By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Bowling Green State University will host a new music lovefest a year from now.
On Thursday, the New Music Gathering announced it would hold its 2017 event on the BGSU campus, May 11-13.
The gathering is expected to attract as many as 500 new music lovers, said Kurt Doles, the director of the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music, which is housed in the College of Musical Arts.
Among the performances, talks, panel discussions, will be speed dating for performers and composers.
The event is described on the website as “an annual three-day conference dedicated to the performance, production, promotion, support and creation of new concert music.”
The gathering “aims to be both a conference in the traditional sense but also quite literally a collective place for things to grow, improve, solidify and above all get personal.”
Doles attended the first New Music Gathering two years ago hosted by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. “I decided within the first 12 hours I was there that we had to do it . … I doggedly pursued it.”
First he needed to secure cooperation from officials at the College of Musical Arts, and then show the organizers that Bowling Green, set among the farm fields of Northwest Ohio, could handle being host. “It took a little bit of convincing on my part,” Doles said. The first two gatherings were held in San Francisco and Baltimore, and organizers were “leaning toward” putting them in another urban center, Doles said.
But he was able to assure them that BGSU had the facilities, and he had the experience from the university’s own New Music Festival held each October, to handle the event.
“That we were able to secure this says something about Bowling Green as a new music center,” he said.
BGSU will handle all the logistics for the event, while the gathering’s team will handle all the programming.
The featured guest artist will be percussionist, conductor and author Steven Schick. He is music director of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus and artistic director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Over the past 40 years, he commissioned or premiered more than 150 new works.
Other performers have been booked, Doles said, but not yet announced.
He said the gathering is called an “un-conference.”
There won’t be vendors or commercial endeavors.
“This is more of a community driven event. … More social and grassroots,” he said. “It’s all driven by members of the community.”
People can apply to speak or perform. One of the signature features is performer-composer speed dating. Performers or representatives of ensembles sit in a circle. In another circle sit composers. Each composer has five minutes to make a pitch.
“All kinds of collaborations and commissions out of that,” he said.
Doles plans to have events at the ClaZel and at the public library “not just keep it hermitically sealed on campus.”
It’s possible it will even extend to the Toledo Museum of Art if the logistics can be worked out.
