Aki Festival of New Music: Why You Should Listen
Our culture brings with it a deluge of sound: innumerable musical styles, C-SPAN talking heads, television dialogue, movie soundtracks, Muzak, and a spreading undergrowth of environmental noise-like the low hum of computers and fluorescent lights. Sorting through this confusion of sound, by making choices as to what we listen to, helps to solidify our personal taste.
No longer does culture or class define musical taste. A bourgeois family living in mid-19th-century Vienna would have entertained in their sumptuous salons to the sounds of lieder by Schubert and his circle, whereas today's equivalent Cleveland family might choose from an eclectic stack of CDs ranging from New Orleans zydeco to Carmina Burana to hip-hop to Britney Spears. This shift is most notable among teens and the Napster crowd, a new breed of music aficionados who browse boundless streams of online music and develop whole new vocabularies to describe what's coming down the musical pipeline. For discriminating listeners who wish to hear live performances of the best in contemporary music, October's Aki Festival of New Music presents a golden opportunity.
Coming to an Aki performance is an adventure. The Aki audience tends to be made up of adventurous people: they try new restaurants, travel to places they've never been, go to museums, and indulge in the occasional Kieslowski film or bite of kim chi. Those of us who identify these qualities in ourselves will find a thrilling world of musical adventure at the 2003 Aki Festival of New Music. We'll be sure to set up extra chairs.
Paul Cox, Assistant Curator of Musical Arts