You know, it can be quite tricky to find contemporary classical music on eMusic. Not their fault, just one result of the inconsistent tagging that classical labels still haven’t got their heads round. Anyway, with that in mind, I’m putting together a list of contemporary composition highlights available on the site. Give it a look. If you’re prepared to dig around a bit on eMusic and use some lateral thinking, there’s some wonderful stuff to be found.
Thank you Tim! Emusic’s search engine has driven me crazy for years. You have performed an invaluable service (now, if they can only start tagging compositions, and resolve the 10 different spellings of every composer with diacritics in his/her name ….)
Glad to help! I’ve found that often the best thing to do is start from the labels (Etcetera, Col Legno, New Albion, etc) and work outwards. Also: ignore their classical-specific search filters. Just put the composer name you want into a general search: sometime it will appear as a composer, an artist, an album title, or a track name (!).
And never mind diacritical issues, just spelling the names correctly would be a start – Finissy?, Birtwhistle? I don’t think eMusic can be entirely to blame though – it’s usually the record companies that supply the data, so they should be the ones working out the consistencies.
I’ll keep adding to the list, so keep checking in.