Bucking the market dominance of major music labels and the elitism of contemporary academic music circles with equal force, Voisey, a 37-year-old composer and impresario of new music, has created a project designed to promote the greatest number of composers to the largest audience possible.

It didn’t take long for Voisey to pack his bags, halt his schooling, and fly to the rolling hills of Israel

The 60×60 project features 60 compositions by 60 different composers, each 60 seconds or less in duration, pieced together to form a one-hour continuous concert. Think 60 is not enough? Well, just to accommodate the overwhelming flow of musical submissions that daily crushes his tiny post office box in Radio City Station, Voisey has created “regional” concerts representing composers from a particular area. In addition to the International 60×60, this year he organized individual concerts for New York, Midwest, Pacific Rim and the UK, totaling 300 compositions from as many composers.

“My goal is to have a large amount of music reach a broad spectrum of people” said Voisey. With 35 concerts already scheduled for the forthcoming season in such diverse locales as London, Paris, Chicago, New York, Sydney, Los Angeles, Munich, Minneapolis, Bucharest and Istanbul, he seems to be accomplishing this goal.

Born 1969, Voisey came to composition from a non-traditional background. “I am not meant to be a composer,” he remarked about his upbringing. The son of two accountants, he received none of the formal training that classical and contemporary composers typically engage in from an early age. His mother, Helen Ging, and father, the late Richard Voisey, encouraged him to seek a more practical profession. His younger sister, Mary Voisey, works for the City of South Hampton.
As a student at Stony Brook University in Long Island, Voisey majored in computer science and showed talent as a programmer. But he soon began pursuing other interests, including studio art, engineering, mathematics and, of course, music. Although promising to provide a stable future, computer science did not satisfy him.

“I feel the work of contemporary composers, even the most successful and well-known, is greatly underexposed. This needs to change for society to grow and evolve,”

A surprising thing happened when Voisey’s singing inspired him to take a music composition class for non-majors. He met Oded Zehavi, an Israeli composer who invited him to study at the College of Tel Hai, located in the Upper Galilee. It didn’t take long for Voisey to pack his bags, halt his schooling, and fly to the rolling hills of Israel. Working on a kibbutz to cover expenses and writing music nearly full time, Voisey “finally found the passion I’d been missing all of my life.”

Paradise doesn’t last forever, but passion may. After two years of writing music
in Israel, Voisey returned to Stony Brook, finished his Bachelor’s, and moved to Manhattan. Relying on his computer programming skills to find jobs in the proliferating dot com industry of the late 1990s, he worked as many as 16 hours a day, putting in a full day at home and at work. Tackling such a difficult career path led him to rethink his approach: “in my struggling moments I realized that I needed to create a company.”

The company was Vox Novus, and its mission was to promote contemporary composers and musicians. “I feel the work of contemporary composers, even the most successful and well-known, is greatly underexposed. This needs to change for society to grow and evolve,” he explained. Vox Novus began in 2000 as a group of 5 friends, then expanded quickly to include more than 100 composers, who, by Voisey’s current standards, may be considered “the inner circle.” Counting the forthcoming concerts, the 60×60 project has included approximately 660 composers from more than 20 countries.

With the 60×60 project, Voisey discovered that he could accomplish his goals with greater facility, and on a larger scale. He has put his mathematical and engineering sensibilities to work and created a system to produce and disseminate contemporary music for a large audience. “What it’s doing is taking our society and the models it’s been given, and putting those into practice for new music,” he said.

One of the major concerns expressed by critics of the project is that the brevity imposed on composers may compromise quality. Voisey seems unthreatened by such challenges, arguing that his simple and elegant format allows the composer full artistic expression while providing the audience with a specific expectation. Doug Cohen, a 60×60 composer and professor of music at Brooklyn College, remarked, “Not since John Cage’s ‘Indeterminacy’ has the flow of time from one moment to the next been so significant.”