An Austin band worth hearing is Balmorhea (website, myspace), who are making some really nice instrumental music and reminding us, again, that people who actually care about music, rather than just about looking good, do not care about genre demarcations. Look: a record of instrumental music with guitars and banjos and violins and cellos; and another record, "by" the same band, of remixes of their tracks (or pieces, or whatever you want to call them) done by various people. It seems to me that these musicians could definitely refer to these cuts as "pieces" and to themselves as "composers," and the only difference would be that they wouldn't have 1500 fans on Facebook or be opening for Tortoise or touring Europe or making any sort of money at all on their music, because no one wants to hear pieces by composers (except other composers... and not even all of them, actually). In a world where new "concert" music and indie "pop" music are running awfully close together (look at Nico Muhly, a Juilliard Corigliano student whose record got reviewed by Pitchfork), calling oneself a composer is becoming nothing more than a bonehead marketing decision--unless one is trying to market oneself as a candidate for an academic job, in which case I suppose it's still safest to distance oneself from any music that's ever made any money.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: classical/pop is no longer a stylistic division, it is a socioeconomic one, and people put themselves on one side of it or the other for reasons of self-interest--because it's on that side where they think they've got a shot at making good.
And yes, I admit it, I was drawn to Balmorhea partially because they named themselves after one of my favorite spots in Texas, an atmospheric little state park out in the desert with a spring-fed pool:
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