New Music America
| New Music America | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Experimental music, contemporary classical music |
| Location(s) |
United States Montreal |
| Years active | 1979 to 1990 |
New Music America was a nomadic American festival (held in Montreal during its last year) showcasing at its origins New York City's Downtown Music, but growing into one of the largest new music festivals ever held in North America, all in an attempt to try to bring out of the popular shadows the breadth and history of 20th Century composition and creation, as well as current trends. From 1979 to 1990, each New Music America (officially bilingualized into Montréal Musiques Actuelles in 1990) had a wealth of local, regional, national and world premieres, adding to its scope some music from around the world by the time of the Miami festival.
The original conference, named New Music New York, with concordant (and demonstrative) concerts was held at The Kitchen in New York City in 1979. One of the themes there was to break down barriers created by the segregation of genres, and breaking music journalist/critic-driven pigeonholing.
The 12 years of the festival's existence was marked by over 750 performances, exhibits, workshops, installations, and artistic inventions, each festival supplanting the previous in size, expanding its diversity and many bringing "new" music to everywhere conceivable in the United States.
Impressed by the breadth (and probably fun) of the NMNY, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis wanted to replicate the experience and held a similar festival a year later, this time named New Music America. Most likely it was at this time that a loose coalition of national administrators and musicians became the New Music Alliance with the task of recreating New Music America in a different city every year, allowing for composers and performers to be seen in their own region while giving a greater exposure to music creators ignored both nationally and historically, such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, Lou Harrison,Pauline Oliveros,Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Rhys Chatham, and Earle Brown, but not Milton Babbitt, the composer whose 1958 essay "Who Cares if you Listen?" created a cold war between the public's desire for new sounds and the modernist composer's desire to sound new.
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