I Don’t Know What ‘New Music’ Is

I started off working in Western classical music and having always been interested in contemporary forms of expression and the contextualisation of artistic practice in the socio-political ‘now’, this has naturally led to a career focus on new music.

But I don’t know what ‘new music’ is anymore.

Is the music I am working with ‘new’? Or ‘contemporary’? Is it ‘experimental’? Or maybe ‘contemporary classical’? There are also the Germany-specific ‘zeitgenössische Musik’ and ‘Neue Musik’ – is it those?

As argued by George Lewis, “genre markers (…) are also about the reproduction of likeness.” This means that precedent is used to determine whether a certain work, composer, or ensemble fits into any of the above genres. Precedent usually means a list of somehow and somewhat determined identifiers – but decided by whom? There is actually an easy answer to this question: those with money. The concert halls, the festivals, the funding bodies. They get to decide based on their own genre categories used to determine how they promote or support artists.

How many times have you sat in a ‘new music’ concert and thought, ‘I’ve heard this before’? I have lost count. This is what reproduction of likeness leads to. Stagnation.

Genres are and have been used to decide whether someone is granted access to a certain space or given financial support. By focusing on genres and categories, even if the intention is to include as has been increasingly the case, the process of defining inevitably also leads to exclusions. Within ‘new music’, belonging to a category that’s related to ‘classical’ helps with access to certain funding pots and stages. In general, belonging to any category at all and being able to tick a box, helps.

There have been attempts to move beyond the shackles of genre, and radio has played an important role in this. On BBC Radio 3, Late Junction, Unclassified, and Night Tracks, all encourage the listener to experience the music without defining it, still within the orbit of ‘classical’, but moving beyond and around it. Radio has been historically a space for experimentation, and continues to be a platform for this also beyond the institution of the BBC: whether through shows on NTS, on community radio stations such as the Berlin-based Cashmere Radio, or through small-scale radio projects such as SAVVYZAAR, initiated by the decolonial art gallery, SAVVY, in Berlin.

However, I prefer going to live concerts over listening to the radio and sadly, I have only rarely found myself to be excited by what is on offer in the big institutions in recent years. In many concert halls, the What’s On categories remain ‘classical’ and ‘contemporary’. ‘Classical’ and ‘everything else’. Elaine Mitchener has expressed a criticism of this perfectly in her essay ‘How to Remove Earwax’:

“This stubborn earwax is built up after years of being taught and believing that Western European classical music is the epitome and apotheosis of musical excellence, by which all other music is to be judged. Anything outside of the Western classical music canon is an add-on. (…)

At this point the earwax problem is so severe that those suffering from it seem incapable of listening to anything else and, worse still, are afraid to have it removed in case these new sounds completely overwhelm their senses and strip them of their assumed musical superiority, along with those power structures that have enabled their entitlement.”

 All of the above is true. What is also true is that there have been attempts at addressing this. That doesn’t mean we can stop there and congratulate ourselves on a job well done. Recently, I heard several people who work within ‘new music’ say that they’re “bored of talking about diversity”; that to them, the work has been done. That “decolonisation is just a misused buzzword”. Often it has been, I agree; it has been instrumentalised in a way that is tokenistic, and therefore ultimately harmful, as it carries a pretence of change, while the underlying structures remain the same. But that doesn’t mean that decolonisation is only a misused buzzword – it should be the aim for all of us who want to see a more equitable and truly diverse ‘new music’ scene.

To go beyond decolonisation as a buzzword, I will go back to this question of genre. This confusion about genres, definitions, labels, words, could be a starting point towards dismantling precedent. For me, looking at precedent is a way of examining existing structures and markers of categorisation. Of inclusion and exclusion. Why does Artist A get to play on this stage, but not Artist B?

Decolonisation is about dismantling colonial (i.e. violent, exclusionary, racist) structures. Nobody has all the answers, and change takes time. There are small practical steps everyone can take to begin this process internally. Ask yourself: which words do you use to describe music that is new? What do you think of when you think of ‘new music’? What artists fit into this category for you? Which don’t?

There has been plenty of newly released, composed, performed music that I’ve been excited about. In the Spotify playlist I’ve put together to accompany this article, I’ve included those who I know will sound like ‘new music’ (in the classical orbit sense) to listeners from within the industry – and those that definitely won’t. But isn’t the sound world of Soosan Lolavar’s Mah Didam, performed by The Hermes Experiment close to Arooj Aftab’s Inayaat? Is Björk’s Utopia really so far away from Du Yun’s collaboration with the JACK Quartet? What about experiments in other ‘genres’ – such as Merdian Brothers experimental cumbia, or Ifi Ude’s Polish-Nigerian folk, which flows on so well from Nwando Ebizie’s I Seduce? 

Is ‘new music’ simply music that tries to do something ‘new’?

Hanna Grześkiewicz is a curator, writer, and researcher. She regularly speaks and writes on topics relating to feminism, social movements, and the political use of the arts.

Hanna’s background is in (new) music, and in this sphere she focuses on alternative forms of collaboration and collectivity, as well as questions relating to the decolonisation of Western classical music. She works mostly with ensembles, writes about new music, and is part of the collective running the Berliner Gesellschaft für Neue Musik [Berlin Society for New Music].