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INDIE CLASSICAL
willing to rely on shrinking grants, foundations,
and donors take cues from pop’s
cultivation of public support. They develop
more band-like schemes (of course,
the difference between smartening up and
selling out is hotly contested). Mazzoli describes
such an unconventional moneyraiser:
“I’ve been hosting a lot of
fundraising parties. I’ve learned that what
people want more than anything is access
to you and the art in a meaningful way. I’ll
perform a section of a work a month before
the premiere and use this as a way to
talk about the work so that people that
want to contribute to the project feel that
they have a special ‘in’ on it. It breaks
down a lot of barriers, very quickly.” And,
forced to get creative about saving money,
musicians ask friends for in-turn and lowpay
contributions of talent on their projects
instead of hiring externally.
The perceived disinterest from academia
also encourages musicians to look beyond
their music school mentors and
colleagues to find a new community.
Sometimes they look outside classical
music, or even music, sniffing out shared
interests and ideas without regard to professional
fields. Muhly describes such a
self-made community: “I
make music with people I like; I
happen to like lots of different
people. I’d love to collaborate
with an architect! I don’t see it
as any big breaking out or
crossing over [from classical
music].” He may not have
worked with an architect, but
he has worked with a perfumer
to create a ‘scent
opera,’ which premiered at
the Guggenheim. As composers
work with more
varieties and numbers of
colleagues, in turn a wider audience hears
their music—including those that may be interested
in future collaboration. Finally, as
composers write increasingly ‘for themselves’
and their newfound communities of colleagues,
they feel less restricted to styles
favoured by academic grants.
All this alienation and resulting
cross-pollination
encourages a DIY attitude.
“This do-it-yourself movement
has come out recently
out of necessity,”
Mazzoli believes. “You’re
told that classical music is
dead. There are no record
labels or outlets for
your music. Funding
is drying up.
We’ve all heard
that for our entire
lives. So we’re
looking to each other and to different models
of funding and producing concerts. I’m very
happy to be part of a group of young
musicians who are interested
in that, who are banding together to do something
new, interesting and fun.”
Postmodern Playground
MUHLY
“The music that I like the best—
whether it’s classical or pop or
whatever—always has this element
of familiarity mixed with a
lot of great surprises.” — MISSY MAZZOLI
Of course there’s nothing new about the establishment’s
distaste for genre bending or
multidisciplinary exchange. The difference
here seems to be a matter of scale.
“We have a much bigger playground
of information to work with,” explains
Warhol Dervish co-founder
and violist Pemi Paull (an LSM contributor).
“There’s a realization of
how much variety there is in the
world. When I was growing up Ravi
Shankar was Indian music. But now
you can listen to 10,000 Indian
musicians, anytime you
want.”
As is also the case outside
music, the gap between
each new standard becomes progressively
shorter. For a long time, music
could only be heard live. But then it
spilled out onto records, then to tape, CD,
downloads, streaming. As many have remarked,
the move to digital is an important
one as listeners are no longer
encouraged to listen to an album in its entirety.
A 2011 Nielsen-MIDEM study reports
that even downloads are on the out,
with more listeners streaming videos to
listen to music than all music downloads
combined. Since it is more or less instant,
streaming indulges musical curiosity even
more easily than downloading. Listeners
can jump from one of the ‘10,000 Indian
musicians’ to another—then on to a Bach
chaconne, interpreted a thousand ways.
All this to say that indie classical composers,
now 30- and 20-somethings, are
among the first whose careers are unrolling
at a time when easy access to all of
recorded music is the norm. Youtube, the
major source of video-music streaming,
was only officially launched in November
2005. No matter that these numbers are
not specific to classical music. In fact, that
may be the point. Culture is a society’s
personality. These composers, like all
artists, create works that reflect the sum of
their ways of life and thinking.
From music by long-decomposed composers
to music premiered an hour earlier;
from music made in
PHOTO Samantha West
Lhasa to music made in
Chicoutimi. Musicians are
eager to soak up as much
as possible of the music
that they now have unprecedented
access to.
Until recently, Paull observes,
“The singularity of
your activities was sort of
a benchmark of how good
at it you were [as a musician].
Now, it’s invaluable to learn different
kinds of music.” In turn, it’s easier than ever
for composers to find trained musicians who
can and will play diverse styles.
Closing yourself to the world beyond your
music is actually considered a handicap.
Muhly, who holds a Columbia English literature
degree, does not even cite music when I
ask what inspires his compositions. “For me,
the absolute best thing to do is to read voraciously,”
he says. “Books, magazines, anything,
and not about music. Reading cookbooks is
exciting to me, reading historical novels is exciting
to me, reading technical manuals about
making knives is exciting. If you fall into a sort
of rabbit hole on the Internet, that can be fun
too. It’s about being a visitor in a foreign space,
which is, I think, the essential experience of
listening to music.”
“There’s this old fashioned image of the composer
as the silent genius who holes up in a
DECEMBER 2011 / JANUARY 2012 15