Summary
It's impossible to define new music to everyone's satisfaction. Is it music written after a certain date, or only by living composers? Must it do something out of the ordinary with tonality or form? Rather than try to provide a definitive answer, Hear and Now: Voices of the Earth, a July 23 collaboration between the Santa Fe Desert Chorale and Santa Fe New Music in the Santuario de Guadalupe, offered pieces that tended to the atmospheric or programmatic and were written in the last 58 years by composers ranging from John Cage (1912-1992) to Eric Whitacre (born 1970).
Whitacre's 1996 Cloudburst was the most effective piece and got the best performance; set to a poem by Octavio Paz, it's a clever and exceptionally compelling musical depiction of rain. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was also about the only piece on the program not to sound safely conservatory-bound.See the full content of this document
Extract
Pasa Reviews: Music That Needs No Definition
The Chorale last performed Cloudburst in 2001 in St. Francis Cathedral, where the vibrant acoustics suited the piece wonderfully. The drier Santuario to...
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