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| Stephen Gorbos | composer | |||||||||||
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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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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: 
