Living Music Summit | The Boston New Music Initiative

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The Boston New Music Initiative was thrilled to present its inaugural Living Music Summit. The summit is a series of concerts, workshops, industry roundtables, and networking events designed to promote all aspects of BNMI’s central mission of supporting and advancing the careers of its members in the field of new music. The 2023 Living Music Summit will consist of several online series, including the Composer Interview Series, the Salon Series and the Workshop Series, but will not include the larger festival at the end of the year. We hope to return with a festival in 2024.

DONATE here to help us make this season's event a reality!

The Living Music Summit is made possible in part by grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Composer Interview Series

Join us for the next installment Composer Interview Series on October 21 at 3pm ET. Our guest will be Leah Reid. Get to know the composer and her music! Register now!

Dr. Leah Reid is a composer, sound artist, researcher, and educator, whose works range from opera, chamber, and vocal music, to acousmatic, electroacoustic works, and interactive sound installations. Her primary research interests involve the perception, modeling, and compositional applications of timbre.

Winner of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, Reid has also won the American Prize in Composition (Vocal Chamber Music Division), first prizes in the 8th KLANG! International Electroacoustic Composition Competition, the Tesselat Electronic Music Competition, and the Franz Schubert Conservatory International Composer Competition, Sound of the Year’s Composed with Sound Award, the Film Score Award in Frame Dance Productions’ Music Composition Competition, theInternational Alliance for Women in Music’s Pauline Oliveros Award, and second prizes in the Iannis Xenakis International Electronic Music Competition and the 13th International Destellos Competition. She has received fellowships from the Guerilla Opera Company, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), the Ucross Foundation, and the Hambidge Center.

She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), where she teaches courses in music composition and technology.

Past Composer Interviews

The complete Season 13 Composer Interview Series with Gabriel Bolaños, Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, Ingrid Stölzel and Melika M. Fitzhugh are available to all Shout It Out members as part of our professional development archive.

Salon Series

The Salon Series is back! We just finished the first Salon of the season on September 29! The next edition will be announced soon!

Workshop Series

Social Media and Marketing for Musicians

October 16, 2022 at 3:30pm ET

Join Trisha Craig and BNMI on zoom for an hour of life changing marketing and social media advice! Say goodbye to the self-fulfilling "starving artist" myth! If you love BNMI's social media feeds, you will love this workshop!

Trisha Craig is the Business Consultant for Creatives as Entrepeneurs.

FREE for everyone and includes a personal followup with Trisha Craig! Register now!

Past Workshop Series

Workshop: Writing for Recorder

As part of the Living Music Summit, BNMI will be hosting a virtual workshop on writing for recorder with Frances Blaker and Melika M. Fitzhugh. Join us on May 14 at 3pm ET to learn about writing for recorder, and then, send us your works for a reading session with Emily O'Brien on June 4 at 4pm ET. Click here to register for the intro on May 14. A link for submitting works for reading will be available after the intro session.

Photo by Heather Carter

Frances Blaker

Frances Blaker is a recorder player with performance and pedagogy degrees from the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music in Copenhagen, during which time she began to compose though mostly as a way of increasing her understanding music. Ms. Blaker began composing seriously in the early 2000’s. She has since been awarded month-long residencies focusing on music composition at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in Otis, Oregon in April 2003, 2006, and 2011. She has received commissions to compose works for Hidden Valley Music Seminars in Carmel Valley, CA, and the Oregon Coast Recorder Society, as well as from individuals. Her most recent commission was given in April of 2020 specifically because the commissioning group realized that, in the early days of the Pandemic, musicians were suffering the loss of all their performing and teaching dates. The commission was to write a duet for recorder and double bass. This led to Seven Short Pieces which will be published in 2022 by Lost in Time Press. Other compositions have been published by Lost in Time Press and PRB Productions.

Melika M. Fitzhugh

A native of Stafford, Virginia, Melika M. Fitzhugh (A.B. Harvard-Radcliffe, M.M. Longy School of Music of Bard College) studied conducting and composition with Thomas G. Everett, Beverly Taylor, James Yannat os, Roger Marsh, Jeff Stadelman, and, most recently, John Howell Morrison. Mel's compositions have been performed internationally by the PHACE Ensemble, Quarteto Larianna, the Brouwer Trio, Sarah Jeffery, Radcliffe Choral Society, Berit Strong, John Tyson, Miyuki Tsurutani, and Aldo Abreu. The artist, also afilm and stage composer, is currently a member of world/early music ensembles Urban Myth, Balkan Fields, and the Quilisma Consort.

Workshop: Writing for Marimba

As part of the Living Music Summit, BNMI will be hosting a virtual workshop on writing for marimba with Matthew Sharrock of Transient Canvas and Hinge Ensemble. Join us on June 5 at 11am ET to learn about writing for marimba. Matt will read and give feedback on submitted works. Click here to submit a work for the reading session.

Workshop: Writing for Violin and Viola

As part of the Living Music Summit, BNMI hosted a Workshop on Writing for Violin and Viola on June 19. Full members can access a recording of the workshop from our resources page.

Workshop: Biography Writing

Thanks to everyone who participated! Professional ghost writer John Hong gave us all some wonderful tips. The recording is available to full members.

Panel: Social Media and Web Presence for Musicians

Thanks to everyone who participated in our panel! We had two special guests, Rachel Abrams, a mezzo-soprano and social media coordinator for Hartford Opera Theater, and Taylor Rossi, a flutist and marketing and web-design specialist. Once available, a recording of the panel is available to full members.

Concerts June 3-5, 2022
June 3 - Literary Elements
June 4 & 5 - Musica Loquelae