We need label choice: Mixed Music vs. Alt-Classical

On Wednesday I responded (twice) to a posting on Greg Sandow's blog entitled Labels. The posting was (I thought) a discussion on what to call the sort of new music found in contemporary classical music circles that draws as much inspiration from Radiohead as Stravinsky. Greg Sandow and others call this kind of music 'alt-classical' while some call it post-classical. In my response to the post, I offered an alternative term, mixed music, to describe this cross-genre music not just in classical music but in other genres as well. Unfortunately (and surprisingly), you will not find my comment on Sandow's blog. Not sure why my response and suggestion wasn't published (is it not as valid and descriptive as alt-classical?) but you can judge for yourself the merits of the term mixed music versus Sandow's alt-classical. Here's what I wrote:

Greg, this whole thought about labels was running through my head during a vocal concert of various 'alt-classical' composers last week at Galapagos. I've been thinking about this for awhile now (well before last week) and it actually inspired the topic for my next Composer Salon as well as a possible alternative to the phrase alt-classical (which while fine, as Chris [Becker] points out above, it seems to be talking about a specific number of young, educated, well-connected NYC composers and so a bit limited and which Molly [Sheridan] points out seems to be a tired hipster marketing attempt to describe the aforementioned type of composer (and their audience) in analogue to the alternative rock world). My term mixed music is borrowed from the racial usage of being of mixed heritage and you can read some of my reasoning to use it to describe today's music at my blog. But in general I think mixed music can be used in a broader sense to describe much of today's cross-genre musical ruminations in classical, jazz, and even pop/rock and beyond. Yet I fully recognize that any label will not be sufficient in capturing accurately all of the 'scenes' or ideas therein and doesn't really say what the music actually sounds like, but I think it works as a description of the general trend today.

Also you can check out the link to the next Composer Salon where I discuss mixed music in more detail. 

POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 6:00 AM