You Only Think You Hate New Music
As I'm still out of town and away from the orchestra, I'm not able to blog extensively about the FutureClassics concert that the orchestra is playing tonight, which is a great shame, because it's one of my favorite things we do all year. Plenty has been written in the local press about our Composers' Institute (and as usual, one of the participating composers is blogging the week for the excellent NewMusicBox,) so I won't rehash the details of the program here, but suffice to say that there is a lot of great stuff being written out there right now, and tonight's show will be one of the few opportunities most of us get to hear a large amount of it played by a major orchestra.
There are a lot of reasons that orchestras don't play more new and avant garde music, the most basic having to do with the fact that orchestras are huge organizations with massive budgets that are absolutely dependent on packing as many people as possible into the hall every week. Throw in the fact that a large percentage of audiences have been seriously averse to unfamiliar music ever since a generation of composers back in the mid-20th century spent about 20-30 years writing music that was intentionally, aggressively hard to listen to, and you start to see why the disconnect occurred. But these days, the vast majority of composers write music that is fun, fascinating, and while often challenging, aimed squarely at engaging the listener, rather than making the listener feel stupid. And if the success of last year's first FutureClassics concert proved anything, it's that people who are adventurous in their music choices don't care a whole lot about genre labels - they just want to hear something good, being played by people who care as much as they do.
If you can't make it out to the concert tonight (and you should - student rush tickets are only $10, and everyone else gets in for $20,) you can listen to the whole show on MPR Classical - that's KSJN 99.5fm in the Cities - and also streaming from MPR's website live at 8pm Central. I can guarantee that it'll be nothing like what you normally hear played on classical radio.
There are a lot of reasons that orchestras don't play more new and avant garde music, the most basic having to do with the fact that orchestras are huge organizations with massive budgets that are absolutely dependent on packing as many people as possible into the hall every week. Throw in the fact that a large percentage of audiences have been seriously averse to unfamiliar music ever since a generation of composers back in the mid-20th century spent about 20-30 years writing music that was intentionally, aggressively hard to listen to, and you start to see why the disconnect occurred. But these days, the vast majority of composers write music that is fun, fascinating, and while often challenging, aimed squarely at engaging the listener, rather than making the listener feel stupid. And if the success of last year's first FutureClassics concert proved anything, it's that people who are adventurous in their music choices don't care a whole lot about genre labels - they just want to hear something good, being played by people who care as much as they do.
If you can't make it out to the concert tonight (and you should - student rush tickets are only $10, and everyone else gets in for $20,) you can listen to the whole show on MPR Classical - that's KSJN 99.5fm in the Cities - and also streaming from MPR's website live at 8pm Central. I can guarantee that it'll be nothing like what you normally hear played on classical radio.
Labels: composers, new music, shameless self-promotion
posted by Sam at
3:46 PM
2 Comments:
Sorry you couldn't be here, buddy, it was indeed a fun concert!
I listened to the online stream, and it sounded very cool. (MPR's really upped the quality of their internet simulcast in the last year!) My favorite pieces were Dan Bradshaw's gorgeous (and technically stunning) Chaconne and Xi Wang's transcendent Above Light, which is without question the most mature and impressive work I've ever heard on one of our Composers' Institute slates.
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