As I age, my perspective continues to change. The question of the day must therefore be, what defines art music? The term, as we have progressed over the past century, has been applied in a consistently expansive fashion. Many years ago, I thought this could only ever be a Good Thing. I now find myself torn, however, or at least reconsidering the notion. What constitutes art music? What are the criteria to be utilized? Is it intent? Surely not. Complexity? Also an unacceptable marker, to myself and many. It would seem that currently the only criterion is that the composer has been classically trained. Is this the standard? If so, is it enough?

This weekend alone, I have listened to the music of perhaps one dozen composers—typically young composers who are quickly establishing themselves and earning the trappings of such establishment: commissions, fellowships, awards, high-profile performances, CD releases—whose music I would consider contemporary art music only when the broadest of definitions has been applied. I find a thought strolling through my brain after hearing each new work: either I am completely out of the loop (there is no denying this) or things have gone horribly wrong over the past ten years (also a distinct possibility).

I have no desire to publicly slight my peers, but I am simply at a loss as to how what might have been a 15-minute (maximum) experiment that yields a five-minute work qualifies one for a three-week residency in an artists’ colony. Any ideas?

What’s the difference between New Age and the new classical avant garde?

A tonal center.

I am increasingly concerned over the state of classical composition in the United States, particularly anywhere outside the greater NYC area.

Scouring the internet for composer resources—collaboratives, alliances, discussion forums, sample excerpts, substantive blogs, podcasts, online texts, anything—is a genuinely fruitless effort.  The resources available are few, and these are rarely updated.  The most active resources—even those provided by allegedly “pro-classical” organizations, like NPR—relate to popular music and songwriting, of little use to those of us who take any of the less traveled pathways.  I find nothing on important concerts or recordings of new music.  No interviews with established composers.  Nothing.

I have managed to locate the independent sites of a few composers, but much of the music presented is the continued beating of the proverbial dead horse: atonal nonsense that was put out to pasture fifty years ago, except no one remembered to clue in the theory and composition professors to this fact.  (Can you believe one of my own composition instructors attempted to steer me toward pitch class sets as a legitimate means to composing new music?  Has any progress been made over the past century?)

There is no composers’ group in the state of Missouri that is open to unaffiliated composers (I found only one group, with membership restricted to students of a single state university).  As a local theory and composition professor mentioned to me recently, midwestern composers are typically too busy teaching (living on commissions in “flyover country” being an apparent impossibility, every local composer evidently serves on a collegiate faculty or sells insurance) to participate in any collective endeavors that might require—say—monthly meetings, conferences, new music concert attendance, or (radically) actually composing new pieces.

The sad reality is that having lived here for a decade now, I’ve yet to meet even one other classically trained composer.  The organization with the greatest number of my own acquaintances as members is the Cleveland Composers Guild, and even one of those is apparently deceased.  As I should have guessed, membership in this organization is limited to those in northeastern Ohio.

Ah, to be a musical orphan.