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OVER the last few years I’ve been diving into the breakdown of the old 20th century creative economy and assessing as best I can the crisis we’re in now. But I’ve also been asking myself — and everybody I know — how we might move forward. Part of the answer comes from work I’ve been doing for a new online magazine called the 21st Century Musician. The site just went up — ArtsJournal’s Greg Sandow is another contributor — and I think it’s quite lively and engaging. Its aim is to help orient music students and young musicians trying to figure out a bewildering and transformed landscape.
I’ve done a few features for the site, including some of the interviews w composers, incl Gabriel Kahane (pictured)
. The most wide-ranging is a story on contemporary models for commissioning new music. I start the piece off this way:
The state of commissioning in the 21st century is so varied and confusing that even established composers have trouble describing it: to some it’s the best of times, to others, much more trying. The year 2014 shows how transitional the current situation is. The Pulitzer-winning composition, John Luther Adams’s Become Ocean, came into being the old-fashioned way, through a commission by the Seattle Symphony. However, the classical Grammy Awards were dominated by a series of songs by Maria Schneider, Winter Morning Walks, which was not commissioned by an august organization but crowd-funded on the Internet.
Please check out this great new site.
Neoliberal philosophy is quite present in the publication, as with most new classical music organizations these days. They describe contemporary composers with the usual coded language of neoliberalism: “They make their own opportunities. They shape their careers like entrepreneurs and might produce their own performances.”
In addition to “entrepreneurship,” they use other neoliberal buzz words such as composers creating “niches” for themselves. Especially rich is the description of composers as “opportunistic.”
Among the composers interview, Esa-Pekka Salonen is the only one who dares to address the philosophical bias. He notes, “What I’m seeing now is a lot of initiative and an entrepreneurial approach to music.”
Regarding Europe’s system of public funding he observes: “In a system where composers’ needs are pretty much taken care of by an institutional support network, the positives vastly overwhelm the negatives.” He mentions how Americans must use micro-financing or simply work for free, and adds, “Of course, this self-financing model is not sustainable in perpetuity. There has to be some model at some point for most of these people.”
He could be much more explicit, and emphasize these problems more often, but it would damage his career in the USA. As Voltaire once remarked, “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”
Of the composers I spoke to, Salonen’s pov most matches mine
Over all, I I like the site a lot, but that doesn’t mean I agree with every story or every source I spoke to for my pieces.
What I want is a world of intelligent, civil discussion and 20th C Musicians offers this.
The five composers selected for interviews provide very a interesting spectrum of views — lots of interesting similarities and contrasts. Whoever selected them did a good job.
I wonder if the editors know that there is another magazine called “21st Century Music” owned by composer Mark Alburger. I’m not certain it is still in publication — the last issue on the web is October 2013 — but the similarity in names could be confusing.