Embracing new music: all music was once new music. But how many of us regularly fold "new notes" into our performing and our teaching?

In the 21st century, new music comes to us daily, whole cloth and in snippets, from many directions. As listeners, we encounter it setting the scene or defining a character or emotion in films and on TV and as an essential partner to rap and dance. Music in these contexts speaks to us using many vocabularies of sounds from the major, minor and Lydian of TV commercials to John Corigliano's 12-tone score for Altered States, and beyond to complexes of structured noise. In such encounters we rarely consider the music itself problematic. So if the sounds in themselves are not at issue, something else must be at work to suggest that new sounds equate to "forbidding" ones: the ...