SOUNDINGS
IN
FATHOMS
new york new music ensemble
plays the music of
oren boneh, flannery cunningham, tyson gholston davis
edward rosenberg iii, nathan shields, b.k. zervigón
6 composers / 5 performers / no rules
HOW IT BEGAN
it was april 2020 and the members of nynme had scattered to their individual isolation locations
The spring of 2020 was a low point for musicians everywhere. By then, knowing we could not safely congregate, we had all already had our first frustrating experiences trying to make music together remotely. For NYNME, what we missed the most were the
transformative moments of working with a live composer to bring their vision to life,
something very central to our mission - and no zoom upgrade or low-latency technology could take the place of this. We began to envision a project where we could harness the innate creativity of composers to fashion a work specifically for this moment in time and these circumstances - hence the micro-commissions project.
What started as a modest call for scores quickly grew to approximately 100 proposals - something we had not counted on, or allotted enough time for! So, much of the summer of 2020 was happily spent learning about new composers and vetting their proposals. Perhaps the most eye-opening aspect of the project was just seeing the scope, variety, and sheer number of applicants - including teenagers, septuagenarians, and everyone in between. As always, it reminds us that there is a big musical world out there, and that our city and our community are just one small, provincial part of it. The fact that most of the composers we eventually chose were people we had not met or worked with before felt and continues to feel validating - perhaps a small silver lining in our pandemic raincloud.
- DANIEL DRUCKMAN
THE CHALLENGE
The inaugural Micro Commissions Call for Proposals is a national search for American composers with adventurous appetites for creating new audio/video work in a non-traditional performance setting as NYNME’s socially distant members remotely record select works. All commissioned works will be remotely recorded and released by NYNME.
in the two weeks the call was open,
we received 96 applications
QUICK STATS
96 applicants
age distribution: 17-78
average age: 41
applicants born in the 90's (27%) were the largest cohort
22 states represented
4 international locations
applicants living in New York State were the largest cohort (19.2%) followed by California (10%)
we were so blown away by the proposals we received that we expanded our initial search from 4 composers to 6
THE COMPOSERS
