So what is iiCoCo? It is a place for international composers to show up as composers every Friday at 11 AM Eastern Time. It isn’t easy to be a composer in the world. It always has been as much easier for a performer to get a gig and earn a living in music than as a composer. On the other hand, almost all of the musicians in the world are performing pieces written by somebody else, not by them. If you are a composer and want to hear your works, which I assume is true, then you must perform them. And where do you get to do that? And where do you get to get feedback about your new work? And where do you get to converse with other composers for artistic development coupled with sensitive, emotional support? There is one place, which is why I founded it, along with a few other composers I met at Juilliard and their friends.
We have been gathering for several years, always on Friday mornings, coming up on 100 times. Sometimes, new people the founders bring in show up, and the core group is stable. Now it is time to take this to the next level and begin to put on concerts in person, but we don’t call them expressions salon concerts, which means they are more like parties than just performances. They are more akin to the salons of Paris 100 years ago, where artists, musicians, and writers got together to share what they were working on and thinking about. Now that the arts have become increasingly combined into media-rich multimedia programs with life components and recorded components, the requirements for putting a party like this together have increased.
A gathering after class a few years ago with our composition professor Ray Lustig.