A fistful of festivals dedicated to new music have just finished, are happening now or are coming up. Two take place this weekend: the Queens New Music Festival in Long Island City and Look Listen at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery in Chelsea.
The traditional classical-music festival circuit is vast, including famous brand names like Mostly Mozart, Salzburg, Tanglewood and Spoleto. Pop has its extravaganzas, like Coachella, Bonnaroo, South by Southwest and Lollapalooza.
In recent years the syndrome has grown acute in the world of new music, an ill-defined genre with roots in the classical avant-garde and tints of pop, rock and jazz. In this world they are called festivals, but closer examination shows the term to be rubber-band stretchy.
Is geography the operative principle? One festival, the Queens series, focuses on a sole neglected borough, while another, MATA — which took place last month — promotes composers from nine countries. A third, the Tribeca New Music Festival, doesn’t even appear in TriBeCa.
How about time frame? The Tribeca fest spreads six concerts in three locales over two months, while Look Listen, which specializes in mixing visual arts with music, will present three concerts on three consecutive nights, starting Saturday.
Does there need to be a purpose? The sprawling River to River Festival, of which new music is only a part, was founded to help revive downtown after the Sept. 11 attacks but has become an established supplier of summertime culture for the area’s growing number of residents, employees and visitors.
So why call them festivals?
“A festival is a way to raise a flag and say, ‘Come see this,’ and doesn’t depend on any single artist or name recognition or audience,” said Sam Miller, president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which is organizing River to River. A festival also is as much about “the intersection between the artist and the place,” he said.
Amy Frawley, the president of Look Listen, said festivals need to provide a “particular window” into a subject, like her festival’s idea of performing works of music surrounded by works of visual art and making connections between them.
May is especially attractive for festival feasting, organizers said. The regular concert season is waning, and there is more room in publications for reviews. There are also more open nights for booking. Musicians and audience members — especially music school students, who form a large corps of new-music fans — have not left yet for the summer and for summer festivals.
Underlying the growth of new-music festivals is the genre’s increasing popularity. “This is a great time to be a composer in new music,” said Preston Stahly, the artistic and executive director of the Tribeca festival. “It’s totally reconnected with the public.”
The Tribeca event had its roots in performances in 1999 at the Flea Theater in TriBeCa and became a festival in 2001. As the performance series became established, public relations advisers suggested calling it a festival, Mr. Stahly said. This season’s edition began on April 11 and runs through June 4. It includes six concerts: two at Merkin Concert Hall, two at the Cell in Chelsea and two at Roulette in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.
Mr. Stahly said he moved out of TriBeCa because the festival far outgrew the Flea, with its 80-seat capacity. Its next show is next Friday, when the avant-garde composer and violinist Ana Milosavljevic performs at the Cell.
The Queens New Music Festival was born in part from selfish reasons, said Allen Schulz, its organizer. He is a founder and president of Random Access Music, a collective of composers who banded together to pool contacts with musicians and to increase performances of their works.
A festival helps with those goals, Mr. Schulz said. He added that he helped start the festival because of a “chip on his shoulder” that comes from having lived in Queens for more than 20 years yet never hearing his music there.
“We all travel into Manhattan or down to Brooklyn to have our pieces played, and it’s really rare to have concerts in Queens,” he said. “It’s really sad.”
Mr. Schulz and his fellow composers built the festival around a concert of their music performed by Cadillac Moon Ensemble, which was available only in May. (That concert took place on Thursday night.) The rest of the festival consists of eight concerts, programmed by Random Access Music from 45 submissions by different performers. It will run from Friday through Sunday at the Secret Theater in Long Island City.
The budget for the Queens fest is a meager $4,000, Mr. Schulz said, with the performers earning half of the box office. Look Listen and the Tribeca festival have budgets of about $50,000. The budget for River to River, which has establishment backers like American Express, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the Downtown Alliance, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and local businesses like Century 21 and Moody’s, looms over those amounts, at $5 million.
That budget’s size reflects the prominence of some its performers. They include contemporary-music luminaries like the Philip Glass Ensemble, Bang on a Can and Alarm Will Sound, as well as Eddie Palmieri, George Clinton and the Trisha Brown Dance Company. The program includes the first performance of a Nico Muhly piece and an Alarm Will Sound performance of “Song Books” by John Cage.
River to River runs from June 17 to July 15. Since the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, a major player in supporting downtown contemporary art, took it over last year, the time frame for scores of presentations has been condensed from about three months to one, and site-specific performances have been emphasized.
“Artists can’t be stopped,” Mr. Miller said. “They’re making incredible work in New York City.”
