Alarm Will Sound Performs at Sheldon Concert Hall. Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Type “new music” into Google, and it’ll cough up the predictable digital flotsam and jetsam: freshly pressed Top 40 singles, mostly. What you probably won’t find are results for New Music.
It’s a genre that involves composers, rather than rock stars, writing for orchestral instruments—except when they write for computer programs. Or for laptop and chamber orchestra, or, in the case of Fluxus composer Alison Knowles, Nivea hand cream applied in front of a microphone.
Some classify New Music as contemporary music, or music written by living composers. Others call it modern, avant-garde, postmodern.
The grandfather of the genre, at least in America, is John Cage—who doesn’t fit the literal definition of a living composer. In fact, that’s the case for many New Music composers: György Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Charles Ives. But if you go with just the strict definition of works being written now, do you mean someone more like John Adams…or John Zorn?
And does anyone care?
“New Music is like the bottom of the arts, right?” says Stefan Freund, an associate professor of composition and music theory at the University of Missouri in Columbia. “Some people go to dance shows; some people go to art shows. And everyone reads new novels. This is something composers complain about all the time: Why does everyone read contemporary literature, but no one is interested in contemporary music?”
That may be changing, though. New Music ensembles—including Golden Arm Trio and eighth blackbird—have slowly been infiltrating culture over the past decade, demonstrating that composers aren’t just dead guys in powdered wigs, that classical music can sound like a lot of things, and that avant-garde doesn’t always mean dissonance.
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St. Louis is having something of a New Music moment.
Freund is also the cellist for Alarm Will Sound, which The New York Times dubbed “one of the most vital and original ensembles on the American music scene.” Last fall, the New York–based chamber orchestra initiated its St. Louis season, with a sort of New Music sampler performed during the American Arts Experience St. Louis. In March, it performed the first excerpts from Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy’s The Hunger (an opera based on the potato famine), as well as the second U.S. performance of minimalist composer Steve Reich’s Radio Rewrite (inspired by Radiohead). And on April 26, it performed its own commissioned piece, 1969, a theatrical-musical hybrid that incorporated history, choral music, projections, and intersections of popular and orchestral music, at the Touhill Center for Performing Arts.
St. Louis has been a fertile ecosystem for new and avant-garde music for decades, though. New Music Circle has been around for more than 50 years, and it’s still pulling in big crowds with increasingly younger audiences. HEARding Cats Collective will kick off its fall season with an underwater concert. And the St. Louis Symphony premiered John Adams’ City Noir in February.
And now, the Mizzou New Music Initiative is expanding New Music even further. The program got its start in 2005 as the Creating Original Music Project, a competition for students from kindergarten through 12th grade. Eight years later, it includes the Sinquefield Composition Prize; the Summer Composition Institute for high school–age composers; composition scholarships for college students; the Missouri Composers Orchestra Project; the Mizzou New Music Ensemble; and the Mizzou International Composers Festival, now in its fourth year.
“We’re trying to make Missouri a mecca for composition,” says Jeanne Sinquefield, who provides not just funding for the New Music Initiative (the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation contributed another $1.4 million this year), but also much of its energy and vision. “You can call it New Music, you can call it whatever—it’s to provide a way to help composers get their music performed.”
Sinquefield is a musician herself. Her first instrument was the accordion, till she joined the junior-high orchestra. “I had the biggest hands,” she says. “So I got the bass.” Her interest in composition blossomed while helping a cousin notate the music he heard in his head.
“The first year we had the K–12 competition, we had all these young composers come in, and none of them had met another composer. They were just composing,” she says. “Let’s say you have this talent, and you play the piano, and you write this stuff, and Mom and Dad think, ‘How sweet.’ But then what? If you play baseball, you have Little League, you have PONY League—you have lots of opportunities to work and interact and grow. But if you’re in sixth grade and you’re a composer, there’s nothing.”
The answer is to “grow the composer,” which is, Sinquefield says, what sets New Music Initiative apart from other programs. “A lot of other places, they’ll get the kids maybe in college, but they are not doing anything to find them and grow them up.”
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On the other side of the spectrum is the Mizzou International Composers Festival, which brings in established guest composers. There are also eight resident emerging composers, chosen from 150-plus applicants from around the world—from places like China, Finland, Israel, and Greece—who will each write a new piece for Alarm Will Sound during the festival.
The six-day event, July 22 through 27, begins with public talks from renowned composers (it’s already hosted two Pulitzer Prize winners), a rare chance for people to interact with internationally acclaimed artists. Then, throughout the week, there are open rehearsals for Alarm Will Sound. “That way, the community can come see the music come to life and see what it takes to prepare for a concert,” says New Music Initiative managing director William Lackey, who oversees the festival with co-artistic directors Freund and W. Thomas McKenney. Then come the concerts. Alarm Will Sound performs its own repertoire Thursday, and Mizzou New Music Ensemble and the music faculty perform Friday. “Saturday night is the crown jewel of that festival week,” says Lackey, “with the eight world premieres.”
The festival already attracts audiences from across Missouri and Illinois, as well as composers’ friends and families. But the goal is to make it into something bigger, something international. “I’d like for our summer music festival to look like True/False,” says Freund, referring to Columbia’s documentary film festival, which attracts films and audiences from around the world. “It’s an event that is very unique, not just to Columbia, but to America. And it’s a destination event where people who are aficionados come and see it, because it’s important.”
A big part of the task is audience-building, which may be easier now than in the past because orchestral music is becoming “polystylistic,” and audiences have become far more receptive to New Music than they were in the ’80s or ’90s. Lackey cites Anna Clyne and Mason Bates, the composers-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who both integrate electronic music into their symphonic work. (Bates is even a DJ.) A lot of Alarm Will Sound’s musicians, he adds, come from world-music backgrounds, rock backgrounds, pop, indie…
“It’s all kind of melting together now,” Lackey says. “There’s so much crossover these days, it’s hard to say that I belong in this one box. It’s very fluid—it’s no longer a box!”
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The New Music Initiative already has a strong presence in St. Louis, and it eventually hopes to expand to Kansas City. Recently, it partnered with Sheldon Concert Hall, which commissioned pieces from young Missouri composers to celebrate its centennial. The series, which wrapped up in April, began with Freund’s “St. Louis Reds,” his take on W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” (which also turned 100 this year). Patrick Clark, who recently completed his master’s degree in conducting at Mizzou, debuted “Snow Coming,” a piece for solo piano. And Stephanie Berg’s “Gateway” accompanied a slideshow of artist Al Hirschfeld’s drawings.
Clark, who studied in the Netherlands with composer Louis Andriessen, says that in Europe there’s an “imperative” toward New Music that he’d never witnessed in America—though he sees something like it emerging at Mizzou now. “And who would ever guess that in the middle of Missouri, that would be important?” he says. “Most people are used to hearing music they already know, and the gratification part is hearing the familiar. But with New Music, part of the thrill is not being familiar with it.”
As for Berg, she says she’s “had a hand in just about every single program” that New Music Initiative has to offer. She won the Sinquefield Composition Prize in 2009, was chosen as a resident composer in 2012, and plays clarinet with the New Music Ensemble. Next January, the St. Louis Symphony will perform her piece from last year’s festival, Ravish and Mayhem, expanded for symphony orchestra. When she heard that news, Berg says, “I alarmed the people I was hanging out with at the time, because I started screaming and cursing very loudly, and they had no idea why!”
Berg is an example of what New Music Initiative has been able to achieve in less than 10 years. She says she always planned to be a performing musician (she plays clarinet, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, and saxophone), but she never realized that she had a talent for composition until New Music Initiative helped her unearth it. The program gave her opportunities to write music (she hears music in her head, usually when she is driving, and developed a shorthand so she could pull over and get it down in a notebook). But most important, seeing her work performed was electrifying. Berg’s journey is a partial answer to the question “What will happen when composers involved from an early age with New Music Initiative go out into the world?”
Though there’s another question that needs answering as well: What is New Music?
“Now, it can pretty much be anything,” says Berg. “We aren’t restricted to certain stylistic expectations. On one hand, it’s very freeing for the composers and those who take part in it, but it also means you have no idea what to expect—which can be exciting, but also frightening.
“A Mozart symphony, even if you’ve never heard it before, you kind of know what you’re going to get. But if they play a piece by some composer you’ve never heard of, who knows? You may like it, you may hate it, and you may be completely bored and forget about it entirely. Or it may be the greatest thing you’ve ever heard.
“So good luck coming up with a definition for that,” she says, laughing. “But if you figure it out, let us know!”
The New Music Ensemble performs at the World Chess Hall of Fame, 4652 Maryland, on May 4 at 7 p.m. For more information about the program, visit mizzounewmusic.missouri.edu. For more with Alarm Will Sound and Steve Reich, go here. And here are SoundCloud clips from composers William Lackey, Patrick Clark, and Stephanie Berg.
