The New Music Scene in NYC

Combining classical influences with experimental music and even pop and rock, these music groups are probably more indie/hip/cool than can be found in most hipster clubs.

Club Acts: Musical Events: The New Yorker: "Forty years ago, New York had just two full-time new-music ensembles: the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble and the Group for Contemporary Music. Now there are more than forty such outfits, from Alarm Will Sound to Wet Ink. Although these groups sometimes play in the uptown concert halls, they more often appear downtown and in Brooklyn....
"An exceptionally vital group of young composers is driving the proliferation of new music. As they pontificate on blogs and Web sites such as Sequenza21 and NewMusicBox, distribute music via MySpace pages and Internet radio, and post flyers for their shows, they act for all the world like unsigned rockers trying to make it in the city.... Classifying their work becomes tricky; many composers of Tignor’s generation are erasing the line between classical and pop, dispensing with performers in favor of laptops, incorporating improvisation and world-music practices, or singing their own art songs in semi-pop style. Complicating the picture further is a new breed of pop artist who composes on the side....
"Sometimes the blurring of boundaries leads to overamplified mush. Just as often, though, it generates a new kind of interstitial music—one that makes a virtue of falling between the cracks....
"Since George Gershwin’s time, people have been talking about a total synthesis of pop and classical traditions. Such a fusion is probably as undesirable as it is unattainable: genre distinctions are part of what makes music comprehensible in the first place. Nonetheless, all music exists on a continuum, and it’s thrilling when a programmer decides to follow a common thread from one genre to another....
"Everyone has something to gain from this exercise. Classical types can expose their wares to a new crowd: the youthful-intellectual demographic that classical presenters often talk about but seldom attract. At the same time, the so-called “pop” artists—none of them remotely of the Top Forty variety—can enjoy an atmosphere free of background chatter and clinking beer bottles. Listeners benefit the most; they experience familiar repertory from new angles or discover music that they otherwise might have missed."