Do What You Love? New Music, New Work—After 2020
Part of NUNC! 5 (the Northwestern University New-Music Conference)
Saturday, April 22, 2023 at 2:00pm CDT
Regenstein Master Class Room
Keynote Presentation by Miki Kaneda, Assistant Professor of Music, Musicology & Ethnomusicology at Boston University
Abstract: Working in new music as a gig worker entails many skills, many tasks, and many jobs, which hardly guarantee a release from precarity. Meanwhile the neoliberal myth of a “labor of love” propagates the conviction that “love” and hard work combined can overcome any challenge, including those posed by racialized and gendered difference. My talk analyzes musical labor and notions of love in relation to gig work. The account of contemporary musical labor I offer concurs with the critiques of the complicity of new music discourse with neoliberal agendas in recent scholarship. However, based on a study grounded in ethnography and interviews, I suggest that the unsettled norms of musical gig work in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic brought to the fore ways in which musical work is more than the perfect manifestation of exploitable labors of “love.” Musical work takes place alongside and despite neoliberalism. I argue, even as contemporary practices of musical work demonstrate how new music is entrepreneurial work embedded in a capitalist system, the everyday experiences of working musicians confound a totalizing account of the neoliberal agenda.
Free EventAbout NUNC! 5
April 21-23, 2023
The Institute for New Music’s fifth conference and festival, NUNC! 5, will feature guest composers Julia Wolfe and Alex Temple as well as guest keynote speaker Miki Kaneda (Boston University). Guest ensembles include the New York-based Yarn/Wire, who will present a concert, workshop and master class.
The Northwestern University Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Alan Pierson, will open the conference with a performance of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia alongside Julia Wolfe’s Fountain of Youth and Anna Meredith’s Nautilus. The Bienen Contemporary/Early Vocal Ensemble, led by Donald Nally, will give the Midwest premiere of Julia Wolfe’s Letter from Abigail together with David Lang’s the national anthems. The conference will close with a Contemporary Music Ensemble concert conducted by Ben Bolter and Alan Pierson, featuring Julia Wolfe’s Impatience, Alex Temple’s The Man Who Hated Everything and Tania León’s Rítmicas.
Regenstein Master Class Room
Address
Bienen School of Music
60 Arts Circle Drive
Evanston, IL 60208
United States
About
The Regenstein Master Class Room is located in the Regenstein Hall of Music, directly adjacent to the Ryan Center for the Musical Arts. Seating 200, the room hosts hundreds of performances and other events each year.