Since the middle years of the twentieth century, new classical music has been viewed in US culture either as something to be tolerated on symphony programmes or as a fringe phenomenon appealing only to an elite group of listeners often associated with the 'academy'. Yet despite all odds, the creation and performance of new classical music continues into the new millennium and to some extent has thrived because of the constantly changing conditions in which all music is created, performed, disseminated, and marketed in the United States. The contributions in this forum focus on the situations of new music in the cultural, economic, political, and social environments of the present in United States. In 'Art-Religion for a Global New Age', Andrea Moore examines the music of Tan Dun around the turn of the millennium, arguing that his market-friendly multiculturalism reanimated the power of art-religion for the post-Cold War era. In 'Conducting Business', Marianna Ritchey demonstrates how contemporary business literature deploys a musical analogy to promote 'creativity' as an economic resource in capitalist systems. She considers a recent opera about Steve Jobs that by aestheticizing corporate power serves to 'orchestrate' our lives. In 'The New Music Scene: Passionate Commitment in the Twenty-First-Century Gig Economy', Judy Lochhead examines the technological and economic conditions that have paved the way for a flourishing of a new music scene in North America. Considering performances by Yarn/ Wire and Ensemble Dal Niente, she argues that these conditions have resulted in new taste cultures that foster passionate commitment. In 'The Boundaries of "Boundarylessness": Revelry, Struggle, and Labor in Three American New Music Ensembles', John Pippen analyses the labour of three new music ensembles-Eighth Blackbird, Third Coast Percussion, and Ensemble Dal Nienteas a negotiation between conflicting concerns: art as anti-commericial and neoliberal discourses of value. He frames the building in which all three ensembles rehearse as a metaphor for how the musicians negotiate these conflicting concerns. In her afterword, 'Boundaries of the New: American Classical Music at the Turn of the Millennium', Anne Shreffler directly addresses the concept of 'boundarylessness' which is so often claimed for new music, demonstrating the persistence of boundaries, particularly those of gender and race.
Starting in the late 1950s, John Cage composed a number of works which are "indeterminate with respect to [their] performance." 1 The most wellknown works of this type date from the late 1950s and 1960s and include Variations I, Fontana Mix, Cartridge Music, Variations II, and Variations III?-Their scores consist of all or some of the following materials: transparent sheets with black dots, circles or lines of various sorts, and opaque sheets with dots or lines-the latter straight or circular. The instructions for the pieces typically direct the performer(s) to randomly overlay the sheets, often the transparent sheets onto the opaque ones. The resulting configurations are then read as indications of actions to be performed. 3 Each piece differs with respect to the precise way in which the *Cage, John. "Composition as Process. II. Indeterminacy," Silence (Cambridge, MA: MTT University Press, 1966 [1961]), 35. present purposes, I consider only those "indeterminate works" requiring the action of a performer in the creation of a notation to be "read." By this definition I exclude works like the Solo for Piano, part of whose score consists of notations that can be "read" directly by a performer.
This issue's Critical Acts focuses on “war and other bad shit” in terms of censorship, immigration, and art as a form of political protest and recovery. In “Habeas Corpus,” Ann Pellegrini uses Sally Field's censored Emmy-acceptance speech to exemplify the Bush administration's privatization of mourning as a means “to bind us to acts of fatal violence against an objectified and dehumanized ‘enemy.’” In her account of Luigi Nono's The Forest Is Young and Full of Life, Judy Lochhead examines the possibility of music as activism, noting how history is recycled from the Vietnam War to today. William Bowling and Rachel Carrico describe how art heals in Lakeviews, part of a post-Katrina project. Guillermo Gómez-Peña rages against “border hysteria,” when the “War on Terror” becomes a “war on difference.”
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