“I attended half a dozen music events connected to orchestras over the past year where audience members asked for more new music,” says composer Jennifer Higdon.
Donato Cabrera is bringing his enthusiasm for new music to the California Symphony (pictured below) and the Las Vegas Philharmonic, where he serves as music director.
J.D. Scott
CHANGE in the Air by Molly Sheridan
When it comes to contemporary classical music, attitudes seem different than they did even a few years ago.
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old two images in your mind for a moment: your own orchestra and a living composer with a new piece of music. Did your heart rate just kick up a little? Was it out of excitement—or terror? Stereotypes die hard, and perhaps one of the most entrenched is that new music and the orchestra have a fraught relationship. However, recent programming and flourishing relationships among orchestras and composers and audiences seem to show that it’s also an outdated misconception. “Music by living composers is faring well” was the headline of an April article by Josh-
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ua Kosman in The San Francisco Chronicle, which went on to highlight a swath of composers—many in their 20s and 30s—and the orchestras that are embracing them. Kosman’s suggestion of “a new golden age of orchestral composition” made for some pretty thrilling reading. Only a few days later on the opposite coast, Alex Ross wrote a piece in The New Yorker celebrating the “vitality and variety of recent orchestral writing,” though he painted a somewhat more sober picture of the landscape on the audience side. Kosman and Ross are not the only ones noticing the trend—others include John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune, Justin David-
son (New York magazine), Anthony Tommasini (New York Times), and Mark Swed (Los Angeles Times). “I definitely think that there is ‘something going on’ in terms of orchestras re-investing in new music,” says musicologist Will Robin, a passionate advocate of contemporary orchestral repertoire and current scholarin-residence with the North Carolina Symphony. In his opinion, administrators “are reawakening to the idea that new music might be a potential draw to audiences.” It’s possible that some of the media attention might reflect journalists more interested in discussing the “new” than another symphony
FALL 2015