Can New Music Be Sexy?

I wrote this from a multidisciplinary arts residency, which I have the good fortune to be attending. There are nine composers here hailing from different parts of the world, which means I’ve gotten to witness firsthand the process people go through when asked about sexiness in new music.The reaction has been quite consistent. Each time I introduce the topic, there is a long moment of silence, followed by an alarmingly polite “Huh. That’s interesting.” The first few times I experienced those polite moments, I wondered if I’d made a bad decision in agreeing to do this article. Would nobody have anything to say about it? I imagined finding myself in the ridiculous position of bugging (and begging) people to fill in my admittedly unscientific sexiness survey.But in every case, the polite silence was broken by an impressive deluge of thoughts, questions, opinions, concerns, jokes, and grievances, and this was also the case with the online survey. For the sake of space, I could not include every participant’s remarks, and many that I did include had to be trimmed. However, I tried to gather and present a representative set of quotations. Attributions were made where respondents volunteered their names.The pieces of new music below were all specifically cited for their eroticism by participants.