In Monday’s (10/17) San Francisco Classical Voice (SFCV), Michael Zwiebach writes, “My SFCV colleague Matt Cmiel is also an enterprising composer who, while still a teenager, founded a new-music ensemble called Formerly Known as Classical. Its latest incarnation is the After Everything Ensemble. In a remarkably short time, in other words, he and his mates have gone from questioning the relevance of the ‘C-word’ for the music they make to adopting a ‘postlabeling’ stance. … To simplify (probably a bit too much), classical music composition was for many centuries based on the mastery of counterpoint. … Counterpoint hasn’t been jettisoned (at least not by everybody), so if you’re classically trained you have to learn it. But you’re also going to consider a mass of significant compositional variants of it, ranging from ‘neoclassical’ to serialist to the style of individuals like György Ligeti. Yet that’s only the tip of the iceberg of a huge variety of experimental styles, non-Western musics, popular musics, and more. … No wonder musicians are sensitive to labeling these days. They obviously want an open-ended term that will allow for the limitless combinations and collaborations that are now the norm. Just don’t call it classical.”
Posted October 19, 2011
