Peers are responsible for evaluating contemporary music, or new music as it is often called in the American context. This dissertation looks at this evaluation at three distinct moments: during evaluation committees appointed to select composers for commissions or grants, in the commissioner-composer relationship, and in position-takings by composers in social media. This research is based primarily on fieldwork with two funding and evaluation bodies for contemporary music: New Music USA in the United States and public subsidies distributed directly to composers by the Ministry for Culture in France (now called « Aides à l’écriture d’œuvres musicales nouvelles originales », formerly known as « Commandes d’État). This Franco-American comparison of evaluative practices reveals contrasting understandings of peer review, which has a number of effects: different voting systems, divergent ways of categorizing the different sub-genres of contemporary music, and distinct views of the role of the composer in society. Judgment in the contemporary arts is often qualified as uncertain (Menger 2009), but the present research shows that this uncertainty is the result of indifference toward certain works or people – often found in the middle of ranked lists – rather than fundamental doubts regarding their quality. In the case of a commission, the bi-directional evaluation conducted by the composer and the commissioner has a profound impact on the work produced, which goes against the vision of the self-determined composer – a vision which is revealed to be more present in the French context than the American. These different moments of valuation (Antal et al. 2015), including informal ones (in social media, for example), are opportunities for the composer to position him- or herself, which helps him/her formulate or impose an interpretative framework favorable to his/her creative work. The view of the contemporary music milieu that results from these different observations is one of a polarized field in France and a world of more porous aesthetics in the United States.

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