World Premiere: Vespers for Mother Earth
Ross Edwards tells Maddy Briggs about his new hour-long work, inspired by Monteverdi, which grapples with our looming ecological crisis.
How do we ensure that adventurous new music gets more than one performance?
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A good discussion of an important issue.
I have wondered if working to encourage “second outings” might be the best thing to do.
Being realistic, most new works won’t enter the standard repertoire and that’s always been so. The current canon or standard repertoire is the result of filtering over many years. “Survivor bias” influences our tastes.
But to give new works a chance to survive, a second performance, not too much after the first would be good. I’d even dreamed of a series just comprising second outings.
Another thought is to get access to ABC’s archive (I hope it still survives) of recordings of these works made for broadcast and at least make them available, in a separate section, for streaming. There are probably rights to be negotiated for that.
I’d be fascinated to spend a day mining those archives.
Another variation of ken’s idea that is not unknown in musical history is to design concerts in which a new work is presented twice in the same program.