Composer/performers

I want to amend what I wrote in previous posts about the

American Composers Orchestra. I mentioned (and very happily) upcoming events

featuring composer/performers, September 27 at Joe’s Pub in New

York, October 13 at Zankel Hall (

w:st="on">New York again), and October 15 at Irvine Auditorium in

w:st="on">Philadelphia. See their

href="http://www.americancomposers.org/">website for details.

I think this is important, and very positive, for the future

of classical music. But what I didn’t say is that their entire season is

devoted to composer/performers, branded under the title “Composers Out Front.”

Why does this matter? Because other arts have grown very

flexible. Visual art, for instance — people don’t (as if this was news!)

just paint paintings, draw drawings, and sculpt sculptures. They do all kinds

of installations, create all kinds of objects, make

films, you name it. And they’ve been doing it for well over a generation. The creations

can be anything an artists likes (little dollhouse rooms, collections of pink

objects, mazes you walk through), and can be displayed in all kinds of places.

Just think of the miniature adobe-style buildings you see on the stairway in

the Whitney Museum

in New York

(which I remember as something like tiny Navajo pueblos).

And this happens in music, too, but not usually in the

classical concert hall. There, we still hear pieces in somewhat traditional

style, for traditional classical instruments. Even electric guitars are rare.

And, sure, the forms of new pieces may be modern, or modernist (we don’t hear

many symphonies with movements in sonata form, though I’m happily writing one;

more on that later). But those new forms themselves have developed traditions,

so while many new pieces may surprise some people in the traditional classical

audience, they don’t surprise anyone who knows new music.

And meanwhile, for more than a generation, composers have

been creating other things. It started in the ’60s (well, there was some of it

in the ’20s, too, but the current version of this started in the ’60s).

Composers do their own versions of art installations — musical performances

involving all kinds of personal ways of creating sound. Often the composer is

the performer, or one of the performers. I used to review performances like

that when I was a critic for The Village

Voice in New York

in the ’80s,

and some of them still are my happiest musical memories.

But while we see installations of all kinds at major art

museums and galleries, and see them given featured reviews in major media, we

don’t see their musical equivalents featured in major concert halls, or (with

rare exceptions) given lead reviews in The

New York Times. In this way, music lags behind visual art. It needs to

catch up, so that a wider audience can see the full explosion of musical

creativity in our time, and also so that a wider audience comes to the

classical concert hall. And the ACO’s season this

year is one important step.