V.com weekend vote: Are you 'open' to new music?
What is your feeling, when you see a piece of "new music" on a concert program? Excitement? Dread?
Are you open to it?
In our interview this week with violinist Leila Josefowicz, one of the world's foremost interpreters of contemporary music, she brought up this very topic.
"What I hope to do is to be so convincing that people are drawn in and fascinated," she said, of playing modern music. "I hope to preempt them, before they get to this stage of, 'Do I get it?' You don't need to 'get it.' There's nothing to get. You just have to experience it. Feel it and hear it, and be open."
Feel it, hear it, be open - these are good ideas for experiencing any kind of music! But truly having an open mind for completely new music - accepting the unexpected and resisting the urge to latch on and reduce it to the familiar - it's pretty hard to do.
For this vote, I am talking about "new music" in the concert hall, including the kind that is atonal, experimental, "sound-based," as well as new music that might be built on more traditional ideas.
Please participate in the vote, and let's use this as a chance to talk about "the way in," for new music. I've certainly had the experience of not exactly liking a piece the first time I hear it or play it, then after hearing it multiple times and living with it, the piece grows on me and I wind up liking it very much. I've also had he experience of a new piece really exciting my imagination, right from the start. Or, there are the cases of just never liking it. What is your way "in" with new music? Do you have particular pieces that have really grown on you, new composers that you enjoy?
You might also like:
- Interview with Violinist Leila Josefowicz: Being Open to New Music
- Interview with Jennifer Koh: Nina Young's Violin Concerto 'Traces'
- Violinist.com Interview with Composer Jessie Montgomery
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Replies
New music can be, well, iffy. About 20 years ago I attended a concert where a piece by Earle Brown was featured. In the program notes there were numerous red flags (studied with John Cage, didn't want the composer to interfere too much with the music, etc). When the performance started, my brother and I looked at each other and tried to suppress spontaneous laughter for like 15 minutes. It was not easy.
Afterwards we went backstage and I really wanted to see the score, for example how you annote "beat the bow on the music stand". At the end of the score was the annotation "Da Capo al Fine, or maybe not." Priceless.
Sadly for me pretty much all new music falls into either of two categories: banal or impenetrable. These days it's mostly the former.
Banal describes most of it. In 1978ish I was in the London Musicians' Collective for a year or two, and recently I heard some free improvisation, and I thought "zero change in 40 years!"
Yes, if it is good. 90% of everything is,--mediocre. Before about 1910 lesser quality music at least sounded pleasant.
I agree with Joel. I am more open to listening to it than I am to playing it, which as a viola player is kinda weird I guess. I have seen several new pieces, either UK or world premieres. Some have been pretty good (Cheryl Frances-Hoad's cello concerto) to downright not that good (I have examples, but would rather not say).
Listening to it, yes! Playing it, well -- that depends. I like Max Richter. Ludovico Einaudi. Arvo Pärt. Philip Glass. Etc. The Minimalists. John Cage too. But I am an amateur, classically trained, who spends most of his time fiddling as well as practicing the Bach unaccompanied S & P, and I don't have to do this for a living. :)
Forgot to mention, I was taken to someone's Agamemnon once. The first half was an hour of récitatif on 3 notes. At half time we went down the pub and stayed there.
Paart, Glass, these people I like 10% of their stuff and hate the other 90%. We are rehearsing Purcell's King Arthur and I joked that he ripped-off Michael Nyman.
If you consider film music as "music", kudos to John Williams. When he proposed his two-note theme for "Jaws", Spielberg said are you out of your mind? The rest is history.
Same for Franz Waxman: we all know his Carmen Fantasy, but he also wrote the music for "Sabrina" and "Sunset Boulevard". Perhaps my favorite is Bernard Herrmann (astonishing number of film scores including "Fahrenheit 451" to the Hitchcock films).
And let's not forget "Dances with the Wolves" soundtrack by John Barry, who is most famous for his James Bond 007 soundtracks, and BTW was married no less than to Jane Birk1n.
I voted a reluctant yes. There is always a sense of dread when I see a contemporary piece by a composer I don't know, on the program. However, going in with very low expectations means they are easy to exceed!
I must add that I'm playing in such a piece at the moment. I'm enjoying it. It was written by one of our violists 10 years ago. Then it was called Guernica-Gaza, but after a controversy was renamed For The Civilian Victims of Warfare. Don't Google it - AI confuses it with a visual artwork by a different person. The notes are simple, but they are mostly fortissimo, and many orchestral silences come between them. You can imagine. Or maybe not - the percussionists won't arrive until the day of the concert!
Here is a link to a concerto that was written a couple of years about a Jewish refugee by his great grandson. ("Moses in Nederland," by Michael Kropf, played by Sabrina Tabby) Another new piece called the sonnenberg suite by Ari fisher is a beautiful piece too. Neither are atonal.
Played a piece by Sam Wu a few years ago that I very much enjoyed. It was called "the wind blows full of sand." I love when we are able to perform new works by young and/or local composers.
I totally relate to many of the comments here! I'm open to listening to new music and to playing it. I find most of it very unpleasant. Much of what I've heard is but a cacophony of noise. I much prefer something pleasing to my ear. To Andrew Fryer, did you mean you saw Akhnaten by Philip Glass? I have to chuckle if it was....I saw the premiere of this opera in Boston. My husband and I looked at each other at the opening music--What the heck is this? haha! We were seated in the front row. I nodded off half way through. When it ended, everyone stood in applause as the spotlight shown down 3 rows behind us...it was Philip Glass!
I'm fine with new music, but if it's going to be really terrible, can it at least be short?
Here's a solution that I've seen increasingly on programs -- the amount of time that each piece takes. Why not?
I attended a lovely recital given by Akemi Takayama accompanied by David Wiley in Roanoke. David "said something" about each piece. Before the "modern" piece, David even said, "If it turns out you don't like it that much, just know it's about six minutes long" or whatever it was. Even though I like it, I found myself peeking at my watch.
"To Andrew Fryer, did you mean you saw Akhnaten by Philip Glass?"
No, I'm sure it was someone's Agamemnon in 1999 or 2000. But I can't find a record of it online.
I've found so many contemporary composers whose works I love recently - Caroline Shaw, Jessie Montgomery, and Jennifer Higdon, to name a few! I also love Michael Torke's violin concerto, "Sky!"
A few days ago I tuned in my car radio to a music station where there was a musicologist explaining the music itself, in this case an avant-garde quartet. He commented every part of the work, saying things like "here it seems like every musician is playing a different piece". I remained in horror to the very end to find out who had composed that piece.
I didn’t vote, because I don’t wanna lie. I mostly listen to classical, bluegrass, and gypsy jazz. The “new” stuff I’ve heard from most young players bores me. Watching them dance and whirl with a violin in their hands, the wind blowing their billowy clothes about is more choreographic theater than music.
Also, this new “strum bowing” that’s being done by rock violinists seems totally unnecessary. Why would anyone want to imitate an electric guitar? Makes no sense, to me.
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November 17, 2025 at 03:28 AM · I'm open to it, but that doesn't mean I don't feel dread, lol!