by Mike Telin
If you’ve ever been asked to define new music, you’ve probably found yourself over-thinking the question. As the Minneapolis-based ensemble Zeitgeist explains it on their website, “In the end, new music is simply that: newly created music written by living composers.”
On Sunday, October 13 at 3:00 pm in Drinko Hall at Cleveland State University, the Cleveland Composers Guild will kick off its 60th anniversary season with a program that celebrates the membership’s diversity of musical styles. The free concert will feature works by Sebastian Birch, Margaret Brouwer, Margi Griebling-Haigh, Scott Michal, Ryan Charles Ramer, Robert Rollin, Matthew C. Saunders, and James Wilding.
“I always say that our concerts are for adventurous listeners who like a smorgasbord of the unexpected,” Composers Guild vice-chair Margi Griebling-Haigh said during a telephone interview. [Read more…]
Composer Natsumi Osborn remembers the first time she read 
When a festival runs for long enough, it becomes interesting to look back and remember that it wasn’t always a staple of the local culture. At one time, it was entirely new.
Since 2014, the Grammy Award-winning Cleveland Chamber Symphony has sponsored 
In an age when the word “opera,” to most, means the historical canon — that body of works that recirculate through the world’s houses each year — it bears repeating as often as possible that new efforts in the genre have flourished of late. Thanks to the combined efforts of the Cleveland Opera Theater, the Maltz Performing Arts Center at the Temple-Tifereth Israel, the Cleveland Composers’ Guild, and the Baldwin Wallace and Oberlin Conservatories of Music, Northeast Ohio audiences recently had a chance to hear scenes from three new works-in-progress by area composers and librettists.
Although composer Dawn Sonntag was well-versed in writing art song, vocal chamber music, and works for chorus, there was one thing missing from her catalogue of works for the voice — an opera. “I wanted to compose one but I had not found a libretto that I connected with,” the Associate Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department at Hiram College said during a telephone conversation.
