters-Lazaro
Los Angeles, CA
Prasanna
Jonathan Melville Pratt
Brooklyn, NY
Jonathan Ragonese
New York, NY
Ranee Ramaswamy
Minneapolis, MN
Aparna Ramaswamy
Minneapolis, MN
Sarah Ratcliff
Trevor Reed
Hotevilla, AZ
Carla Rees
London, United Kingdom
Prudence Rees-Lee
Renee Baker Chicago Modern Orchestra Project & FAQtet Ensemble
Chicago, IL
Samuel Rhodes
Gyan Riley
Brooklyn, NY
Amanda Ringger
Rockefeller Chapel, University of Chicago
John Fitz Rogers
Columbia, SC
Joshua Roman
New York, NY
Roulette Intermedium, Inc.
Brooklyn, NY
Christopher Rouse
Dave Ruder
Brooklyn, NY
Adam Rudolph
Maplewood, NJ
Sandbox Percussion
Brooklyn, NY
Eleonor Sandresky
Brooklyn, NY
Steve Schick
David Schweizer
Seattle Symphony Orchestra
Seattle, WA
Madeleine Shapiro
New York, NY
Caroline Shaw
New York, NY
Judith Sherman
New York, NY
Erika Chong Shuch
Sarah Silver
San Antonio, TX
Sirius Quartet
Sky-Pony
Kate Soper
Sam Sowyrda
Lalit Subramanian
Catherine Sullivan
John Supko
Durham, NC
Kathleen Supove
Brooklyn, NY
Rajna Swaminathan
New York, NY
Anjna Swaminathan
Talea Ensemble
New York, NY
Ohad Talmor
Brooklyn, NY
The Apple Hill String Quartet
The Paul Dresher Ensemble [aka Musical Traditions, Inc.]
San Francisco, CA
Christopher Theofanidis
New Haven, CT
Third Coast Percussion
Chicago, IL
Thrill Jockey Records
TIGUE
Brooklyn, NY
Adam Tinkle
Saratoga Springs, NY
Jeff Tobias
Brooklyn, NY
Joan Tower
Red Hook, NY
Maureen Towey
Annie Trépanier
Winsted, CT
Jason Treuting
Princeton, NJ
Danny Tunick
Brooklyn, NY
Ken Ueno
Berkeley, CA
Dan VanHassel
Oakland, CA
Aleksandra Vrebalov
New York City, NY
Michael Wall
Salt Lake City, UT
John Walsh
Brooklyn, NY
Jen Wang
Richmond, CA
Ellen Warkentine
Monte Weber
Brooklyn, NY
David Wegehaupt
Oakland, CA
Dan Weiss
Brooklyn, NY
Travis Weller
Austin, TX
Philip White
Brooklyn, NY
White Eagle Hall / Jersey City Theater Center
Allen Willner
Gary Wise
Daniel Wohl
Brooklyn, NY
Theresa Wong
Berkeley, CA
Randall Woolf
Brooklyn, NY
La Monte Young
New York, NY
Phil Young
Saratoga, CA
Marian Zazeela
New York, NY
Evan Ziporyn
Lexington, MA
Alarm Will Sound, Inc.American Contemporary Music Ensemble
American Lyric Theater Center Inc.
American Modern Ensemble
American Opera Projects
Argento New Music Project
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, New York City Chapter, Inc.
C4: the Choral Composer/Conductor Collective
Da Capo Chamber Players, Inc.
Dither
Ear Heart Music
Either/Or, Inc.
Ekmeles
ETHEL’s Foundation for the Arts
Harvestworks
ISSUE Project Room
League of Composers/ISCM
Look & Listen Festival
Mantra Percussion
Metropolis Ensemble
MIVOS quartet
Momenta Quartet
Music at the Anthology
Music From China
Music Mondays
New Amsterdam Presents
New Thread Quartet
Newspeak
PRISM Quartet, Inc.
Qubit New Music
Quintet of the Americas
S.E.M. Ensemble
So Percussion
Talea Ensemble
Talujon, Inc.
The Firehouse Space
The Jazz Gallery
TRANSIT
VisionIntoArt Presents Inc.
Wet Ink Music Productions, Inc.
Yarn/Wire
Karim Al-Zand
Houston, TX
David Bakakrishnan
Albany, CA
Stefanie Batten Bland
New York, NY
John Bischoff
Oakland, CA
Per Bloland
Oxford, OH
William Boughton
Guilford, CT
Seth Boustead
Chicago, IL
Don Braden
New York, NY
Elizabeth Brown
Brooklyn, NY
Ronald Brown
Brooklyn, NY
Nicholas Brown
Washington DC
Monique Buzzarté
New York, NY
Sarah Cahill
Berkeley, CA
Ed Campion
Oakland, CA
Raven Chacon
Albuquerque, NM
Luciano Chessa
San Francisco, CA
Andrea Jane Clearfield
Philadelphia, PA
Majel Connery
Berkeley, CA
Kitty Daniels
Seattle, WA
Tina Davidson
Lancaster, PA
Gabriela Diaz
Wellesley, MA
Kurt Doles
Bowling Green, OH
David Dorfman
New London, CT
Dave Douglas
New York, NY
Richard Einhorn
New York, NY
Mandy Fang
Irmo, SC
Jim Findlay
Brooklyn, NY
Jefferson Friedman
Los Angeles, CA
Kenneth Froelich
Fresno, CA
Mara Gibson
Kansas City, MO
Jeremy Gill
Jamaica Plain, MA
David Gompper
Iowa City, IA
Mark Grey
San Francisco, CA
Jorge Villavicencio Grossmann
Ithaca, NY
Paulette Haupt
Waterford, CT
Holly Herndon
San Francisco, CA
Sungji Hong
Denton, TX
Edward Jacobs
Greenville, NC
Craig Hella Johnson
Austin, TX
Virginia Johnson
New York, NY
Bonnie Jones
Baltimore, MD
Chris Jones
Chicago, IL
Victoria Jordanova
Los Angeles, CA
Peiling Kao
Oakland, CA
Bevin Kelley
Providence, RI
Chris Kim
Ithaca, NY
Joan La Barbara
New York, NY
Dorothy Lawson
New York, NY
Sarah Lipstate
Brooklyn, NY
Caroline Mallonee
Buffalo, NY
Miya Masaoka
New York, NY
Arjun Mendiratta
Boston, MA
Susanne Mentzer
San Francisco, CA
Lisa Miller
Dresher, PA
Andy Milne
Shohola, PA
Nicole Mitchell
Long Beach, CA
Andreas Mitisek
Chicago, IL
Beata Moon
Queens, NY
Stephan Moore
Pawtucket, RI
Steve Nalepa
Los Angeles, CA
Amy X Neuburg
Oakland, CA
Francisco Nunez
New York, NY
Linda Oh
New York, NY
Meg Okura
New York, NY
Ed Osborn
Providence, RI
Jason Palmer
Roslindale, MA
Joo Won Park
Oberlin, OH
Bobby Previte
New York, NY
Linda Reichert
Philadelphia, PA
Todd Reynolds
Sunnyside, NY
Belinda Reynolds
San Francisco, CA
Jason Roebke
Chicago, IL
Mikel Rouse
New York, NY
Paul Rudy
Perry, KS
Elena Ruehr
Brookline, MA
Jenny Scheinman
Arcata, CA
Laura Schwendinger
Madison, WI
Amy Seiwert
San Francisco, CA
Sydney Skybetter
New York, NY
Christine Southworth
Lexington, MA
Erik Spangler
Baltimore, MD
Leah Stein
Seattle, WA
Nat Stookey
San Francisco, CA
Stella Sung
Oviedo, FL
Jeff Surak
Chevy Chase, MD
Todd Tarantino
New York, NY
Yosvany Terry
New York, NY
Zhou Tian
Hamilton, NY
Barbara Day Turner
San José, CA
Matt Ulery
Chicago, IL
Andy Vores
Cambridge, MA
Diane Wondisford
New York, NY
Evan Ziporyn
Lexington, MA
Digital to Analog: The Needle and Thread Running Through Technology
No Strings Attached: A Prism on the Saxophone Quartet
Singing It—Generations in Jazz
The Opposite of Brain Candy—Decoding Black MIDI
Musings on the Media
In search of Musical Integration Between the United States and the Rest of the Americas / En busca de
una integración musical entre Estados Unidos y el resto de las Américas
Digital to Analog: Plug and Play
A Reuniting Repertoire–The Guitar Music of Ernst Bacon
“This is My Design”
Psychedelic Citizenship: Jimi Hendrix as Tone Poet
Income, Expenses, and Mileage, Oh My! The Musician’s Guide to Reaching Organizational Nirvana In the New Year
The Banjo Faces Its Shadow
Thank You For Your Reply
Island Exports & Descendants Broaden Jazz Expressions
The Know-Nothings of Jazz
DarwinTunes and Cultural Reductionism
Mormon Music after the “Mormon Moment”
The Role Of College Teaching In The Life of A Creative Musician
Style Points
Trauma, Meaning, and The Quietest of Whispers
The Dangers of Secondhand Music
Who is Creative Placemaking? New Music, Integrity, and Community
Music Criticism is Broken and It’s All Your Fault
Hafez Modirzadeh: Crossing The Bridge
Melinda Wagner: It’s Just Who I Am
Jen Shyu: No More Sequined Dresses
Fay Victor: Opening Other Doors
Sheila Jordan: Music Saved My Life
Erik Friedlander: Stories Without Words
Samuel Adler: Knowing What You’re Doing
Miranda Cuckson: String Alchemist
Caroline Shaw: Yes, a Composer, but Perhaps not a Baker!
Gelsey Bell: Get a Little Closer
Jerome Kitzke: Stories That Must Be Told
Julian Wachner: Transcending the Sacred and the Profane
Daron Hagen: The Human Element
Ken Thomson: Energized Complexities
Paul Dresher: Intense Beauty, Visceral Energy, and Sonic Curiosity
Susan Alcorn: Fearless Slides
Laurie Spiegel: Grassroots Technologist
Lainie Fefferman: Strength In Numbers
Paola Prestini: Following Her Vision
Du Yun: No Safety Net
“Which of these Aaron Jay Kernises am I?”
Robert Honstein: Oblique Strategies
Jim Staley and His Home for New Music: Roulette @ 35
James Lee III: Don’t Miss a Chance
Pablo Ziegler: Making the Music Dance
Realizing Unrealized Projects
Advice from Strangers: Finding Your Own Strangers
Curation as a Third Possible Activity for Composers
Advice from Strangers: When Resources Are Low
Curation is Not a Form of Marketing
Advice from Strangers: A Path to Collaboration
New Music Needs Curators
Advice from Strangers: A Trust Recipe
Why I’m Not Getting a Doctorate
Advice from Strangers: The Craft of Community
Mantras & Filters: Overcoming Composer’s Block
Advice from Strangers: In Pursuit of Growth
Watching TV at Copland House
Now Hear This: NMBx Interviews Now On SoundCloud
Advice from Strangers: The Best of Two Worlds
On Not Composing
Selling Out is Not Selling Out
Student Debt is a Music Policy Issue
Friday Informer: Where Profanity Meets Art
In It to Win It: Lessons from the Long Game
Lost in Translation
Right Place, Right Time
Who Counts as an Expert?
What Have YOU Been Up To?
Jazz Remixes
There’s This Thing Happening: The New York Avant Garde Festival and Its Audience
Brahms’s Third Racket
FLUX-PIECE, FLUXCONCERT, FLUXFEST: Maciunas’s FluxFest Kit 2
Mad Fresh
Why Not Include the Bird—Tudorfest, 1964
Biting Breaks: Sampling and Ownership
It’s Music Because I Can Hear It: 1960s Experimental Music Festivals
Getting the Point
Be the First Follower
Dotting Dots
How to be While in Rehearsals
Decisions Made
Can’t See the Trees for the Forest at the 2015 Grammys
Advocating for New Music
Lessons Learned
What About Those Great American Symphonies?
Talking About Contemporary Music in a Helpful Way
Our Responsibility to the Next Generation
Blogging from Estonia: Creative Energy and New Perspectives
Rugged Individualism Meets the Orchestra—A Snapshot of the 2015 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute
Eco-Music: Not Just a Theory
Helena Tulve: Trust, Discovery, and the Creative Process
Hoping To Hit a “Bird”: A Critical Analysis of the Phenomenon of Mentorship
Whose Job Is It To Teach Audience Experience?
Art and Environment: Connections, Community, and Being
THINGS HAVE GOT TO CHANGE!–Writing Political Music in Today’s World
New Music and Globalization 4: Archipelagos
Blogging from Estonia–A Search for Fresh Sounds
New Music Boxes: Wring Out the Old
Everything is real. There is no audience.
New Music and Globalization 3: Embodiment and Mobility
The Audience: More Than Money and Applause
This Year’s Model (or, That’s What They Don’t See)
New Music and Globalization 2: Networked Music
The Performer, the Audience, and the Measure of Success
New Music and Globalization, Part 1: Silk Road and Global Collaborations
Why I Make Music
Incarceration and Musical Inspiration Part Four: The Last Class
Classical Music Has Open Data Sets?
The Art of Doubting Myself
Incarceration and Musical Inspiration Part Three: A Live Concert in Prison
Listen To Music, Dammit!
Incarceration and Musical Inspiration Part Two: The Human Piano
There Is No Right Experience
Incarceration and Musical Inspiration Part One: Meeting the Men at Auburn’s Maximum Security Prison
Hindustani Music: The Four-Syllable Darling and Text Setting in Hindi
Disposable Spaces, Plastic Music
We Are Sitting In (Another) Room: Improv with Architecture
Hindustani Music: Cultural Collisions (and Washing Machines)
Music in a Time of Snapchat: Ephemeral Contexts
Hindustani Music: Let It Go
Monumental Listening
Hindustani Music: Recitals of Gratitude
Off the Trail: Absorbing the Reflection of the PCT
The T.A.R.D.I.S. of Opulence
Do You Hear the People Sing? Music and Protest in the Street
(Don’t) Leave it to Bieber
12 Things I’ve Learned from Church Music, Parts 10-12: Stick to Texts Even Though It’s All About the
Music…Actually, It Isn’t
The Dilemma of the “Postmodern Avant-Garde”
12 Things I’ve Learned from Church Music (Parts 7-9): Write Faster; Hear It, Change It; Churches Do Tons
of New Music
It Ain’t Us, Babe
12 Things I’ve Learned from Church Music, Parts 4-6: Make Them Sound Good, Follow the Rules, then Break
the Rules
The Musicology of the Present
Rethinking Grants: Sometimes Smaller is Bigger
12 Things I’ve Learned from Church Music Parts 1-3—Where You Are plus What and Who You Know
Back to School: Five Articles to Get the Semester Started Right
Unexpected Song
Location, Location
Dying From Exposure
What Are We Afraid Of?
The Media and the Message
Claire Chase and the Winner-Take-All Economy
New Music Opportunities for Young Students Grow in Missouri
When Entrepreneurship and Artistry Conflict
Finding a True Name in a Post-Genre World
Who’s Got a Question?
In Response: You’re an Artist AND an Entrepreneur
You’re an Artist, Not an Entrepreneur
The Improvisation Continuum
A Very Long Walk: Time, Distance, and Creativity on the PCT
On the Met Opera Lockout
A Feedback Loop of Movement and Sound: Five Questions with Choreographer Cori Marquis
An Rx for Improvisation
Why “Don’t Play for Free” Is Not Enough
What Lies Ahead For Teenage Composers?
Good Vibrations: Towards a Fair Trade Standard for Live Music
School’s Not Out for Summer
Advertising vs. Reality: Opera America Magazine Editor Responds
Of New Music and the 99%
Truth in Advertising
New Music USA Awards $287,050 to 54 Projects
One of Our Brothers as Well as a Bright Light—Remembering James Horner (1953-2015)
Compromise and Conviction at the National Composers Intensive
Beyond the Margins of Self
The Freedom Of A Bird In Flight – Ornette Coleman (1930-2015)
David Hertzberg Wins ACO’s Underwood Commission
Gunther Schuller Dies at 89
Follow the Bang on a Can Marathon and Make Music NY on NewMusicBox
2015 Paul Revere Awards & Other MPA Annual Meeting Highlights
2015 Composers Now Creative Residencies Announced
2015 Doris Duke Impact Awards Announced
Jazz Pioneer Ornette Coleman Dies at 85
Let Them Eat Non-Perishables: How ALIAS thrives by giving all its proceeds away
Celebrating New Music Awards Week
From Groupmuse to the BSO: Show-hopping in Boston
Killsonic: L.A.’s wild, war-painted musical incubator
Attend NewMusicBox LIVE on May 19
Julia Wolfe Wins 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music
2015-2016 Rome Prize Recipients Announced
OPERA American Awards $100,000 to 7 Female Composers
Four Composers Chosen for 2nd Berkeley Symphony EarShot Readings
2015 Guggenheim Fellowship Awards Announced
Postcard from Pittsburgh: Contemporary Chamber Music Thrives in the Steel City
Missing the Gig: Remembering Clark Terry (1920-2015)
2015 Class of Doris Duke Artists Announced
ACO Announces Composers Chosen for Underwood Readings
ASCAP Announces 2015 Morton Gould Young Composer Award Winners
Remembering Tod Dockstader (1932-2015)
Aaron Jay Kernis to Direct New Nashville Symphony Composer Lab & Workshop
Robert Dick’s The Other Flute Mocked on Network TV
Remembering Ezra Laderman (1924-2015)
16 Composers Receive More Than $200K from American Academy of Arts and Letters
Remembering Tom McKinley (1938-2015): A Personal Reflection
Bobby Previte Awarded 2015 Greenfield Prize
American Composers Forum Announces 2015 Champions of New Music
2015 New Music Bake Sale Line-Up Announced
Come Away – Ezra Sims (1928-2015)
2015 ASCAP Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Awards Announced
Digital to Analog: Poems and Histories
Mason Bates Appointed Kennedy Center’s First Composer-In-Residence
The 2015 CMA/ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming and Other New Music at CMA
New Music USA Awards $284,250 to 62 Projects
Meeting of New Music Minds at SF Gathering
Chicago: The Spektral Quartet goes to pieces (and rots)
Mark Lanz Weiser Receives Nissim Prize
Spring For Music Has Second Life as SHIFT in Washington DC
New NEA Reports Crunch the Numbers on Culture
John Luther Adams Wins William Schuman Award
Eve Beglarian Wins 2015 Robert Rauschenberg Award
The Queen of Grace and Kindness—Deborah Atherton (1951-2014)
Corigliano and Over 130 Other Music Creators Honored at ASCAP Foundation Awards
Violinist Mark Sokol—American Music Advocate (1946-2014)
57th Annual Grammy Award Nominations Announced
Boston: Passports and Layovers from Lorelei and Roomful of Teeth
Musical America Honors NMBx Regional Editor with “Profile in Courage”
Fromm Foundation Announces 2014 Commissions
Happy Birthday, Adolphe Sax!
John Luther Adams Named Musical America’s 2015 Composer of the Year
Intense, Hardworking and Fun Loving—Remembering Stephen Paulus (1949-2014)
ACF Announces 2014 JFund Awardees
Chicago: A scavenger hunt of world premieres
League of American Orchestras & New Music USA Announce 12 New Music Alive Residencies
Getting Past Difficult Pronunciations to Answering Some Difficult Questions—the 2014 ISCM World Music
Days
Boston: A Fight for Love and Glory—Pipeline! at 25
Three Musicians Among 2014 USA Fellows
Chicago: The Unbearable Intimacy of Wandelweiser
Boosey & Hawkes Signs David T. Little
Two Women Composers Commissioned in New League/EarShot Program
Open Letter from American Composers to Atlanta Symphony
Chicago: Enter the Dollhouse—Colombine’s Paradise Theatre
Steve Coleman Awarded 2014 MacArthur “Genius Grant”
A Peek from the Peaks of the PROs
Chicago: Hiking the Song Path, hearing music everywhere
2014 Barlow Winners Announced
New Music USA Requesting Feedback on Project Grants
British Report on Commissioning Fees Inspires Concern
All Up In Your Space: Billie Howard on How Artists Live
Washington National Opera to Mount 3 New 20-Minute Operas
New Foundation Will Support Performance and Commissioning of American Music
Todd Lerew Wins the 2014 ACF National Composition Contest
Richard Toensing (1940-2014)—“The Oak Doesn’t Grow as Fast as the Squash”
Tanglewood: Sessions and Lessons on Successful Composition
Loudness Isn’t What It Used to Be: Southland Ensemble and Robert Ashley
Charlie Haden (1937-2014)—One of the Greatest
Visconti Chosen as California Symphony Young American Composer-in-Residence
Remembering Seymour Barab (1921-2014): Composer, Cellist, Friend
Mary Rodgers (1931-2014): A Woman of Many Talents
New Music USA Awards $311,000 to Artists
Julia Adolphe
Anahid Ajemian
Eugene Birman
Carla Bley
Emily Bookwalter
Roger Bourland
Daphne Carr
Ted Chapin
Mark Clague
Kevin Clark
Bradley Colten
October Crifasi
Brian Current
Rob Deemer
Kevin Erickson
Reena Esmail
Nat Evans
Eddy Ficklin
Robert Fink
Álvaro Gallegos
Emily Green
Jeremy Grimshaw
Matthew Guerrieri
Trevor Gureckis
David Harrington
Ethan Hein
Aaron Holloway-Nahum
Megan Ihnen
Marie Incontrera
Willard Jenkins
Dan Joseph
George Grella Jr
Linda Kernohan
Kristin Kuster
Libby Larsen
R. Andrew Lee
Shaya Lyon
Payton MacDonald
Marcus McLaurine
Ellen McSweeney
Matt Mendez
Dean C. Minderman
Theodore Mook
Nick Norton
Frank J. Oteri
Joan Arnau Pàmies
Sam Reising
Will Roseliep
Marc Rossi
Mikel Rouse
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Isaac Schankler
Isaac Schankler
Heidi Schaul-Yoder
Caitlin Schmid
Garrett Schumann
Alex Shapiro
Molly Sheridan
Daniel Siepmann
Matthew Sigman
Sara Sitzer
Kile Smith
Erik Spangler
NewMusicBox Staff
Heather Stebbins
Tom Steenland
Debbie Steinglass
David Stock
Jamaaladeen Tacuma
Dale Trumbore
Jenny Undercofler
Matt Walker
Nate Wooley
Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust
The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc.
The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation
Baisley Powell Elebash Fund
The Ford Foundation
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The National Endowment for the Arts
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund
The Helen F. Whitaker Fund
Anonymous
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Booth Ferris Foundation
The Mary Flager Cary Charitable Trust
The New York State Council on the Arts
The NYC Department of Cultural Affairs
The Scherman Foundation
The Aaron Copland Fund
The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation
MailChimp
The National Endowment for the Arts
The Alice M. Ditson Fund
The Amphion Foundation
The Francis Goelet Trust
The Getty Foundation
The Reed Foundation
ASCAP Corporation
The ASCAP Foundation
The Fan Fox and Leslie Samuels Foundation
The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts
The Rodgers and Hammerstein Foundation
BMI Corporation
The BMI Foundation
John Adams
John Harbison
Steve Stucky
Dan Godfrey
Augusta Read Thomas
In honor of James Kendrick, Kristin Lancino, Frances Richard, and Steven Stucky
John Luther Adams
Samuel Adler
Daniel Asia
Donald Crockett
Michael Daugherty
Joel Harrison
Stephen Hartke
Jake Heggie
Jennifer Higdon
Pierre Jalbert
Lori Laitman
David Liptak
David Ludwig
Beata Moon
Robert Paterson
Shulamit Ran
Steve Reich
Michael Schelle
Elliott Schwartz
Laura Schwendinger
Alex Shapiro
Judith Shatin
Donald Walker
Dan Welcher
Anonymous
Tom Brenner
Dorothea Endicott
Alan Kornberg
Frederick Peters
Justus and Elizabeth Schlichting
Joseph A. and Nancy Meli Walker
Cece Wasserman (The Cheswatyr Foundation)
NancyBell Coe
Timothy Gallagher
Harriet Kaufman
Marya Martin and Kenneth Davidson
A Slade and Phyllis Mills
Barbara A. Petersen
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Arts Federation
Michael Embler and Maria Cilenti
The Counterpoint Fund
Mr. Edward Harsh
Kristin and Thierry Lancino
Gayle Morgan
Linda and Stuart Nelson
Jim and Warrie Price
Frances Richard
Paul Sperry
Dr. Carol and David Zale
Michel and Caroline Zaleski
Dr. Rae Alexander-Minter
Toni and Seth Bernstein
Mrs. Helen Coyner
Mr. Anthony Creamer
Leslie Kandell
Thomas L. Kempner Jr.
Mr. James Kendrick
Richard and Karen LeFrak
Elyse Montiel
Mr. Thomas W. Morris
Steven and Brenda Schick
Mr. Elliott Schwartz
Ms. Deborah Steinglass
Matias Tarnopolsky
Ms. Cia Toscanini
Samuel Adler
Rhoda Baruch
Mr. and Mrs. Astrid and John Baumgardner
Theodore and Joanna Chapin
Yi and Zhou Long Chen
Ms. Susan Cheng
Mr. Anthony Creamer
Ms. Susan Feder and Todd Gordon
Mitch Gillette
David Indyke
Mattie Kaiser
Mr. and Mrs. Barry and Sally Mandel
Mr. David Alan Miller
Martin and Lucy Miller Murray
Frank J. Oteri
Amy and Robert Poster
Frank Proto
Dr. Michael Schelle
Jennifer Wada
Dr. and Mrs. Alex and Audry Weintrob
Ms. Judith Lang Zaimont
Dan Anastasio
T.J. Anderson
Robert and Linda Attiyeh
Dan Becker
Dr. Nancy Bogen
David Borden
Mr. Seth Bousted
Seth Brenzel
Joanne Hubbard Cossa
Phyllis Farley
Peter Golub
Joel Harrison
Ms. Lydia Kontos
Paul and Toby Koren
Pascal Le Boeuf
Mr. Richard LeSueur
Mrs. Catherine Leuning
Mr. Ed Matthew
Dr. Sasha Matson
Greg Mays
Mr. Harold Meltzer
Maury Newburger
Mr. Marc Ostrow
Ms. Vivian Perlis
Mr. Daniel J. Perlongo
Stanislaw Skrowaczewski
Ann and Dick Sullivan
Robert Sutherland
Lawrence Tarlow
Matthew Welch
Gernot Wolfgang
Zhou Long and Chen Yi
Wes York and Bob Scrofani
Roger M. Aldridge
Mr. Greg Allen
Mr. Bill Alves
Lawrence Axelrod
Mr. David Balakrishnan
Mrs. Lilian Barbash
Ms. Carol Barnett
Nancy Barry
Ms. Eve Beglarian
Ms. Elizabeth Bell
William Hayes Biggs
David Bloom
William Bolcom and Joan Morris
David Briggs
Allen Brings
Mr. Philip C. Brunelle
Doranne Croon Cedillo
Ms. Gloria Cheng
Mr. Wesley A. Clark
Noah Creshevsky
Mr. Conrad Cummings
Andrew Cyr
J-P Douglas
Ms. Mary DuPree
Mr. Paul A. Epstein
John Evans
Peter Golub
Mr. Ralph Grierson
Lucille Herbert
MaestroThomas Hampson
Mr. Samuel H. Hope
Stephen Jaffe
Judith Kellock
Ms. Laura Kaminsky
Ms. Jessica Krash
Ms. Tania Leon
Sharan Leventhal
Arthur Levering
Mrs. Nancy B. Loeffler
Clara Longstreth
Ed Matthew
Ms. Janice Misurell-Mitchell
John Neuchterlein
Ms. Ursula Oppens
Vera Parkin
Paul Dresher Ensemble/Musical Traditions
Neva Pilgrim
Jayn Rosenfeld
Mr. Peter Rubardt
Mr. Anthony W. Schuman
Ms. Lucy A. Shelton
Gerald Starlight
Dawn Upshaw
Libby Van Cleve and Jack Vees
Mark Winges
Elizabeth Wood
Yehudi Wyner
Mr. Gregory Beyer
Emily Bookwalter
Ms. Kim Braun
Mr. Thomas D. Brosh
Lydia Busler
Luke Cissell
Ms. Nancy S. Clarke
Mr. Kenneth Deveney
Richard Einhorn
Sivan Eldar
Kathryn Engelhardt
Dr. Marti Epstein
Ms. Jan Faidley
Ms. Joanne Feltman
Dr. Lyudmila German
James Ginsberg and Patrice Michaels
Jake Goodman
Mr. William Holab
Ms. Debra Kaye
Harold Lichtin
Alanna Maharajh
Lucy Mattingly
William Merrill
Network for Good
Ed Osborn
Tristan and Lesley Perich
Mr. Mark W. Phillips
Kala Pierson
Janese Quitugua
Ms. Erin Rogers
Julie Sandler-Friedman
Nanette Shannon
Mr. Allen Shearer
Jane Sheldon
Mr. Sean Shepherd
J. Sloan
Thomas Steeland
Andrew Steifel
David Stock
John Toenjes
Mr. Steven Tintweiss
Dr. Aleksandra Vebrelov
Mr. Gregory R. Wanamaker
Gail Wein
Anna Williams
Roger Zahab
Mr. John Zielinski
Total Revenue :
$2,489,462
Total Expenses :
$2,476,460
(including $990,327 in grants to the field)
Endowment value as of 6/30/15:
$16,958,072
Frederick Peters, Chair
Steven Stucky, Vice Chair
Kristin Lancino, Secretary
Joseph Walker, Treasurer
Ed Harsh, President and CEO
Rae Alexander-Minter
Theodore Chapin
Dorothea Endicott
Tim Gallagher
Daniel S. Godfrey
Harriet Kaufman
James Kendrick
Alan Kornberg
Marya Martin
Phyllis Mills
Gayle Morgan
Barbara A. Petersen
Frances Richard
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Steven Schick
Matías Tarnopolsky
Steve Reich, Trustee Emeritus
Harold Meltzer, Chair
Eve Beglarian
Derek Bermel
Chen Yi
Alvin Curran
Gabriela Lena Frank
Laura Karpman
Paul S. Phillips
Robert Xavier Rodriguez
Steve Reich
Julia Wolfe
Alex Shapiro, Chair
Deborah Campana
Daphne Carr
John Nasukaluk Clare
Christine Clark
Jean Cook
Jessica Lustig
Doug McLennan
Marvin Rosen
Norman Ryan
Carol Zale
Chitra Arunasalam
Director of Finance and
Administration
Madeline Bohm
Software Engineer and Designer
Emily Bookwalter (Through 6/30/2015)
Grantmaking and Community
Manager
Kevin Clark
Director of Platform
Kristen Doering (Starting 7/1/2015)
Grantmaking Associate
Eddy Ficklin
Senior Software Engineer
Ed Harsh
President and CEO
Ethan Joseph (Through 6/30/2015)
Manager for Individual Giving
Brad Lenz (Starting 7/1/2015)
Development Associate for Individual Giving
Debbie Milburn (Starting 7/1/2015)
Junior Software Engineer
Frank J. Oteri
Composer Advocate and Senior
Editor, NewMusicBox
Sam Reising
Grantmaking and Social Media Manager
Hannah Rubashkin
Development Manager for Institutional Giving
Deborah Steinglass
Director of Development
Molly Sheridan
Executive Editor, NewMusicBox and
Director, Counterstream Radio
Scott Winship
Director of Grantmaking Programs
Performance of Black Mountain Songs
(Photo by Julieta Cervantes)
Cary Awardees So Percussion
(Photo by Photo by Gene Pittman, courtesy Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.)
Nankoweap Granaries
(Photo by Trevor Reed)
Samuel Adler
(Photo by Molly Sheridan)
Trimpin and Ludovic Morlot
(Photo courtesy of the Seattle Symphony)
Performance of TRIBE: life in gestures
(Photo by Javier Galeano)
Harrison Bankhead Quartet Performance at Edgefest 2014
(Photo by Lars Bjorn)
Sheila Jordan, Fay Victor, and Jen Shyu
(Photos by Molly Sheridan)
Edmar Castañeda
(Photo by Diana Bejarano)
Gelsey Bell
(Photo by Molly Sheridan)
Concert Premiere of George Lewis’s Afterword, The AACM (as) Opera at Roulette
(Photo courtesy of digitice.org)
95 Rituals (for Anna Halprin)
(Photo by Pak Han)
Laurie Spiegel
(Photo by Molly Sheridan and Alexandra Gardner)
A Selection of Cary Fund Awardees
(Photos by permission of the ensembles)
Performance of Black Mountain Songs
(Photo by Julieta Cervantes)
Film Still from Body and Soul
(Photo by Don DiNicola and Renee Baker)
Performance of TRIBE: life in gestures
(Photo by Javier Galeano)