How much do composers bend to the tastes of those who fund them? What about the tastes of their audience? And how much difference does it make what performers are available to them?
These are the questions I tried to answer in the paper I wrote as a culmination of my independent study/ACM internship (to read it, follow this link:
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1estf-Qa89M__f6_S-HdExMa-PetuYCw... ). I think we tend to think of composers as looking into the night sky and writing in a sort of trance-like state music that comes to them from some sort heavenly visions. I'm not a composer, but I'm pretty sure that's not quite how it works!
As part of the internship, I researched grants and wrote one, am drafting a fundraising plan, worked the box office, and discussed how to develop ACM's fan base. The experience taught me that ACM's a great organization, not least because through it "contemporary music" and "fan base" can coexist peacefully in the same sentence.
If you'd like to take a look at the paper, below is a link to it. Skip to the end if you want to read about ACM, or if you're more interested in modern and contemporary composers than in historical ones.