"COMPOSERS IN RED SNEAKERS PLACE MUSIC AT THE CENTER…"
Boston Globe
"In principle and in fact the Composers in Red Sneakers are a good thing. They have successfully demystified the new-music experience, and now regularly attract the largest new-music audience in town and, what is more, send it home feeling it has had a good time ... "
Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe
"It is tempting to regard the buffoonery of the Composers in Red Sneakers as a camouflage for creative inadequacy. But that would be wholly misleading and grossly unfair. The members of this entertaining consortium are all individuals of talent, originality, and imagination, even if their humor frequently needs curbing to save it from slipping into slapstick... "
Arthur Hepner, The Boston Globe
"There are no concerts quite like those of the Composers in Red Sneakers. The trappings are endearingly silly. Typically, there was an unexpected interlude of Tex-Mex singing and guitar playing by a group called the Trio Los Treboles. One of the conductors was greeted with wolf whistles. The chorus in the final number sported a bizarre array of footwear, flippers included. If anyone is asking just what all this has to do with contemporary music, the answer is: it gets people to come and listen. And more than that, it gets the people to come back ... "
Richard Buell, The Boston Globe
"Sometimes the state of contemporary music begins to seem meager and depressing, like being washed up on a desert island with nothing to subsist on but trail mix and salad dressing, but then (a thought) there are the Composers in Red Sneakers to think about - and be heartened by. Though these seven young men have passed through the academy and are well trained in the composer's craft, they have hardly adopted the mores of the academy. Their concerts are, in fact, astonishingly casual in tone. The Composers in Red Sneakers do not guarantine musical art within a proscenium or nail it to a museum wall. Their program notes are endearingly silly and uninformative. And they have gathered a young, receptive following that certainly isn't the endogamous crowd that usually goes to new-music concerts. LES SNEAKERS ARE, IN SHORT, A PHENOMENON WORTH CELEBRATING ... "
Richard Buell, The Boston Globe
"...THIS IS REAL MUSIC, with rhythm, melody, harmony, and form, which the listener can perceive, but definitely is from the twentieth century."
Thomas Hall, Journal of the American Viola Society
"The Composers in Red Sneakers, who always have something up their sleeves and down their socks, tried nothing less than reverse the course of music history Thursday evening. "
Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe
"Strikingly absent from the Old Cambridge Baptist Church Thursday night were the usual composer-academics and their students, friends, and significant others…. Composers in Red Sneakers have actually succeeded in drawing a new and different audience for contemporary music, for the time being at least. It's a young and uncommitted audience, probably attracted by the CIRS style, which is loose and not particularly high-minded or didactic, as much as by cheap tickets. Indeed, there is a $1 discount if you can demonstrate that you're NOT a student ... "
Richard Buell, The Boston Globe.
"Hundreds of people were turned away from another recent concert, too, an even more astonishing piece of news because it was a new-music concert - very new music, some of it actually composed for this performance."
Lloyd Schwartz, The Boston Phoenix
"Prepare to hear music not absurdly demanding of the listener, with a healthy sense of whimsy; skilful, serious, and very well performed. All these things indeed came true ... "
Derrick Henry, The Boston Globe
