March/April Birthdays!

Due to our crazy schedules as of late (not to mention being distracted by all the gender-related hoopla!), Sarah and I neglected to get the March birthdays posted. Sorry!

Happy Belated Birthday to Pierre Boulez and Tristan Murail and Happy Birthday to two composers born in April--Chen Yi and Augusta Read Thomas! As always, these birthday posts offer only a small sample of living composers, but we hope it will provide some new listening experiences for everyone.

An excerpt from Boulez's Rituel:

An excerpt from Murail's Desintegrations:

Chen's Duo Ye


Thomas's Rush

The "Woman Composer" Revisited

In response to all the discussion on NewMusicBox recently about women composers, Natalie wrote a great post about affirmative action, women composers, and the new music scene in general. I'd like to focus on some of the points brought up in Amy Beth Kirsten's article. (I'd recommend reading the comments too- some of them are quite illuminating and make really interesting arguments, both agreeing and disagreeing with what I'm about to say.)

Kirsten's main argument is that we are living in a post-gender world. I respectfully disagree. As we've talked about many, many times on this blog before, until there are equal numbers of men and women studying composition, graduating from composition programs, being programmed on concerts, obtaining jobs in the field (whether in academia or not, including residencies, commissions, etc), we are certainly not living in a post-gender world. The new music world is absolutely getting better with regard to the number of female composers, but we are making progress at a snail's pace. Just because we're moving toward a goal does not mean we are anywhere near it. And I don't think anyone can argue that there are equal numbers of male and female composers doing all these thing-- so why are people continuing to argue that gender doesn't matter?

"Affirmative Action" from a Different Angle

There has been a lot of chatter recently on NewMusicBox regarding the programming of female composers and whether or not an "affirmative action" approach is necessary. Amy Beth Kirsten's thoughtful and optimistic article on the state of gender in the composition world sparked an interesting debate about the subject of programming (with Kirsten making the argument that an affirmative action approach is no longer necessary). I disagree with this, but at first I did agree with Kirsten's idea that programming more new music in general would solve the gender disparity. On second thought, however, I just don't think this is true, especially since there are new music ensembles that don't program female composers in proportion to the demographic. Now, please bear with me because I admit this may be a bit of a kooky metaphorical argument for affirmative action, but here goes...

New music is underrepresented, right? I think we all can get behind that. We all can agree that orchestras and other traditional ensembles, for the most part, do not program nearly enough new music to satisfy the needs and talents of the contemporary composition scene. Furthermore, nobody in our community would say that the lack of representation of new music is due to a lack of quality compositions. We all know that the programming needs of orchestras and other groups are more complex than that. Presumably, therefore, new music is under-programmed for other reasons. Perhaps it would help to imagine "new music" as its own minority group in terms of general "classical" programming.

More Discussion About Women Composers (or the Lack Thereof)

I am very excited to share this fantastic article (and comments) from NewMusicBox by David Smooke. I really don't have anything to add to it because it eloquently discusses many of the issues that we've talked about on this blog in the past: about the appalling lack of women in the field of composition, both in sheer numbers and in performances and programming, and why, the gender make-up of competition winners, confidence issues in the world of composition as they relate to gender, etc. It even has statistics... and pie charts!!

It's really nice to know that people are talking about this important issue. Let's keep it up!

- Posted by Sarah

Happy February Birthdays!

Happy birthday to John Adams, John Corigliano, and Christopher Rouse!

John Adams's Chamber Symphony (Mvt. 1)


John Corigliano's Circus Maximus


Christopher Rouse's Gorgon 

Goodbye, New Music in the Media

Dear Alphabet Soup Readers,

We have decided to take down our page "New Music in the Media." While we feel it is very important to discuss new music issues raised in the news, we have decided that if we feel an article or event is noteworthy enough to post and/or discuss on this blog, we will do so on the main page so we can actually have a discussion about it. 

Thanks for your continued readership!

- Natalie & Sarah

I Have Confidence in Sunshine, I Have Confidence in Rain

A year ago I asked the question "Where Are the Female Composers?" and attempted to answer it by briefly touching on the issue of an institutionalized gender gap, among other topics. Sarah addressed the frustrating discrepancies between the male/female demographics in the composition world and the winners of awards in "Competitions and Gender: What's Up with That?" I still feel mostly the same way as I did last year regarding these topics. However, one highly important aspect of the gender gap was left out of our discussion last year: the issue of confidence.



For the most part, I find (in my limited experience) that women are generally unwilling to discuss confidence issues when addressing the gender gap, especially in mixed-gender company. I think we all feel, to a certain extent, that admitting to a lack of confidence or having any kind of self-doubt displays a weakness that can only be harmful to us in this brash, networking, market-driven world.