Introducing...

Hi, I’m John. Welcome to my blog. This site is part of my master’s thesis in ethno/musicology on contemporary classical music ensembles and their communities. I am combining ethnographic and ethnological research with postmodern criticism to describe how people participate in and with new music ensembles. By creating a blog, I hope to participate in new music’s digital community.

Holy Cow! What does that even mean and why are there so many links?

Basically I’m a grad student and I want a way to engage some of the people who participate in the new classical music scene.

But, John, if you participate in a culture, wouldn’t you risk changing that culture?

Well, it depends. It seems a little pretentious to think that I can cause some major change. Also, cultures are not fixed objects; they move and change over time. Change itself is neither good nor bad, it just is. I’m already a part of that culture. I studied music in college, like many new music folks, and conduct a community orchestra. I perform new music regularly and many of my friends (including my gf, Abby Shupe) compose new classical music.

I thought classical music was written by a bunch of dead white guys.

Not necessarily. Possible reasons for this common characterization include the following. Many American music conservatories emphasize the music of dead white guys (and a few white gals). Diversity has improved over the past fifty years, but a lot of the classical repertoire was written by men who died a while back. That's not a bad thing, but it makes me wonder what we're saying when we talk about how this music the best in the galaxy. Performance instruction of the broad range of styles known as popular, which refers to a dazzling range of music, has been historically excluded from conservatories and other college music schools. “New Music” in classical cultures generally describes music made by living composers.

John, I’m a “classical” musician and I hate that term. Also, I avoid playing the older stuff because [insert reason here]. Please don’t use that term to describe my musical life.

I agree; it’s a silly term. Milton Babbitt, a living composer, spoke about this very issue in an interview in 2001. One popular alternative is “western art music” though I think that term has a couple of HUGE problems: 1. It implies that music made outside this tradition is not art. That’s just silly. Try telling someone that the music they listen to isn’t really art. I’m sure that’ll go really well. 2. “Western” combines the dozens of styles of music from the past 2400 years, depending on who you ask, into one big, oddly shaped lump. That lump gets crammed into books like A History of Western Music by Donald J. Grout, Claude V. Palisca, and J. Peter Burkholder. (I like how Burkholder’s initial comes first. It sounds cool, “J. Pete is on the street with feet walking to the beat of history, looking out for pieces of tunes stitched like fruit of the loom hidden underneath the surface of a symphony” I went to a slam last week. It was awesome.) Anyways, that’s a lot of people to put in one book. (it’s a well-written book, though). I’m going to use classical because I think it’s a little less ridiculous than “western art music,” “serious music” (ever listen to hip-hop?) or “concert music” (lots of musical groups have concerts).

Please feel free to comment, complement, or criticize, especially if you’re not a dead white guy. I’ll update at least twice a week.