_____________________________________________________ 6.10.2013 | Ascetic Life
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I am currently 'composer in residence' on a small island about one hundred miles south of Stockholm. It's really quiet, and the only non-monkish thing I do each day is eat ice cream. Here's a photo of the Tonsättarnas Hus (composer's hall) taken during the bright hour of 11pm. This building used to be a customs house and now facilitates, um, creativity...
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_____________________________________________________ 5.25.2013 | Brainstorming, String Quartet, off to Sweden
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I am currently in one of my favorite mental spaces as a composer, which is the interim between projects. That's not to say I do not enjoy the actual act of composing. I do. A lot. But once the process of generating material and formal schema begins, the fear and loathing of a deadline makes it quite difficult to experiment with non-musical ideas. So, right now I am in a sandbox with Monteverdi, Lucretius, and Euclid, trying to intuit my way to the germinal impulses for three new projects: a concert I'll curate in December, a work for violin and ensemble, and a work for children's choir and strings. I'll let you know how those go...
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On to more concrete things: I am about to head down to Charleston for Spoleto Festival USA, where the St. Lawrence String Quartet will premiere a new piece. My first attempt at writing a string quartet was surprisingly fun and rewarding. I say 'surprisingly' for several reasons, but none more pertinent than the time an intimidating thick-rimmed-glasses-wearing graduate student told me, with equal parts scorn and didacticism, 'the string quartet is something you don't want to poop on.' I was 18 and intimidated. I guess I carried that sentiment with me for a while, paying more attention to the weight of Schoenberg and the Grosse Fugue and forgetting about the weightlessness of Haydn and Cage.
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After four days there, I'll spend a month writing in Visby, which is a small town on the west coast of Gotland Island in Sweden. I hear that there is lots of sunlight up there in June... enough, perhaps, to eliminate any excuse I may have for not updating my website in a more diligent manner.
_____________________________________________________ 3.19.2013 | SFS Tour Cancelled
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Sad news: The San Francisco Symphony has cancelled its tour of the East Coast, in which I was really looking forward to participate. Many concert halls will be empty this week (Carnegie, NJPAC, KenCenter), not to mention Davies, which may remain empty for many weeks ahead unless the musicians and management can come to an agreement.
_____________________________________________________ 2.18.2013 | Contemporaneous Performs
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Last week I went to hear Contemporaneous perform a bunch of new works in the fingerpainting-clad assembly room of PS 147 in the Lower East Side. They presented three new works by young composers and a relatively new work by David Lang. Crazy hats off to these young players (I guess I can't call them kids). They did a terrific job, particularly with my friend Andrew's piece Try, which I heard in December with the NY Philharmonic.
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_____________________________________________________ 1.26.2013 | Dead of Winter Update
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First off, I've updated my website! Yes, I now maintain my information and updates with Indexhibit 2.0, the incredibly useful platform developed by one of the web's most notorious curmudgeons, Jeffrey Vaska. Feel free to indulge in my sexy new collapsing menus.
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I thought I might as well inform you about the spring, which is looking to be exciting. First, the San Francisco Symphony has programmed my piece Drift and Providence again this coming March in San Francisco. This is (still) exciting. And (still) terrifying, as I (once again) have to share the program with a heavy dose of Germanic gravitas. Before, it was Mahler. Now, it's Beethoven and Brahms. For these performances as well, I get to lead the sound design. The Symphony has decided to call my 'instrument' electronica, which I think is a bit off the mark. So, for those who are curious about what I am actually doing in the back of the house, just come up and ask me. For more information about these performances (and the subsequent ones on the east coast) check out my events page.
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Other than that, I have been kicking my own ass trying to get these pieces I wrote called Tension Studies ready for several performances in April. This has been equal parts really frustrating and really fun. Revising is one of those things that can completely imperil you. “Why did I decide to do this?” “Is it possible to fix this pacing here?” The answers to these questions are usually "because I am an idiot" and "no." But there is also, for me at least, a sense of freedom in revising, not having to submit to some arbitrary rule or quasi-logic. So, despite my agonizing, I learned a lot and have better pieces to share.
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The two young men who are responsible for creating these pieces are going to be releasing them next month, and (how exciting!) the members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic will be playing both studies as part of their Green Umbrella Series.
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Last, but not least, I started a piece for SF-based guitar ensemble Mobius Trio. Matt, Mason, and Rob asked me for a piece more than a year ago, and I have finally bushwhacked through enough revisions, applications, and laundry to start making this 'thing' for them.
_____________________________________________________ 12.18.2012 | Visby
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I've been invited to spend a month in residence this summer on Gotland Island, Sweden. I'll be writing there during the brightest month of the year (two weeks before and after the summer solstice). Visby is not particularly northern, in fact, it's one of the southernmost parts of Scandinavia. Still... plenty of light! I have never been to northern Europe, so I am very excited about this opportunity. For what it's worth, my great-grandparents were Swedish. Perhaps I'll learn something about myself.
_____________________________________________________ 12.15.2012 | Timber
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_____________________________________________________ 11.30.2012 | New Sounds
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I have uploaded a short 'mixtape.' In it you can find samples from the wide-ranging projects I've been involved with over the last two years.
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_____________________________________________________ 11.26.2012 | Scavenging
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_____________________________________________________ 7.24.2012 | Summer Update
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An update to this website seems necessary because I have many things to share with you.
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I composed Drift and Providence between the spring and winter of 2012. I carried it everywhere, and it experienced its creation in numerous inconvenient locations: Brooklyn coffee shops, Taiwanese hotels, even the space behind a friend's Clavinova in a desolate part of the early winter Sierra Nevada. I found this process exciting and unpredictable, and because of this lack of anchorage I felt it necessary to create a narrative about 'stability of place.'
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The piece has several performances coming up on both coasts. Check the dates here.
_ Piano Trio was an adventure to put together. It was supposed to have its premiere at the Barge in September last year, but due to fire code violations, our favorite floating concert hall was shut down hours before the premiere. Lisa, Ashley, and Karen finally gave the performance about 9 months later and killed it. I think the long-time-coming anticipation made the experience that much more exhilarating. The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players will give another performance in October alongside the works of John Cage (3 Constructions), Missy Mazolli, and Lei Liang,
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Andy and Travis of the Living Earth Show have been working hard getting their first album prepared for the public. Our recordings of Tension Studies are still in progress.
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_____________________________________________________ 3.5.2012 | Early March Update:
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I am feeling a bit sad that I was not able to hear The Living Earth Show perform a new work by close friend and curry guru Adrian Knight at the 2012 Hot Air Music Festival yesterday afternoon. If you didn't hear the news, they caused a 4.1 magnitude earthquake during their soundcheck.
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Please keep your ears peeled! Andy and Travis (The Living Earth Show) will be releasing music from their first season soon. The project will include works by an awesome group of composers. I just finished mixing a couple tracks and look forward to sharing.
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In other news, The San Francisco Symphony just announced that they will be performing a new work of mine on both coasts this coming season. The piece is called 'Drift and Providence,' and it was a huge undertaking for me (I finished it in December). I started work on it in obnoxiously loud Brooklyn coffee shops during the spring of 2011 and put on the finishing touches on while chopping firewood somewhere off The Golden Chain Highway during seven days of INTENSE, almost unnerving silence.
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The project really is what my 2011 was about, and I feel so unbelievably fortunate to be able to share it with my closest friends and family in SF and NY - and performances by the orchestra I grew up with!
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_____________________________________________________ 11.22.2011 | Beyond the 100th Meridian
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I want to be a west coast artist. This, unfortunately, is a task more difficult than it sounds (and not for the obvious reason that I spend most of the year in Brooklyn). What I mean is that so much of what westerners are is defined by their non-nativeness, by their displacement after some sort of great migratory journey away from establishment. I am thinking of artists and businessmen alike - pioneers and religious zealots. I am thinking of Wallace Stegner and Agnes Martin; Ingram Marshall and John Wesley Powell; Clarence King, Arnold Schwarzenegger (hah) and Lansford Hastings. However, being from the west (and by that I mean being born and raised there) is completely different. And particularly so in the 21st century. There is no territory unexplored, and a once extant provincialism has slipped through the cracks of everyday life. The great aridity has been forcefully saturated by foreign waters, and the land will soon be privatized by Atlanta-based companies (i.e. Turner presents the Yolla Bolly wilderness).
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Is, then, living in New York the most western thing I can do?
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