Coming Soon: SFNM²

We have some exciting news to share about our future. Beginning with this season, Santa Fe New Music is dedicating ourselves to a festival format debuting next June 21-24, 2012: the Southwest Festival of New Music, or SFNM². This format of concentrated activity will enable us to go deeper in our work, by convening before you in Santa Fe leading composers and performers of the music of our time, in commissions and programs that will resonate beyond Santa Fe. And by linking currents in new music to issues of the day with theme-based explorations, we exponentially increase the range and scope of our presentations.

Our inaugural festival will have the theme of "Music as Environmental Consciousness," in homage to the 2012 centenary of John Cage. Cage opened our ears and minds to the possibility of hearing all the world as music, and our festival will focus on the younger generation of composers and practitioners who have carried the spirit of his work forward into today. Our curatorial approach to our subject will not be to present works which imprint an extra-musical "nature" theme on work which is already stylistically coded, but rather to feature works which derive from - and assert - the notion that music is an element of the ecosystem.

Those of you who have followed SFNM's work know how close this subject is to our core values, and to how we endeavor to relate the relevance of our work to important issues of the day. We have an exciting festival developing: headlined by a commissioned new work by Christian Wolff, close colleague of Cage and the last surviving member of the "New York School" of composers which consisted of Cage, Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown.

We'll also be presenting premieres of new work by young composers Nathan Davis (New York), Lisa Coons (Hartford), and Chris Marianetti (Brooklyn via Albuquerque). Other composers, from Australia, France, Germany, and Japan, as well as Santa Fe's distinguished and pioneering David Dunn, will be featured with some of their most recent music.

In the weeks and months to come, we'll be writing you here with features on these composers, and augmenting our website with music, video, and writings on our theme. Special warm-up events, including film screenings and roundtable previews, will be announced soon.

Save the dates! SFNM² will take place June 21-24, 2012 at Santa Fe's Center for Contemporary Arts. SFNM² will be a great beginning to SFNM's second decade of music-making - we hope that you're as excited as we are to be part of our next chapter!

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