Tag: contemporary music

New Music Concert – Kanawha Forum 2.0

Flutist Lindsey Goodman is full of energy.

When I called her a dynamo, at first she looked puzzled, but I explained that I meant that she was full of enthusiasm, energy and drive. Just hearing about her performing and teaching schedule makes me want to take a nap.

But she is more than just a person with enthusiasm. She is a professional musician on a mission. This mission is her passion since she was 18 years old. Her mission is contemporary music.

Say “contemporary” music and some people, metaphorically, run screaming out of the room. Some of them still do it literally, but with all the variety in today’s music, the days of “Train Wrecks in C Sharp Minor” are mostly music of the past.

"New music is my life's calling. I firmly believe that if there's no music of the present, there can be no music of tomorrow."

There is no unified school of thought in this new millennium, no “ism” that can adequately summarize the style of concert music today. It’s a wide range of sounds, procedures and compositional choices.

WVSO flutist Lindsey Goodman has put together a new music series in cooperation with Kanawha United Presbyterian Church in Charleston.  The three concert series featuring a variety of contemporary works is called Kanawha Forum 2.0.

Here’s Lindsey to talk about it:

Scared to Write a Note

Thumbing through a copy of Opera News, an article on opera composer Ricky Ian Gordon revealed some very provocative words:

“The twentieth century is littered with a lot of composers who were terrorized out of writing what they heard-out of writing in …their authentic voice. There was such a critical backlash against…tonal music. I mean you could write…you were just laughed off the map.”

What is music? Such a simple question. Such complication behind the answers.

The early 2oth century composers were in a real bind. Were they going to be followers of Serialism, Indeterminacy or Neoclassicism? Tonality, for all intents and purposes, was an anachronism-something so quaint that only the inferior or less serious composers would chose as a musical language.

(Think this attitude is gone? A few years ago, one of my colleagues made an off-hand remark about the 12 Tone System and a listener wrote that anyone with any knowledge knew that the last serious (read important) works were written in this style. So, we must remain in a prison based on a system that began in the 1920’s?)

Or worst choice of all: write the music they heard in their own minds?

We all talk about the arts in terms of freedom, but there’s always a quid pro quo. The questions become: why are we writing? Who are we writing for?

If there’s a shadow hanging over your shoulder of what you “should” be writing or a host of critical voices in your mind, you’re never going to write the music that is your true voice.

Mr. Gordon is writing no less than three operas. 

I doubt he has much time to listen to the voice of doubt or to the ghosts of musical eras past.

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