Why we're different

Last Friday, I participated in a panel discussion with UM composition students and faculty. I wasn't really sure if I had anything to write about, even though I had plenty to say during the discussion. Also participating in the discussion were colleagues of mine from two other groups, one in a chamber ensemble comprised of piano trio plus clarinet and one starting a "new" music group. I put "new" in quotes because after a week of digesting the discussion I had with the class and my colleagues I've finally figured out why what we are doing is different. We're just playing music. Straight up. No "new" music/poetry slams in a shipyard or throwing a modern work on the front half of a program just to have one and then hoping that the trapped audience stays around for the Beethoven on the second half. No assumptions about the audience's intellectual capacity to understand the music of living composers. Just find some good music and play it to the best of our ability. Find something in it that isn't on the page.

So many groups bemoan the fact that audiences don't want to hear works of living composers or they purposefully put themselves into a "new" music ghetto by only performing contemporary music. I think both these approaches are extreme and that ultimately, we end up in the same place. The already small group of people who are listening to serious music are being told that this new music stuff is weird and difficult, to be played only on college campuses or in warehouses with welders and performers in black leather. If that's your thing, cool, but what we're proposing is that there is a middle way. How about if we don't let on that the music is "new" and we just program it as music? No prejudice inducing tags. Just music, plain and simple. There are plenty of long dead composers that people have never heard of that sometimes show up on concert programs (Heinichen, Monn, Hans Rott. Everybody's got a champion). This isn't a bait and switch, this is having enough faith in the music and our musicianship that we can stop apologizing for the music and the way we play it. I've been a proponent of new music for as long as I've been conducting for many reasons, but to be honest, mostly because it is really exciting to work with living composers. Also, in a very real way, I can be a part of the creative process from the work's inception. That's an honor. Project Copernicus is about realigning musical paradigms and tearing down the walls of the musical ghettos we're living in. We don't need these distinctions anymore. Let's just make some good, honest music and get down to the business of touching people's hearts .