Dear Friends,
Quick note before we start: for those of you in the central Wisconsin area, I’ll be performing at the “Concerts in the Shed” festival in Marshfield, Wisconsin on Tuesday, August 11, at 6 pm Central Time. We’ll be playing Brahms G Minor Piano Quartet and Shostakovich Trio No. 2. Admission is free, but due to limited space, RSVP’ing is encouraged: click here or here for more information.
I just got back from the Chroma International Music Festival in Miskolc, Hungary, where I worked with students from all over the world.
It was a very fun experience, not least because this festival featured both pianists and composers. One of the highlights was hearing and performing new works by faculty and student composers.
It’s fun to play works by living composers: you can play for the composer, talk to them, and ask questions about the score. It’s also gratifying to give other people the chance to hear new works they wouldn't otherwise encounter.
At the Chroma Festival, I performed Suite for Solo Piano by Josh Beacom, one of our student composers. This experience got me thinking about how rarely most piano students engage with music of our time, and what they’re missing out on.
When I talk about this, people often assume I mean composers like Prokofiev, Debussy, Shostakovich, or Copland. I understand why, because their music feels more “modern” due to the tonal language and style of the writing.
But most of that music was written in the first half of the twentieth century, which makes it around a hundred years old already! Contemporary music, or new music, or “music of our time,” is music that’s being written right now, reflecting the ideas and style of composers who are experiencing this world we are all currently living in.
Many classical musicians feel a strong pull toward performing and listening to older music, and I can understand that urge. There is so much great music to explore, and it’s easy to develop a strong emotional connection with the musical language of the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras, not to mention specific composers and pieces we want to hear over and over.
But think about what it would be like if most art museums only displayed art from before around 1920. You could still have an engaging, enriching experience walking through the galleries, but you’d also be missing out on a lot of art created since then, that reflects our more modern times.
All music was once new. Every Beethoven sonata, every Bach partita, every Chopin prelude was, at some point, a piece nobody had ever played or heard in a concert hall before. And the music of our time is just as worthy of the same curiosity and openness that earlier audiences had for music of their time.
So this week, I encourage you to listen to a piece of classical music by a living composer. And here, I’m talking music by people who are composing within the classical tradition today. These composers are continuing the tradition from Bach through Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, and into the present.
If you listen to several pieces, you will probably find that you like some more than others, and that’s okay. You don’t necessarily enjoy every piece of art in an art gallery, and part of the point here is to explore new sounds and voices, and to begin to form an idea of living composers whose music you’re drawn to.
To get you started, here’s a list of suggestions. Click on a title to listen.
Let me know what you think, and also, I'd love to hear your suggestions of works for piano by living composers! If I get enough suggestions from my readers, I'll compile a list and share it in a future email.
👋 Happy practicing,
Kate
PS If you're interested in improving your scales, my new online course The Art of Piano Scales will come out on August 27. Click here to join more than 950 people on the waitlist, and be the first to know when it's available.