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9 February 2010 In the works: New live recordings of two new pieces: Apparition: A Christmas Prelude was commissioned by the Catholic University of America for their annual Christmas concert for charity. The piece, for orchestra, choir, and soprano soloist, is a depiction of Luke 2.14, that famous moment in the Christmas story when the terrifying heavenly host appears before the shepherds. In composing this piece (which opened the program for the CUA orchestra), I thought of this revelation from the perspective of the shepherds, in what could have been a staggering emotional ambiguity in the moment. The clip below, from the middle of the piece, is a live recording made in the Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception when the piece was premiered back in December.
7 February 2010 Performances upcoming: 19 December 2009 The semester is finally winding down...almost done reading papers and grading exams. Earlier this month I had a new piece premiered by the Catholic University Orchestra and University Chorus as part of the annual CUA Christmas Concert. Apparition: A Christmas Prelude, was premiered on Dec. 4th in the Basilica with David Searle conducting and Crossley Hawn as the soprano soloist. With the nature of the event in mind, I chose to make a setting of Luke 2.14 (the angel of the lord and heavenly host appearing before the shepherds...). The CUA groups did a fantastic job with the music. Special thanks to Leo Nestor for preparing the chorus. EWTN, the global Catholic network, is broadcasting the concert twice: Dec. 20th at 1:30pm, and Dec. 25th at 6pm. Click here to find which channel EWTN is on in your area. While I'm hoping to obtain a copy of the recording to post on my listening pages, for now this is your best bet to hear the piece.
27 October 2009 Last week my new piece Signals was performed by the NOW Ensemble here in DC at the Corcoran Gallery, followed by a performance on Judah Adashi's Evolution Contemporary Music Series at An Die Musik in Baltimore. It was great to hang out with the NOW crew for a few days. If you haven't heard their 2008 album, get it (on the New Amsterdam label), or, better yet, when they roll into a town near you, make a point to see them live. They put on a fantastic show. I've posted an mp3 of NOW's Corcoran performance here. Not mentioned in the sales pitch below was Timothy Andres, who's lovely piece Night Jaunt was a late addition to the program. Thanks to NOW Ensemble for all their hard work on my piece, and to everyone that helped make these two shows possible!
16 October 2009 Fall is upon us in the District. Along with a healthy re-design of this sight, in the last few months I’ve found myself getting back into working with electronics. I’m currently working on a new piece for Noah Getz, a fantastic sax player based here in DC. Echos of Amber, for soprano sax and electronics, will be played by Noah out in Flagstaff, Arizona on November 14th. For the source materials in this piece, I used some field recordings from Rajasthan that I made while on a trip to India last year. Along with sounds of India, there’s a little of Noah himself in the mix as well. Below is a by-product of my project with Noah: I made this track from some layered/processed soprano sax multiphonics.
I'm also very excited about the NOW Ensemble's upcoming shows in DC (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Monday, Oct 19th at 7pm) and Baltimore (An Die Musik, Tuesday, Oct 20th at 8pm): they'll be performing Signals, a work I wrote for them this past summer, along with music by John Altieri, Timothy Andres, Patrick Burke, Mark Dancigers, Judd Greenstein, Missy Mazzoli, Anthony Suter, and Kirsten Volness.
23 June 2009
In the spirit of summertime fun, here's a clip from a remix project I've been working on:
5 May 2009 Timothy Andres will play surely some revelation...?, a set of piano pieces from 2004, on Thursday, May 14th at the Strathmore Mansion. The show's at 7:30, and includes works by Ingram Marshall, Charles Ives, Frederick Rzewski, and of course Timo himself. Click here to listen to the first movement of my piece, played here by Emily Green (the complete piece is available on my here) really looking forward to Timo's performance: in addition to being a fantastic composer, Timo is an incredibly engaging performer (and he also takes really cool pics - look throughout his site - and makes other fun visual art). With the academic year coming to an end, I'm looking forward to the usual summertime composition blitz: I've got a viola/electronics piece I'm hoping to start, some orchestral music, and hopefully some more piano music as well. Signals,my new piece for the NOW Ensemble, is just about wrapped up and anxiously awaiting its premiere next fall, most likely in DC (location TBD). 14 March 2009 Four Sonnets, my new song cycle for high voice, flute, violin, cello, and harp (texts by Shakespeare - Sonnets 50, 64, 66, and 43), was premiered on Tuesday, March 10th at Catholic University in Washington, DC. Waka Osifchin was the soprano; the rest of the ensemble was Sophia Musleh (flute), Solomia Ghorokhivska (vioin), Soo You (cello), and Cara Fleck (harp). A unifying element in these pieces is the sense of being in a space apart from what is physically around you. The texts all dwell on this in some way, and I hoped to create a musical analogue. Then Do Mine Eyes Best See, the fourth movement, is a good example of what I was after in this respect. Here is a link to that mp3; the entire four-movement cycle can be found on my listening page. Special thanks to Mike Mermagen for recording the concert! 16 February 2009 Recent Activities: I recently overhauled my bass clarinet piece, On the Whiteness of the Whale, which was first composed for Amy Advocat back in the summer of 2006. This new version, which you can listen to here, is a clearer rendering of what Amy and I originally found fascinating about her technique on the instrument (...beastly growling sounds, ethereal multiphonic trills). Four Sonnets, a song cycle for high voice, flute, violin, cello, and harp that I wrote this past summer at the Copland House, will receive its premiere performance at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, March 10th in Washington DC at Catholic University. This concert is part of the yearly President's Festival of the Arts at Catholic University. The third song of the the set, For Restful Death I Cry, can be heard here, sung by Steven Ebel in May 2007. For this performance, DC soprano Waka Yoshioka Osifchin will be singing the voice part. I received a Subito Grant from the American Composers Forum Washington, DC chapter for the premiere of my new piece with the NOW Ensemble. No date/venue for the show yet, but it will take place in DC a some point in the late spring or early fall. Check back for updates soon. |
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11 December 2008 An mp3 of Chez Monk, my new piano piece has been posted here. Augustus Arnone premiered the piece a few weeks ago in Red Bank, NJ. He'll be playing it again in Boston this winter, and (hopefully) down here in Washington this spring. Aided by Marshall McLuhan, Augustus is on a vision quest that has so far produced several notable concerts at Merkin Hall in NYC, the most recent of which was the complete works of Milton Babbitt (available as a podcast from his website).
Happy holidays from the blue trees in my neighborhood. 2 October 2008 New pieces on which I am working: NOW Ensemble project; viola and (maybe) electronics for the amazing Wendy Richman; a piano piece for Emily Green (which might be a Ballade, or at least a response to Ballades by Brahms). These are all in the works for performances this spring. This past summer I finished a cycle of Shakespeare sonnets for tenor and chamber ensemble (3 more movements to compliment For Restful Death I Cry), and a new short piano piece that has something to do with Thelonious Monk (which might be premiered in New Jersey this November by Augustus Arnone). Kevin Berg, a fantastic oboe player living in Austin, TX, has started playing my piece Sorrows with the Moon. I have a version of this piece for Clarinet up on my listening page; the oboe version has sat unplayed for a few years, so I'm really looking forward to hearing what Kevin does with it.
The pictures above: a four-leaf clover from Rock Creek Park; bikes and knees about to board a DC metro; the Thomas Jefferson memorial at night. 17 May 2008 I'm just wrapping up some much needed updates to the various sections of this site. Most importantly, I've posted some new tracks: the performances of Bridges and Footprints from my DMA recital last weekend. Footprints is my newest piece, while Bridges dates back to late 2003. Both are for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. Though composed several years apart, I've started thinking of these pieces as a larger two-movement work (that's how they're posted on my listening page). Along with certain musical materials and ideas that are common to both pieces, they were also both written with my sister and her family in mind. 5 May 2008 This Sunday, May 11th at 8pm in Cornell University's Barnes Hall I'll be presenting my DMA recital. This concert brings together several chamber works I completed during my time as a DMA student in Ithaca. Here's the lineup: Emily Green will be playing surely some revelation? for piano; She'll be joined by Tim Feeney and Chris Stark on my trio Alleluia (hey hey hey), for trombone, vibes, and piano; Andrew Liebermann, a wonderful saxophonist from Eastman, will be playing Football Season is Over, my tribute to Hunter S Thompson for alto sax and tape; and Timothy Andres, Nick DiEugenio, Becca Doggett, and Hannah Collins will be coming in from New Haven to play two quartets: Bridges and Footprints, both for clarinet, violin, cello and piano. Footprints is a world premiere, composed this past winter in the confines of my Worcester dissertation camp. Every piece other than Footprints is available on my listening page. The Stark-Green-Feeney trio is a group of good friends based at Cornell. Tim-O, ironically enough, played Bridges a few years ago at the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival when it was hot off the press. I'm excited to be working with Tim-O (and his Yale buddies) again on Bridges and the premiere of my newest piece, Footprints. I'm not sure what the bigger piece of news is: finishing my DMA or landing a job. My dissertation, on Ingram Marshall's Dark Waters, was officially wrapped up at the end of April. Right around the same time I accepted an offer from Catholic University's Benjamin T Rome School of Music. I'll be joining them down in Washington, DC in the fall as Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory. What I'm looking forward to most right now is the upcoming residency at the Copland House. I've had a few projects that have needed to be pushed to the back burner these past few months that I'm very excited to get back into. These include more songs using Shakespeare sonnets, an orchestra piece, and some work with spoken word recordings I made this past year of my 91-year-old uncle. 11 February 2008 - My new piece for the Boston-based Fifth Tier Ensemble is in the works, and I'll be defending my dissertation in April (working title: Technology, Historicity, and Compositional Process in Ingram Marshall's Dark Waters) . Right after my teaching finishes at Holy Cross, I'll be starting a month-long residency at the Copland House. 25 October 2007 Updates are up on all the pages of this site. Check out the listening section for 3 new pieces just added. The fall semester is in full swing: my new teaching position at Holy Cross is going well, and I continue to chip away at my dissertation. The dissertation, which will hopefully be wrapped up in the next few months, is on Ingram Marshall's Dark Waters, for English Horn, tape, and digital delays. I'm writing about applications of historical awareness, and the relationship between technology and compositional process. Along those lines, I offer two pictures for your consideration: the first are the components of Ingram Marshall's Serge Synthesizer, which he used on the road and in the studio from about 1975 - 1986. On the right is Marshall's venerable Casio FZ-10M sampler, one of the elements used to create Dark Waters.
An archive of previous news posts can be found here.
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A quick summertime update: Justin Brierley has a new music show on the radio up in Rhode Island. Like most things radio these days, you can catch it streaming online. His show is called Music for internets, which you can hook up with 
Back in July I landed in Washington, DC for my 
One of the responsibilities I've taken on at CUA is running the electronic studio. I started exploring the facilities last week, quickly remembering how much fun it is to plug microphones into a computer and make some noise (I pretty much put my electronic music activities on hold last year to finish my degree). Expect some mp3 posts in the next few weeks using materials gathered around DC. I'm planning on dusting off my chops with some short pieces made out of DC field recordings. All of this is a warm-up for my upcoming trip to India in December! The real reason for the trip is a wedding, but I'm also planning on gathering lots of interesting sound materials. 
Some shout-outs: 
