Are Electroacoustic Composers Our Friends?
Electroacoustic composers have a long way to go before they can become friends with audiences and performers (and this is coming from a composer with some success in this medium). Last week, I guest-lectured to college sophomore music majors and found out that only two of them knew any electroacoustic music (one was a composer, the other recently heard my Eastern Pinnacle for Clarinet and CD). This is even more surprising considering they had just had a unit in electroacoustic music in their Music History/Literature course.
Clearly, there is a disconnect between audiences when college music students have troubles naming one piece. The Kronos quartet is a needle in the haystack of mainstream ensembles that has bridged the gap with performances of recent works such as Terry Riley’s The Cusp of Magic and Clint Mansell’s music for Requiem for a Dream.
