United States: May 2006 Report
A week before his 90th birthday,
American composer Milton Babbitt
received the AMC's Founders'
Award at the AMC Annual
Membership Meeting and Awards
Ceremony. The award was presented
to him by one-time Babbitt student,
composer Stephen Sondheim.
Photo by Jeffrey Herman.
The American Music Center's annual membership meeting and awards ceremony took place on 1 May 2006. This year's honorees were: jazz pianist, composer, and radio personality Billy Taylor; Seattle-based electric guitarist and composer Bill Frisell; the San Francisco Bay-area based choral group Chanticleer; New Yorker music critic Alex Ross; and nonagenarian composer and theorist Milton Babbitt. Mr. Babbitt was presented the AMC's Founders Award, our highest honor, by musical theatre composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who studied composition with Babbitt as a graduate student at Princeton University in the 1950s. Following the annual meeting, there was a concert to benefit the American Music Center featuring performances by jazz pianist Matthew Shipp, extended vocalist/sound artist Pamela Z, and the Meridian Arts Ensemble, who performed Babbitt's 1992 brass quintet, Counterparts.
In April and early May, the American Music Center held professional development workshops in New York City and Minneapolis. The workshops, designed specifically to help self-publishing composers, cover the following topics: "Every Composer's Business — Essentials for Your Career," which offers essential information on copyright, licensing, and negotiating commission contracts; "A Better Score — How to Produce Exceptional Scores and Parts," a crash course in producing professional-quality, performer-friendly scores and parts; and "Increasing Your Visibility — How to Promote and Market Your Music," which covers networking and promotional materials and strategies. The New York workshops were held the weekend prior to the AMC's annual membership meeting and awards ceremony. The Minnesota workshops were held in conjunction with the Minnesota Orchestra Reading Sessions and Composer Institute, a unique program featuring readings of orchestral works by eight emerging composers from across the nation produced by the Minnesota Orchestra and the American Composers Forum in cooperation with the American Music Center. (To watch an excerpt from a workshop the AMC presented at Tanglewood in August 2000, visit the following URL: www.amc.net/resources/pdp/workshop.mov.)
Two popular AMC publications — the Contemporary Ensembles Directory and Opportunties in New Music — are now online directories. Subscribers can search the ensembles directory by name, city, state, ensemble type, or all of these. Each listing contains contact information, email and website links, and general information about the ensemble, including whether they prefer to receive scores and/or recordings. The opportunity directory, which will be updated continually throughout the year, contains information on ongoing composition competitions (annual, biennial, etc.), residencies, summer programs, calls for scores, artists' colonies and retreats, various funding sources, and more. Both are available as one-year subscriptions. AMC members receive a discount. To learn more about AMC publications, please visit the following URL: www.amc.net/resources/publications/index.html.
May 2006 marks the seventh anniversary of the launch of NewMusicBox and the first anniversary of the redesigned site. The May 2006 "Cover" features a talk with composer Ned Rorem which includes brief video excerpts from the premiere of his new opera, Our Town. Upcoming "Cover" stories will feature Nic Collins, Zhou Long and Chen Yi, Elliott Sharp, and Mario Davidovsky. In June, we will feature a group discussion about the pressing issues which hinder promulgation of new orchestral repertoire; we convened this first-ever talk between an orchestra executive (American Symphony Orchestra League CEO Henry Fogel), a music director (Seattle Symphony music director Gerard Schwarz), representatives from the Musician's Union (AFM's former ICSOM Chair Robert Levine and AFM's Local 802 President David Lennon), a composer (Christopher Theofanidis), and a publisher (Jennifer Bilfield, President of Boosey & Hawkes, Inc., in New York). Highlights of articles posted on the site in recent months include an attempt to define chamber music, suggestions for putting people in seats, a humorous examination of composition titles, and an elaborate exegesis on an unusual percussion instrument called the simantron. Our coverage of Yehudi Wyner's piano concerto receiving the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Music was the first coverage of this news on the web or anywhere else and was widely picked up on other sites. We later published a personal essay by Wyner about winning the award. Finally, there is now new editorial content in NewMusicBox every day. So be sure to make a visit to NewMusicBox a part of your daily web surfing!
Lyn Liston, Ian Moss, and Frank J. Oteri