New music is relevant music. Living creative musicians reflect on who we are, address questions we all have, challenge our preconceptions, enlighten and elevate us. While it is sometimes viewed as more abstract than other art forms, music has the ability to communicate through a language that can be commonly understood. It can also be a powerful interdisciplinary partner for work involving film, theater, dance, and more.

So while New Music USA is focused on building the new music community, this community doesn’t exist in isolation. It is an active part of our larger society and necessarily engages with a wide spectrum of contemporary issues and realities. Each artist finds her or his own pathway for this engagement. In reviewing the full collection of work emerging from New Music USA’s programming in 2015/16, I was struck by the range of those pathways and the trails they weave across the United States.

As you look through these pages you will see projects examining cultural heritage and experience such as Hannibal Lokumbe’s One Land, One River, One People, and Gerald Clayton’s Piedmont Blues. There is interdisciplinary work exploring the human relationship to boundaries in our world, such as LEIMAY’s multimedia Borders. Close examinations of issues affecting artists and others in our society are evident, as observed through week-long series on NewMusicBox devoted to topics such as “Mental Health and Musical Creativity.” Many adventures in the creation of new work are represented here, as with Ken Ueno’s new work in residency with the Alia Musica ensemble and Brian Baumbusch’s creations for the JACK string quartet in collaboration with the Lightbulb Ensemble gamelan. As always, the many profiles featured on NewMusicBox in the past year, represented here by those on Muhal Richard Abrams and Missy Mazzoli, included many insights on the connections between artist and community and society.

New Music USA is proud to bring forward the voices of artists in our community. I hope you will explore these voices further by visiting our website newmusicusa.org, and then further engage with the full range of new music that is present in our world every day. There’s such a diverse and exciting collection of music waiting to be discovered!

Ed Harsh

President and CEO

“Composer Darrel Grant has said, ‘I believe that we who create art possess an extraordinary power to communicate, inspire, provoke, inform, and to move others to transform society.’ Across communities, new music is actively challenging us to pay attention to the issues and the voices in our society.”

In an essay published on NewMusicBox this past year, Christina Rusnak reflects on how composers and performers are “looking at the diverse landscapes in which we live, with their complex human histories and changing values, as the grounds to examine the intersection of place and people—past and present.”

There are countless new music works composed today specifically geared towards political activism, social criticism, and raising awareness. Ethan Ganse Morse’s opera The Canticle of the Black Madonna responds to 9/11 and addresses PTSD; cellist Kari Juusela composed PBBP in response to the British Petroleum oil spill on the Gulf coast in 2010; Brian Harnetty critiqued the human and environmental impacts of the extraction industries of southeastern Ohio through music as well as his writings for NewMusicBox; and Joan Szymko worked for months with families and patients with Alzheimer’s to try and understand their experiences and have their voices heard through her choral work Shadow and Light.

Music has the power to heal. Music also has the power to advocate for the changes needed in our society by engaging audiences with them on deeper, more emotional levels and from a wide variety of different perspectives.

 “New music can advocate for the changes needed in our society by connecting us to issues larger than ourselves. … By creating works that look to the diverse landscapes in which we live as a foundation, the intersection of place and people expands our musical palette. The resulting pieces may become some of the most compelling works of our time.” 

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• Published on NewMusicBox April 19, 2016

LINKS:

• "Composing Advocacy: Social Voices" article

Muhal Richard Abrams, a founding member of the AACM, has worked with a long list of heralded artists—Max Roach, Dexter Gordon, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Art Farmer, and Anthony Braxton—and so many more. Yet simultaneously, the 85-year-old Abrams has also been active as a composer of works for string quartet, orchestra, and solo piano, having had premieres by such ensembles as the Kronos Quartet, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and the Brooklyn Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra.

His extensive and prolific career aside, Abrams’s wisdom and pedagogy reaches beyond just being a performer and composer. Abrams met with Frank J. Oteri this past January to discuss his take on genre, musical boundaries, old verses new, and his approach to music as “just sound.”

 “The word jazz can be confusing. … But if we say music, it could be anywhere. It’s just music. The next question, what type of music? Okay. No type of music. Just sound. You know, because that’s what it is. Sound. Before it’s even organized into any kind of continuum that we would call music, it’s just sound. … A style name limits the scope or the focus and that turns out to be unfair to quite a number of people.”

To Abrams, categorizations, labels, and definitions are constructs that can serve to limit us. Old music can be reinvented as something new, and new music can be reminiscent of the past; a composition could be an improvisation and an improvisation a composition. This non-dualistic and boundary-less approach clearly reflects itself in his own music and diverse accomplishments as an artist and has a lot to offer today’s world of genre-bending and border-breaking new music.

“In reference to people saying this is old or this is new, if it’s old for you, then it’s old for you. If it’s new for you, it’s new for you. But those are just terms that are useful to describe the particular mood that that person or those people are feeling. None of it’s real because the situation that is characterized as old often times is revisited and found to be useful for some future purpose. And something new can be visited and found that is reminiscent of something that’s old.”

• Published on NewMusicBox April 1, 2016

LINKS:

• Muhal Richard Abrams Profile

Music Alive is an orchestral residency program administered in association with the League of American Orchestras that is designed to empower composers and positively change the culture of orchestras and their communities.

Over the past year, we were able to witness Music Alive’s ability to accomplish this through our one-week New Partnership residencies. We saw, for example, how a composer can help augment an orchestra’s relationship with their community.  In his residency with the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra, Rick Robinson encouraged the orchestra to give chamber performances in unconventional spaces such as bars, restaurants, and senior centers—something that he does with his own CutTime® ensemble. Through this experiment, the orchestra was able to serve larger segments of their community and also show that new music is truly for everyone.  We also saw that many orchestras went above and beyond this round to secure additional funding to add either extra time or more content to their residency and that the relationships brokered by Music Alive often end up being long lasting and fruitful for the composer.  For example, the Boston Landmarks Orchestra found additional funding to commission a piece from their Music Alive residency composer Clarice Assad.  On top of that, the relationship did not end with the end of the residency, as Assad will be premiering a new concerto with the Boston Landmarks Orchestra and Akron Symphony in 2017.

Residency pairings can also push orchestras to explore types of music they might not have otherwise. Sumi Tonooka is a jazz composer who applied to Music Alive in order to be able to work closely with an orchestra.  The South Dakota Symphony was so excited about the possibilities of this unconventional residency that they used additional funds to commission a piece from Tonooka, and that opportunity has opened doors in the orchestra world for her.  Derrick Spiva is a composer who is interested in “exploring connections between musical cultures” and brought this interest to his residency with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.  In addition to presenting his work Prisms, Cycles, Leaps which has West African and Balkan influences, Spiva spoke to students, gave West African music workshops for young musicians, and participated in pre-concert talks with the Zadonu African Music and Dance Company to help audiences understand the rhythmic complexities of his music.  Spiva described his residency as being “humbling and inspiring.  It has made me believe even more strongly in the power of music to bring people from different cultural backgrounds together through a shared, communal, experience.”

In the program cycle completed with the 2015/16 season, Music Alive offered two types of residencies.  The first of these, Principal Residencies, were three years long and included deep engagement from the composer and the orchestra.  These residencies featured premiers of new work, community engagement activities, and performances of other work by the composer.  This past round, Music Alive awarded Principal Residencies to the Albany Symphony and the Sleeping Giant Collective (Timo Andres, Andrew Norman, Jacob Cooper, Christopher Cerrone, Robert Honstein, and Ted Hearne); the Dayton Performing Arts Alliance and Stella Sung; the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and Gabriela Lena Frank; the Pacific Symphony and Narong Prangcharoen; and the Seattle Symphony and Trimpin.

The New Partnership pairings that were supported by this past round of Music Alive are: Claire 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, Jingjing 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, Derek Spiva and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Sumi Tonooka and the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, and Dan Visconti and the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra.

While this past year marked the end of a multi-year round of Music Alive, New Music USA was recently awarded a $1.5 million dollar grant from the Mellon Foundation that will support a reinvented version of Music Alive that beginning immediately with the 2016/17 season. This new cycle prioritizes collaborative work and immersive experiences for composers, orchestra musicians, artistic leadership, and community members.  Through these changes to Music Alive, we hope to demonstrate—through active partnership with the participating residency pairings and our colleagues at the League—the power and value of living creative artists working at the center of American orchestras.

LINKS:

• Music Alive

Over the past few years, NewMusicBox has explored issues of serious concern to the field through special theme weeks. This has allowed multiple writers to share their perspectives and provided a platform for wider community dialog. NewMusicBox held two theme weeks in the past year that focused on important aspects of an artist’s life: dealing with money and mental health challenges.

Making It: Music & Money

Following the New Music Gathering in Baltimore last winter, our team was eager to continue and expand on conversations that emerged there about the economic dimensions of being an artist.

“We viscerally understand that one of the salient experiences of being an artist in the United States is the tension between the value we feel in our minds, our hearts, our bones, and the valuation the culture tends to reflect back, negatively, in lack of money. We should all talk about this a lot. Sharing stories is one of the most empowering human acts.” –Ed Harsh

We tried to cover a lot of issues and avoid what could easily become a list of complaints about the difficulties of an artist’s life. We wanted to provide insight and stimulate more ideas. Topics ranged from advice on crowd-sourcing and audience-based commissioning, to strategies for holding “regular jobs” to sustain and work in tandem with artistic practice, to reflections on funding structures and the economic climate for new music in general.

We asked Bonnie Jones to share some of the thoughts she had presented at the New Music Gathering:

“My own path for making a living while making art was something that during the panel I referred to as the Bonnie Jones Grant. This ‘grant’ was all the various web-related freelance and fulltime jobs I’ve held during my 17 years in Baltimore, which directly funded my volunteer non-profit, curatorial work, and art practice. In other words, I had a lot of regular jobs, but I thought of them as very much part of my creative practice because they sustained that practice.… I realized early on that the music and writing I was drawn to might never be able to generate enough income to support my FOOD/SHELTER needs. So I got a job, a job job as artists sometimes call it, or job jobs in my case.”

Mental Health & Musical Creativity

After a blog post by composer Nico Muhly as well as a New York Times article by Keeril Makan about mental health issues and musical creativity, there were many expansive conversations and expressions of solidarity shared within the new music community. We noticed that this was a recurring topic that needed to be further addressed and paid attention to. Our theme week on this topic included a series of interviews and essays during which composers and musicians shared their personal experiences, serving to encourage open dialogue about how mental health issues are dealt with in relation to creative work. The week consisted of contributions by Marcos Balter, Jenny Olivia Johnson, Keeril Makan, Daniel Felsenfeld, and Carolyn O’Brien.

“Everybody thinks they understand depression because they’ve been through a breakup, or they’ve lost someone. But depression is a very specific thing. It’s good that we’re talking about it. … [S]o many composers, or artists, or creative artists generally, have experienced this.” —Daniel Felsenfeld

“Composing, for me, is almost like keeping a diary. I do feel more creative when I am happier. But, funny enough, my works that seem to resonate the most with other people tend to be the ones I’ve created during convoluted personal times. I try not to capitalize on it, not to romanticize depression or anxiety. … But, I’m human, and I have low points, and I do produce during these low points. So, these darker works do happen. I don’t seek them out, but they do happen.” —Marcos Balter

• Published on NewMusicBox September 7-11, 2015, and April 11-15, 2016

LINKS:

• Musical Creativity and Mental Health Week Introduction
• Making It: Music and Money Week Introduction

This Year in Review provides some examples of the work we’ve supported over the past twelve months.  What you don’t see here, however, is the sheer volume of amazing music being created that we simply don’t have the resources to support.  We know that as advocates it’s our role to communicate widely about the breadth, depth, and quality of the work that’s being done across the U.S., to find more support and to expand the resources we distribute to the field, and also to build and even broker relationships between artists and supporters that allow for more funding and support for new music artists, even independently of our programs.

So, back in 2015 we started building New Music Connect: A Network for Friends of New Music, and in 2015-16 we launched a small prototype, with a steering committee of five individuals who are deeply committed to supporting new music all across the U.S. These individuals have provided major financial support but even more importantly, they have helped us design a program that is now ready to launch and expand.

New Music Connect brings together new music patron enthusiasts to learn, exchange ideas, co-mentor, experience, and help build the world of new music in the United States. In addition to creating relationships between donors, a major goal of the network is to link donors with artists, both through additional funds members provide through project grants, but also through other activities that introduce members and artists to each other. Connect has the potential to become a powerful network to help artists do their work as well as address larger issues in our field.

Members of New Music Connect also have the opportunity to view projects that have gone through our panel process and individually support projects they are interested in.  Even in the nascent stage of this program, this has already led to an additional $60,000 being distributed to musicians through project grants that would not have been possible otherwise.

In addition to New Music Connect, in 2015-16 we launched a new program, The NYC New Music Impact Fund, which was funded by a $495,000 grant from The Scherman Foundation’s Katharine S. and Axel G. Rosin Fund. (New Music USA is the first music organization to receive a grant from the Rosin Fund.) We built this program to address the needs of a large and important sector of our field: small, artist-led ensembles and venues. Drawing on experiences from New Music USA’s history of support for the sector and on insights gained through multiple meetings we had in the previous year with those active in it, we designed the program to combine support for general operations and residency activity with creative collaborative marketing work on behalf of the sector as a whole.

Though the Impact Fund is initially focused on organizations in New York City, our dream is eventually to extend it to other areas and ideally across the entire country. The first cohort of participants was awarded in June 2016. You can sign up to receive updates about the Impact Fund here.

LINKS:

• New Music Connect Page
• New Music Impact Fund Page

In the late 1960s and early 1970s amidst the growing American experimental music scene, another underground movement was simultaneously emerging called New Communalism. Its activity often went undocumented, as much of it took place in the privacy of intimate artist circles and communes. The experimental artists and researchers in this group were interested in exploring deeper levels of consciousness and pushing the boundaries of music, science, and art. In her article published on NewMusicBox, Kerry O’Brien provided a deep look into the movement via an exploration of the group Pulsa and documentation of the experiments and performances they held at their loft space and commune, Harmony Ranch, in rural Connecticut. There they hosted such legends as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and many others.

“In working with wave energies, part of Pulsa’s work dealt with often invisible or inaudible materials like heat, sound, and light. For instance, in early 1970, Pulsa held an installation in New York City at the MoMA’s Outdoor Sculpture garden. … [The work] aimed to gather ‘environmental information,’ including sound, light movement, and heat using microphones, infrared sensors, and photocells. They then fed that information back into the garden using strobe lights, infrared heaters, and loudspeakers.”

Pulsa’s intent was to develop technology for controlling perceptible wave energies and to create artworks based on and in dialogue with their research. Their ideas were concerned with the theme of interconnectivity and community—a sentiment that the group not only worked with in their art, but ardently practiced as a lifestyle

“Pulsa created art and music that not only made group collaborations audible and palpable, but they also reminded their audiences and participants—through light and sound—that actions have effects. … Pulsa’s work attested to the myriad ways that human beings are entangled­­—with each other and with environments—and you can hear this involvement; you can hear community through sound.”

• Published on NewMusicBox May 25, 2016

LINKS:

• Communal Experimentalism Article

New Music USA serves as advocates—and not just in the traditional sense of the word.  We view our grantmaking and online content as advocacy for the new music field, as well as all of our work to build a community that includes all participants—creators, appreciators, and supporters—and then connects them to each other.

We also engage in activities that are very specifically focused on advocating for American composers and their work. For example, New Music USA is a governing member of the International Association of Music Information Centers (IAMIC). President and CEO Ed Harsh serves as vice-president and Composer Advocate Frank J. Oteri serves as the chair of the Communications Group.  Ed attended two meetings of IAMIC in Europe this past year, working to build international networks for the advancement of new American music.

New Music USA also represents the United States in the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), where Frank was elected to the Executive Committee this year.  Frank traveled to Ljubljana, Slovenia, in September for ISCM’s 2015 World Music Days, and Tongyeong, South Korea, for ISCM’s 2016 World Music Days.  Frank also helped secure funding for Missy Mazzoli, whose work was nominated by New Music USA and then chosen to be performed at the 2016 World Music Days, to attend the festival.

Nationally, New Music USA is one of 13 national members of the Performing Arts Alliance (PAA), an organization for performing arts advocates. Ed also attended quarterly meetings of New York Grantmakers in the Arts and the national conference of Grantmakers in the Arts in LA in October.

Frank gave a presentation to composers participating in the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra Edward T. Cone Composition Institute in July.  He also attended the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra Composer Institute in November and moderated a roundtable panel of composers and orchestra administrators.  Frank attended the Chamber Music America Annual Conference (serving as a mentor for a group of first-time attendees), served on the faculty of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, and moderated two panels as a part of the American Composers Orchestra’s Underwood and Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute Readings and Workshop: “The Real Path to Programming” and “Publicity and Promotion.”  Scott Winship, our director of grantmaking programs, gave a presentation called “Support Structures for Composers” at this gathering, as well.  Scott also participated on a Grant Resources for Jazz panel at the 2016 Jazz Education Network in Louisville, Kentucky.

New Music USA’s grantmaking staff attended and led an interactive session at this year’s League of American Orchestras’ conference titled “Leveraging Creative Connections.”  Additionally, Ed and three other staff members attended the second New Music Gathering, which took place in Baltimore in January. Director of Platform Kevin Clark gave a presentation on economics and long-term planning for artists.

An article published on NewMusicBox by musicologist Will Robin took a retrospective look at Bang on a Can’s history, legacy, and the community it built for American contemporary music.

About 30 years ago at the very first Bang on a Can marathon, Milton Babbitt’s Vision and Prayer was scheduled next to Steve Reich’s Four Organs. Before introducing his piece Babbitt joked, “Sorry I got here late, but I got lost—I’ve never been this far downtown before.”

Upon first arriving to New York, Bang on a Can founders—David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe—noticed a stark contrast of musical communities and aesthetics: “Uptown” and “Downtown”. The philosophies or schools of thought were vastly different, and to the three young composers, this very contrast was the breeding ground for envisioning a new reality for American music.

“Wolfe titled her dissertation ‘Embracing the Clash,’ and that early ‘clash’ became an all-encompassing metaphor for Bang on a Can, extending out into its programming of non-Western music, rock, and free improvisation…. The Reich/Babbitt juxtaposition, though, wasn’t only about clashing. It was about resolution: imagining a new kind of new music community, one that would bring together two disparate scenes.”

The three composers’ initial vision of a musical community defined by a boundary-breaking, genre-bending, and “embracing the clash” postmodern mentality gave birth to the present day Bang on a Can—a now multifaceted umbrella organization that sponsors marathon concerts, a touring ensemble, record label, marching band, institute, and commissioning fund. Their dream to reimagine possibilities and create a sense of community within the plurality of differences that comprise the American music scene became a reality.

“Stepping past ideologies, placing oneself not only not within an uptown or downtown camp, but also beyond any squabbles between them, became a core mythos of Bang on a Can… [their] ideology is that of, as its website declares, ‘building a world in which powerful new musical ideas flow freely across all genres and borders.’”

• Published on NewMusicBox June 22, 2016

LINKS:

• Imagining Community at Bang on a Can’s First Marathon Article