Minor quibble

I heard Northwestern University's Contemporary Music Ensemble last night and, in lieu of actual review or substantive comments, enjoyed myself. Actually I was mostly just shocked (and thankful) to realize that it was my first time hearing an ensemble piece by Morton Feldman played live. As is my wont, I will mention one ostensibly bitchy issue I had with the program layout, which is when you have a composer in their 20s, it's a bit silly to refer to them in the program by their last name, as in Relephant ••••• Jones (b. 1982), as though this Jones character is a well-known personality who is often so abbreviated and his/her first name should be so obvious to any audience member that it isn't worth including. Especially in this case of last night's concert, where one of them actually had the same last name as a much more famous composer, because that's just confusing.

This is a super small problem, but I do think it points to a larger question, which is who and what we expect our composers to do and be these days. The last name-only convention belongs to museum curator-type symphony concerts and piano recitals where the only composers represented are the ones who appeared in cheesy posters on the walls of your grade-school music classroom. Last name-only suggests an absent and canonized entity, not a twentysomething dude who's still hanging around drinking beer and exerting agency and creating new music. This is one of the tiny, apparently insignificant aspects of our classical music presentation strategy that prevent composition from seeming like a normal social activity, that keep people from thinking of composers as regular participants woven into our culture.

(n.b. I claim the title Relephant for any future works. Unless it already won a Morton Gould last year, I'll have to check that.)