Notes on New Music Now

When I studied music at university, there were no courses about making a living as an artist, or how funding bodies worked. It’s probably just as well. I was convinced at the time that the only things that mattered vis-à-vis music were abstract musical ideas, and that any pragmatic considerations—like whether something I wrote was physically possible to perform, or how much a performer gets paid—were irrelevant or for someone else to deal with. I certainly wasn’t interested in careers workshops or grant writing. I had far more pressing concerns like working in a bar and pursuing a litany of sure-to-fail relationships.

These days, I find myself thinking rather a lot about funding bodies and how someone might make a living as an artist. I’m still not that interested in careers workshops and grant writing, although the financial realities of adulthood do change one’s priorities. I really would rather be thinking (and writing) about other things, but as I talk with other composers, there’s often a sense of gloom and precariousness about the new music scene in Aotearoa. Maybe this ennui is just a fact of living in this era of perma- and poly-crisis. Maybe it stems from a sense of missed possibilities and unrealized potential.

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When I’m not working for money (in tertiary education), I work in an area that, for desperate want of a better term, might be called “new music.”¹ (Also called: “contemporary classical music” (😬), “art music,” “contemporary composition.”) It’s an imperfect label applied to a swathe of compositional practices and approaches to music-making, supported and regulated, as with any domain of practice, by institutions and norms. For composers, making new music includes working with highly-trained, specialist performers realising scores, usually in live settings, and can include improvisational practices, and some kinds of sonic arts and electronic music. Some new music is process-, idea-, and performer-oriented, and sits comfortably within the bit of the Venn diagram that contains “experimental music.” Some is more closely aligned with the values and practices of classical music of the 19th century, often to its detriment. New music is both focused on innovation and “newness” while sitting adjacent to, and sometimes offering a critique of, the tradition of Western classical music.

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While new music doesn’t get much airtime, people periodically express concern about the so-called demise of classical music. (There was a moment in the noughties where this concern about dying audiences and waning attention spans led to a flurry of publications extolling its virtues. I don’t buy all the arguments.²) The case for new music gets made much less often; those in this space often feel that sitting on the periphery is the best place to be. In Tāmaki Makaurau, the Audio Foundation—one of our few dedicated new music institutions—is admirably adept at positioning itself as on the outside while doing what it needs to do to receive multi-year investment funding from Creative New Zealand. There’s a serious lack of commentary and criticism around new music too, perhaps because we want to spend the limited time we have to actually make music. There are, however, few other advocates to do it for us. And there is a real risk in our being quiet, coy, and cool about what we do: those who decide where the money goes will fund the louder voices.

Do I need to say why I think new music matters, and why we should care about its health, financial and otherwise? Briefly: I think there’s intrinsic value in a practice that sits outside the commercial music and classical music apparatuses. I think that people should be paid fairly for their labour, and that if we can afford to fund administrators in arts organizations (which we do—a lot of them) we should be able to fund artists. And I think that some of the most paradigm-shifting and possibility-generating music-making is happening in the realm of new music. Realising different futures requires these musics to be dreamt and made.

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Like other performance-based practices, music exists in multiple modes. When I notate a new work that is performed and recorded, many interacting activities and objects are manifested in different contexts, including a score, an abstract sound structure, a recording, and the acts of composing and performing. The work travels via a performer, mediator in the chain from ideation to reception.³ All of this is to say something unremarkable yet important: notated music needs not just to be written, but to be performed. Both cost. Turns out we like paying for the latter much more than the former.

Consider funding for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra (NZSO). I don’t particularly begrudge the fact they have their own act of parliament and millions in guaranteed annual funding. But their funding is primarily spent on only one part of the equation: performers and performances, not composers and compositions.⁴

And the result? Imagine walking into Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Art Gallery and discovering it full of work from the 18th and 19th centuries. There’s a selection of modern classics in one corner, and a Michael Smither as the lone New Zealand artist on show. Do you think for a moment that would be acceptable in 21st century Aotearoa? It’s not a perfect analogy, but the situation described is akin to the programming practice of the NZSO. The orchestras of Tāmaki Makaurau and Ōtautahi tend to do better, but the innate conservatism in institutional culture in this space, and related audience and performer expectations, is clearly still hard to shake.⁵

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It’s easy to get wound up about orchestras, given their resource intensity, but their actual role in the new music ecology is somewhat limited. There are many other willing ensembles and individual performers of new music in Aotearoa, skilled and experienced in spite of the fact that paid opportunities to perform this work are limited. (Those who wish to focus on new music often find more consistently rewarding opportunities overseas.) Some of these performers here and abroad are the strongest advocates for new music we have.

That said, the only established ensemble focused (mainly but not exclusively) on new music is Stroma, based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and drawing primarily on performers from the NZSO. Stroma presents some excellent programmes, but—as its funding dictates—it is a non-touring group making presentations two or three times each year. There are many other ensembles and performers who play new music, but these often employ the “sandwich” technique,⁶ delivering the new music between two bits of not-new music, with the idea that this makes it more “palatable” for audiences while reinforcing its otherness in relation to more “acceptable” repertoire.

What of other institutions? The role of University music schools seems to be diminishing, the result of funding pressures and conflicting priorities—though the residency/fellowship programmes at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University and the University of Otago remain important opportunities for composers to have paid time to compose. RNZ Concert, Aotearoa’s (self-described) “fine music network,” is focused on traditional repertoire, though it does an exceptional job of recording and broadcasting live performances of New Zealand composers’ works, and remains one of the few places for new music to get an airing. Chamber Music New Zealand, traditionally focused on standard ensembles (think: string quartets) and repertoire (think: Brahms) but admitting some new music, seems to be having a minor identity crisis.⁷ There are plenty of acronymic organizations in play: SOUNZ (a music information centre), APRA (a royalties collection body), and CANZ (a composer-led advocacy organization). Both the Audio Foundation in Tāmaki Makaurau and Pyramid Club in Te Whanganui-a-Tara are important community-focused hubs for experimental and new music, with a focus on hybrid composer-performer activity. There are a few record labels that feature new music and arts festivals that present it from time to time. Creative New Zealand plays an outsized role in deciding what new music is commissioned, given the paucity of other composer funding opportunities. As noted earlier, avenues for criticism and commentary are limited, constraining discourse and diminishing our ability to make positive change. All together, as a network of institutions, there seem to be lots of component parts and good intentions, and plenty of gaps. 

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We have new music composers from Aotearoa doing amazing things. I think of Dylan Lardelli, who lives in Sydney and travels often to Asia and Europe to share his unique, engaging, and deeply-considered music with some of the best new music performers in the world. And Celeste Oram, now of Manhattan, NYC, who combines intellectual rigour and curiosity with creative whimsicality across a wide-ranging practice. There are many others in Aotearoa and abroad.

But the sense of precariousness and gloom is unshakeable, and I’m pretty sure it’s not simply a projection of dissatisfaction about my own fumbling practice. So, what to do? Here’s three things:

1. Performing ensembles must commit to spending a percentage of their annual budget on commissioning Aotearoa’s composers. Large unwieldy organizations could start low. If the NZSO, for example, committed a mere 2.5% of their annual budget to composer commission fees, it would total almost $450,000 each year. This by itself would radically change the landscape.

2. We need to find sustainable ways to enable willing performers to be paid to play new music more often. What could this look like? Perhaps, as a starting point, an ensemble dedicated solely to new music practices. It doesn’t need to be full-time, but it does need to be more than occasional. (I’m working on it.)

3. It’s boring having to constantly advocate for your worth, but those of us in the game—myself included—must get better at clearly and unapologetically making the case for new music, distinct from (though connected to) classical music, and distinctly valuable.