Composer Sean Neukom: Classical Music Still Has Places to Go

For young classical musician and composer Sean Neukom, classical composers of the past are most important for their legacy as visionaries.
Composer Sean Neukom: Classical Music Still Has Places to Go
Sean Neukom Courtesy of Sean Neukom
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For young classical musician and composer Sean Neukom, the classical composers of the past are most important for their legacy as visionaries. The greatest classical composers pushed human consciousness forward, and he believes that musicians today should want to emulate them.

What the great composers of the past were able to achieve is astounding. “Without the technologies we now have, without the audio recordings, without marketing (as a thing unto itself), they pushed human consciousness,” he said in the phone interview on Aug. 20, 2015.

People were forced to find a language in order to talk about the work of these composers. Music theory, “always a retrospective study,” he says, developed afterward in response to what the musicians had already achieved.

Sean Neukom (Courtesy of Sean Neukom)
Sean Neukom Courtesy of Sean Neukom
Sharon Kilarski
Sharon Kilarski
Author
Sharon writes theater reviews, opinion pieces on our culture, and the classics series. Classics: Looking Forward Looking Backward: Practitioners involved with the classical arts respond to why they think the texts, forms, and methods of the classics are worth keeping and why they continue to look to the past for that which inspires and speaks to us. To see the full series, see ept.ms/LookingAtClassics.
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