The United States' New Music scene has, to its great credit, constructed itself principally on its own — a slow, brutal, Fabian advance, but an amazing and largely self-determined advance nonetheless.
A general lack of government support has forced unprotected activators in particular — e.g., those operating outside the armor of academia — to grow increasingly resourceful, to scrounge for new solutions, to consider and work outside of the projected and predictable boxes. [N.B — The token NEA funds that are available require so much bureaucratic application red tape that it’s often not worth the time or simply asks more resources than a small organization can reasonably manage.] Whether or not one believes that such government support is more help- or hurtful long-long-term for a scene like ours, the simple reality is that US composers and ensembles right now exist in a much more brutal world generally than, say, their French or German counterparts.
While it’s easy for those of us in the US New Music scene to jealously obsess over always-greener funding grasses, the general circumstance in which we find ourselves may also prove eventually to have been the compost heap out of which the next generation’s solutions were developed. A certain amount of discomfort is necessary for significant growth: not so much that the organism is crushed and defeated, but not so little that it forgets how to evolve beyond the world it knows. The ideal is just enough to force the maximum improvement.
This present US swamp of do-it-yourselfers and defiant music makers, this diasporitic congregation of hard-charging, problem-solving, imaginative, and willfully dedicated American minds all working and being and experimenting in this New Music project — this is the Factory of the Phoenix, this is our great, brilliant, and relentless wealth. This swamp army of passionate and hard-working mavericks owns the classic American recipe for our next evolution, and if we ever are to learn how to thrive in what the world is becoming — and not just panting to hungrily trail along — then this now will have been the laboratory for that victory.
I want to be careful to emphasize here that we are speaking strictly as to the question of how to thrive in a brutal economic and cultural environment while simultaneously maintaining the highest standards of artistic excellence. It is an old and easy trick to work at the lowest common denominator or mass produce under a standard of “high art,” providing the convenient content of popular culture with the warm feelings that come along with things that make us feel smart. However, a solution that compromises a fundamental value is simply not a solution, it is a distraction, and it does no one any good to conflate garbage and greatness. We are interested in looking for new mechanisms to create a better environment for the advancement of truly progressive artistic projects in the United States, and not for those works that simply make use of the label for marketing purposes.
This will continue to be a slow and dirty process, and when a solution emerges it won’t be a single item or cure, but a new network of evolved details — processes, ideas, mechanisms, partnerships, understandings, technologies, and so forth — and it will always require more work, more refinement, more improvement. However, if we ever are able to learn to do this, to thrive without government support, then this research will not only have been for us here, but for every composer in every country whose cultural support may have found itself desiccated in the face of mounting debts, less patient citizens, and generally more market-oriented mindsets. We have to keep pushing, to make sure that we don't find ourselves to be dinosaurs irritable and too slow to act regarding the onset of permanent winter.
