The Composer as Generalist? Specialization, Collaboration, and the Funding of New Music

Abstract

In 1958, composer Milton Babbitt advocated in his now-infamous essay “Who Cares if You Listen?” that composers, as specialists in “complex, difficult, and problematical” music, could remain insulated from both aesthetic and economic pressures by retreating to the university. In the decades since, Babbitt’s preferences for siloed specialization have become deeply retrenched within new music’s institutional structures; but this dissertation documents four cases of opposition to Babbitt’s isolationist paradigm, asking how institutional and artistic practices have accommodated or resisted specialization in contemporary music. In two historical chapters, I use archival records to outline institutions’ efforts to re-integrate composers into broader communities of performers and audiences. Examining the Minnesota Composers Forum’s community-focused commissions and the New York Foundation for the Arts’s no-strings-attached grants to composers, I show how granting organizations leveraged new funding structures to recreate the social relationships that organized the work of creating new music. I illustrate through two contemporary chapters how new-music practitioners, still untangling a complicated web of historical influences, have turned to collaborative strategies for composition to contest Babbitt’s historical precedent. In a reception study of musician Caroline Shaw and an ethnography of young composers and performers at the 2022 Nief Norf Summer Festival, I show how contemporary musicians have challenged ideologies of specialization by making a conscious effort to learn skills typically ascribed to other musical roles. Ultimately, in outlining the relationship between specialization and the musical and institutional practices it enables, I argue that new music’s institutionalized division of labor powerfully constrains how musicians understand the connection between their musical skills and musical roles—and yet, in their creative practices, musicians find new ways to resist this paradigm.