Musica Nova.

November 2008 saw the 17th year of the international electro-acoustic music (EA) competition MUSICA NOVA. It attracted 76 entries from 23 countries in its two categories: pure EA (Category A) and the combination of a live element with EA (Category B), Multimedia compositions are excluded from the competition because they are too varied in approach, technique and scope to be effectively compared. The competition concentrates on the artistically purely musical genre in which the artistic qualities of the music and technical know-how appear in concentrated form. No preference is given to any particular style.

The concert of winning pieces was held on the 12th of December in the presence of the winners--Elizabeth Anderson (USA, 1st Prize in Category A), Yota Kobayashi (Japan, 1st Prize in Category B) and Richard Muller (CR, 1st Prize in the Czech Round of the competition). The programme also included pieces by others who were placed or given special awards: Roderik de Man (Holland, Hear, Hear!), Kyong Mee Choi (Korea, as co-author with Timothy E. Johnson, USA - Tensile Strength) in Category A, Michal Rataj (CR, Silence Talking) in Category B. The other finalists included Martin Bedard (Canada), Clara Maida (France), Yutaka Makino (Japan), Dohi Moon (Korea), Fred Szymanski (USA) in Category A; Takuto Fukuda (Japan), Kyong Mee Choi (Korea), Marie Samuelsson (Sweden), Lissa Streich (Germany) in Category B. In the Czech Round the others were Jiri Ospalik, who won the special prize for the youngest composer, Petr Parizek and Michal Rataj.

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The concert and competition was as usual organised by the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music with support from the Ministry of Culture, Prague City Authority and the Czech Music Fund and the OSA (copyright protection organization) Foundations. In Czech Music Quarterly we regularly report on the competition, and let us just add that the competition is not anonymous and the commentaries of the composers concerned are a valuable part of the event. This year we followed our usual custom of asking the winners about the advantages, pitfalls and prospects of the genre.

The Category A winner Elizabeth Anderson is an American living in Belgium, where she moved to continue her EA music studies. She then took her doctorate with the well-known Denise Smalley at the City University in London (her dissertation is published on www.ems-network.org). She has won a series of prizes in the USA, France, Belgium, Italy and Sweden. She won MUSICA NOVA with an octophonic piece entitled Protopia. Her main strategy in composition is the creation of spatial contrasts. In her lengthy answer to our question she emphasised the need for composers not to underestimate the time and the honesty required for a work to mature, even though the flexibility and user-friendliness of the technique may seem to make things easier for them: "In the past, much time was needed to accomplish compositional tasks with analogue techniques, but this time allowed compositional ideas to be born and mature. Since sound material is now easily recorded, created, modified and superposed, the composer must resist the temptation to hurry through a piece, and thereby lose commitment to the creative process and all that it entails. (...) Acousmatic composition involves the creation of new sounds, and to construct a viable form for a piece takes its time and these compositional stages can hardly be compressed."

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The Category B winner Yota Kobayashi from Japan (born in 1980), was educated in Canada and at Simon Fraser University with the famous teacher in the field Barry Truax, and won with his composition for flute and EA Tensho. His views were similar to those of Elizabeth Anderson: "... new technologies should not be confused with the fundamental requirement of knowledge and skills. For instance, with recent score program and a sampler, we can get an immediate audible feed back ... In fact, I have seen many music students who tend to put notes intuitively rather than theoretically not being able to play keyboard. In this sense, such technology might be double-edged sword and a risk to those students who do not like to learn voice-leading, harmony, instrumentation etc. If they are used by sensible and knowledgeable composers and sound designers, new technologies would not risk our creativity but might allow us to go beyond the creative horizon."

Naturally, the best solution is intuition based on knowledge. We can agree that as more technical possibilities become available, a greater gap can open up between the broadly acceptable average work, which more people are achieving today because of the greater sophistication of the tools and musical "ready made" resources that the tools offer, and the top work of genius, which will also be a rare solitary "revelation".

As Elizabeth Anderson also said in her answer, "In the 21th centry, the only limits in acousmatic composition are those placed by composers on themselves."