The first annual New Music Gathering opened at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music with a nod to the challenges that have always faced creators of new music – questions about how to support their work, who wants to listen to it and what to call it – followed by a cheerful call to fearlessly forge ahead. Organizers Lanie Fefferman, Daniel Felsenfeld, Mary Kouyoumdjian and Matt Marks (pictured below) welcomed participants who will include representatives of established and budding organizations, from the breakthrough chamber orchestra Alarm Will Sound to writers, academics and a wide range of ensembles and soloists (many of them SFCM alumni).

As the name suggests, the New Music Gathering relies on planned informality to distinguish it  from a typical conference. Lectures, demonstrations and concerts are part of the mix. But organizer Fefferman said she’ll measure the event’s success “when I look on Facebook in ten years and see the amazing collaborations that have happened from two people who wouldn’t have known each other if not for listening to each other’s music here.”

SFCM President David H. Stull linked the spirit of the New Music Gathering directly to the mission of schools such as the Conservatory. Stull said while conservatories rightly celebrate the great canon of classical music, “we don’t necessarily celebrate the culture of the individuals that created the canon, which was innovation. None of them were thinking about anything other than writing new music.” Stull called on musicians to persevere with their creativity in the face of challenges, telling the audience, “The music school of the future has to be one that’s not just about a great education, but one which overtly creates the conditions for highly creative work. I do think that is the future and I think all of you represent that.”

Keynote speaker Claire Chase, flutist and co-founder of the International Contemporary Ensemble, prefaced her remarks by admitting she “probably wouldn’t be caught dead at a conference unless it was like this, like the anti-conference.” She also suggested SFCM would offer an ideal atmosphere for the exchange of ideas over the next three days, saying “I don’t know of a Conservatory anywhere that has felt more alive and less like a Conservatory and more pulsating with ideas and with the need to make the work we do more shared, more generous, more collaborative and even more awesome.”

Read excerpts of Chase’s keynote address below. The New Music Gathering continues through January 17. For conference details and a complete schedule visit www.newmusicgathering.org.

There’s no such thing as a handbook for this kind of work. Without a handbook, it’s about agency… It’s about not letting existing structures – the market, the academy and any other arbitrary entity here – dictate what are we making, how we’re going to make and who we’re making it for. And agency for us as artists is also importantly about inquiry. It’s about embracing the ineluctable change that comes from asking the burning questions about all of the shit that we don’t know: what is the music of our time, how do we make it, what do we call it, why do we make it, where do we make it, for whom do we make it, how do we sustain it?

Every time a dollar is raised by a music ensemble toward a production in New York, that’s a dollar towards the larger ecosystem of music. It matters. And every time a grant is won by a new music ensemble, no matter how small it is, that changes the field for all of us. In the same way that we’re not competing for audiences [but instead] we’re creating audiences, we’re not competing for grant money, we’re creating grant money. We’re building a world that we all want to live and work in.  

We’ve variously referred to what we do as new music, contemporary music, post-classical music, experimental music. The one I like to use at bars when someone sees me with my instrument case and is like, “What kind of music do you play?” I say, “Weird music.” The truth is that there are problems with all of these words… So, what do we call the work that we’re making? What do we call our roles in it and what do we call the story we’re writing as we build the world that we want to live and work in? I say we just break it down. Let’s call what we do: music. Let’s call our roles in it: human and let’s call our modality, our way of doing it: love.

Flutist and International Contemporary Ensemble co-founder Claire Chase, New Music Gathering Keynote Speaker