Given that all the obvious "isms" have been exhausted, composers now face an existential crisis over where music might head next; and, anyway, our culture has decided to privilege ephemeral celebrity over anyone who cares enough about the future to utter anything difficult or challenging.
THE Swiss composer Frank Martin, who died at 84 in 1974, lived through the decades when pointless stylistic battles were waged within the field of contemporary music, and composers faced pressure to take sides.
Back in Paris with two years of his grant remaining, Bizet was temporarily secure financially, and could ignore for the moment the difficulties that other young composers faced in the city.
"Turandot" shows the composer facing his greatest challenge — dramatizing a heroine who, in contrast to the magnificently earthy characters of "La Bohème" and "Tosca," is fundamentally inhuman.
We need to survive this.'" Sekhabi and composer Mpho Matome faced a challenge to capture the right tone, and some critics in Grahamstown suggested they had failed to escape the "celebratory" essence of musicals.
So games composers face problems - and opportunities - that no other musician ever has to think about.
But for "Oscar Peterson," an hourlong performance receiving its American television premiere Friday night at 10 on Bravo, the pianist, composer and ensemble leader faced a challenge that he initially found daunting: To create a jazz transcription of the passion of Jesus.
The West End theater district, said the composer and impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber, is facing "a bloodbath of a summer" because theatergoers can neither find nor afford hotel rooms in a city filled with sports fans.
Political opera — by which one almost invariably means politics of the near- to far-left varieties, right-wing classical composers being an elusive species — faces an obvious paradox.
While James Macmillan wouldn't claim that composers today face the same dangers, he does believe that secular fundamentalism is growing as a counterpart to religious fundamentalism, preventing discussion of spiritual matters.
