There are scores and scores of fantastic new “classical” music being written these days in the choral, instrumental, organ/piano, and orchestral genres.  I will do a series of short, related blog posts on these different genres of contemporary classical music.

The first area I’ll highlight is choral music:

Almost all of us know some of the popular choral composers writing today- Morten Lauridsen, Eric Whitacre, among others.  And there are those that are content with performing a short range of these contemporary composers to balance out their repertoire of Thomas Tallis and Palestrina motets.  The problem I have with this is I get bored with hearing the same composers over and over at concerts.  It’s like taking a course on English literature and spending the entire semester on one Canterbury tale.  Yeah, it’s great stuff, but there is so much more out there.  Several of the popular contemporary choral composers write in common tonal language and I find myself wishing for more diversity.

A wonderful young composer of choral pieces (and organ, which I’ll get to in my next post) is Carson Cooman.  He is in his mid thirties, but already has a tremendously varied output in many genres, including choral.  He is a contemporary classical music aficionado himself, so he has a passion in his composing, and it comes across well.  I find it hard to pinpoint his musical influences, which for me, means that he has absorbed much and made his music something new altogether- a unique tonal language and musical voice.

Below is a recording of a somewhat simple piece by Cooman: Bless the Lord, O My Soul.  This piece was written in 2010 and uses this common sacred text to great effect.