Topic: Voices from the Industry

Composer Jennifer Higdon: Traditional Musical Influences, Contemporary Concerns

Posted on April 25, 2025 by - News Briefs

In Friday’s (4/25) National Public Radio, Tom Huizenga writes, “ ‘Accessible’ can be a dirty word in contemporary classical music. For decades, composers have outfitted their works with gnarly tangles of complexity, and heaven forbid if there’s a tune you can hum. That music rightfully has its cheerleaders, but composer Jennifer Higdon isn’t among them. She is a vigorous defender of melody, and when her music is described as ‘accessible,’ she doesn’t wince, she rejoices. Traditional-sounding melody, harmony and rhythm are Higdon’s building blocks, but her works are anything but old-fashioned. They tend to percolate with an organic freshness, and a musical language that’s large in vocabulary but easy to grasp. Across her career, she has pulled off the near-impossible feat of walking the fine line between classical music’s fanatics and first-timers, satisfying both camps. When Higdon writes music—whether it’s her operatic adaptation of Cold Mountain, chamber works or any of her 15 concertos—she insists that it communicates, that it’s capable of being understood and appreciated. So far, the 62-year-old Brooklyn native’s track record is a success. Her music routinely receives upwards of 250 performances per year, and she’s won a Pulitzer Prize and three Grammys.” The article includes an extensive question-and-answer interview with Higdon.

In Praise of Improv

Posted on April 17, 2025 by - News Briefs

In Sunday’s (4/13) Washington Post, Nina Moske, a senior at Duke University, writes, “The cellist was improvising. She sat alone with no music stand before her, devising a new composition…. The piece was not recorded and would never be replicated. I recently joined her as a member of Duke University’s New Music Ensemble. There are eight of us: a pianist, a cellist, a violinist, a clarinetist, a guitarist, a flautist, a percussionist and a conductor. The group performs experimental pieces from the 20th and 21st centuries, and we improvise. As a classically trained flutist, I expected to feel unmoored without structure. But improvisation has made space for a freedom I didn’t know I needed: timelessness. College students like me treat time as a finite resource—something to harness for maximum gain…. My own white-knuckled grip on time stems, in part, from my years of musical training. Classical ensembles prize precision … There’s real artistry in the craft of classical music, but I was lost in the minutiae…. I now improvise once or twice each week with my group and have tried to implement the practice on my own, too. My days are no less busy, but even a few minutes of extemporizing clear my head.”

Opinion: How to Define Classical Music in Our Rapidly Evolving World?

Posted on April 16, 2025 by - News Briefs

In the May 2025 issue of The Atlantic, Matthew Aucoin writes, “I’m a composer and conductor in the field that’s broadly known as Western classical music, a term that’s routinely applied to radically different idioms across more than 1,000 years of musical history. Within this huge array, you’ll find the engulfing sonorities of William Byrd’s choral music; the intimate revelations, too private for words, in chamber works by Franz Schubert and Anton Webern; the majestic topography of Jean Sibelius’s orchestral landscapes; and, more recently, a multitude of works by composers as different from one another as Chaya Czernowin, Tyshawn Sorey, and Thomas Adès. The unruly and elusive entity known as classical music does not sound like any one thing, and the sheer abundance of the tradition might invite the conclusion that trying to define it at all is a hopeless exercise. But that would be a mistake, especially at this moment. Like every other sector of cultural life, classical music has been roiled over the past decade by intense debates … The stakes of these discussions … have at times felt existential … What is classical music, whom is it for, and what about it is worth defending?”