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5.3.2012 BAC  The Baryshnikov Arts Center - May 3, 2012 • • • 3.5.2012 Early March Update: 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. 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. 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. 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! • • • 11.22.2011 Beyond the 100th Meridian  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). Is, then, living in New York the most western thing I can do? Image: Tulare, 2011 - Emily Adams • • • 10.26.2011 An Elegy Unto Itself I have been working really hard on a new work, and I have sounds to prove it.
Everything was made in Max/MSP 5.1.8, which means the work is retro and sentimental. • • • 9.29.2011
Disappointing news: tonight's concert has been cancelled due to a NYC fire code violation. This is tough news to digest because this unique institution will be shut down for the next several weeks -- that, and this phenomenally energetic concert (see below) will have to be postponed until 2012. Stay tuned, folks. • • • 9.2.2011 Bargemusic Just a quick blurb about a concert coming up on the 29th of September. Brooklyn's Bargemusic is hosting a set of Trios to be performed by (in various combinations) Lisa Moore, Karen Bentley-Pollick, Ashley Bathgate, Nathan Koci, and Courtney Orlando. What a smashing(ly good-looking) group of people. • • • 8.13.2011 Finishing up out here Well, I've spent the last two months navigating my conscience through thick fog and dodging dreadlocked post-hippies. I've been working all day every day on two big projects and spending my free time reading Josiah Royce, Wallace Stegner, and Clarence King. I took a couple weeks off to teach in Berkeley and bushwhacked a couple of miles northwest of Truckee. Yes, that's right: it has been a bona fide west coast summer.
That said, I am ready to go back to New York. I am so frickin' excited about the projects I'll be part of in the upcoming year. Stay tuned - I have lots of really exciting news! Until then... • • • 7.24.2011 Kickstarter is a viable commissioning tool I am really happy to say that the kickstarter campaign I've been a part of (see below) has successfully raised the funds needed for the production of three new works. This is exciting not only because I will be able to feed myself during the process of writing a new work for Lisa Moore, Ashely Bathgate, and Karen Bentley-Pollick, but also because it confirms that a new and perhaps more democratic way of fundraising exists now. Of course, there are several risks involved in launching a kickstarter campaign, but one could argue that the public involvement and transparency of funding brings new music one step closer to being something exoteric. My friend Maura Lafferty has a lot more to say about this: A huge thank you to everyone involved! • • • 6.25.2011 Be my patron. Please... Lisa Moore and Ashley Bathgate have fully embraced a truly 21st century model of fundraising and have launched a kickstarter campaign to commission three new works by young composers. I am excited to be part of the project. The funding that is coming my way will go towards the creation of a work for their group 'TwoSense' + the great violinist Karen Bentley Pollick, with whom I have worked many times in the past. If you have a moment, please take a look at the video - Lisa and Ashley have done a great job articulating why a project like this is important for performers and composers alike. Also, can someone please contact the FCC!? • • • 6.8.2011 West coastin' Just a quick blurb about two concerts coming up. The first is this Friday at the Schoolhouse in SF. More LES and an aerial silk artist. Hmm... kind of curious about this one, myself. Here's the link for that: SF The other concert is down in La Jolla. Colin McCalister and Morris Palter are interpreting TS1. Link: SD • • • 5.11.2011 Brooklyn Hipster feed:
• • • 3.27.2011 Spring concerts! It's turning out to be a pretty busy and exciting spring season. Check out the events page for concerts on both sides of the country... Also, if you have a moment, check out this article on one of my favorite composers - Ingram Marshall. • • • 3.21.2011 Thanks, Anne! • • • 3.20.2011 SFCMC on Friday night!  I just wanted to make a quick blurb about a concert coming up this Friday night in San Francisco. Andrew Meyerson and Travis Andrews, who together make 'The Living Earth Show,' will be putting on their debut concert at 8pm on the 25th (Friday) at the San Francisco Community Music Center. I have been working with them for a couple of months now, and they have put a tremendous amount of energy into commissioning, preparing, and performing five brand new pieces. If you have time this Friday, please go out and support these guys. • • • 2.23.2011 littlefield in Brooklyn this weekend For those of you who are in and around New York this weekend, I would highly recommend checking out what looks like a great show at littlefield NYC on Sunday night. The concert features music by many talented young composers and performers: Andy Akiho, Chris Cerrone, Ted Hearne, Adrian Knight, and the loadbang ensemble. • • • 2.14.2011 soundON I am happy to announce that I'll be a featured composer at the soundON new music festival in San Diego on the 16th of June. Colin McCallister and Morris Palter will play Tension Studies on the opening night. This project looks very cool, and the festival will feature a very diverse group of composers during the couple of days. Very honored to be part of this project. Check it out. The piece is on the "Chill Out" concert... I guess they only listened to the first 8 minutes of the work before programming it... • • • 2.9.2011 The Living Earth Show It was 80 degrees in San Francisco last Sunday, and most were either sunbathing or inside watching the super bowl. But Matt Cmiel and other students of the San Francisco Conservatory were able to get a great enthusiastic crowd for their 2nd annual 'Hot Air Music Festival.' They were broadcasting a pirated stream of the game in German (ha! so apropos...) downstairs. It was in many ways the true test of new music. Football or George Crumb? Props to Andy Meyerson and Travis Andrews. They gave cosmic performances of two works last weekend, one by Alden Jenks and my Tension Study # 1. Look out for them in March when they program these works along with some music by Jude Traxler. • • • 1.24.2011 Hoyt-Schermerhorn  My friend Chris Cerrone has a new piece that I really like. It's a work for piano and electronics that describes the feelings of isolation and loneliness one may find iving in a city like New York (anyone who has lived there knows what I am talking about). Writing solo piano works is the most difficult thing to do as a composer with the exception of, perhaps, giving up coffee. Chris takes an interesting route and writes a work that is not virtuosic at all (in parts it sounds almost like a distillation of Ravel's La Valeé des Cloches). I do feel that this is the type of electroacoustic work that is very concerned with its recorded afterlife (meaning the acoustic state that Chris intends seems to include what we normally get from recording and mixing, i.e. reverberation, compression, and a very clear sound of the instrument creaking and moaning as the player sinks in). Ask me 2 years ago, and I would have probably dismissed this solution, but I am gradually beginning to think it's legit. After all, I am guessing that, while waiting for his train at Hoyt-Schermerhorn, Chris was probably listening to something on his headphones. Something the G train is actually good for: giving composers time to think. • • • 1.21.2011 So I like spectral jazz. What's it to you?  Here is a picture of composer/ saxophonist Steve Lehman posing with what looks like some bizarre mechanical apparatus protruding form his mouth. While it is indeed a mechanical apparatus, most would consider it not such a strange thing, but Lehman is able to treat it musically just as he exhibits it here visually: as something that is really not that human. I love his music. I think he is a visionary and is an exception to the rule that omnivorous post-modern American music is trite and bland. I find it particularly compelling that he is able to somehow reconcile the long lost friendships of, for example, GZA/Genius (one of the legendary members of the Wu Tang Clan) and French composer Tristan Murail (and other seemingly unrelated musicians). I think it is because he pays little attention to style and looks closer at purely acoustical connections. This may seem like a stretch, but what he is showing is that Murail's spectralism and GZA's turntableism are actually looking at the same thing, perhaps from different perspectives. GZA's microtonality is a result of 'rhythmic compensation,' meaning that in order to compile a beat that uses one or more samples generally requires changing the speed of the material. So, if, for example, GZA is using two samples, and one is at 82bpm and the other is at 89, and they harmonically the same, the result of compensating for the 7bpm difference is something that is a bit funky and out of tune. Of course, the spectralists approach their microtonality from a much more scientific point of view, but that's not really Steve's point in this work. Like I said, it doesn't really seem to be about intent or craft or style or anything really but sound itself, at least for this particular track. Bold move, Steve. He states this very clearly in his 'Living in the World Today':
Now listen to the GZA:
I love it. Tyshawn Sorey's drumming also helps a lot. I have a hard time imagining this album (Travail, Transformation, and Flow) without him. • • • 1.16.2011 Happy new year!  I've posted a sample from Tension Study # 2 below. I am realizing as I write this piece that it is in fact a kind of blues. Perhaps this has to do with the instrumentation. Throughout history the guitar and its close relatives seem to share an abundance of music that is melancholy. I'm thinking, for example, of John Dowland (birth of the emo) and an American brand like the music of Muddy Waters. My music is really techie and involves all kinds of sounds that really have nothing to do with either of these guys, but having to deal with six strings almost necessitates writing something blue.  This piece is a bit different from # 1, which takes a very ambiguous and murky musical idea and transforms it into something overwhelmingly direct. Study # 2 is cyclical, a bit more subtle, and points the tradition of 'head, blowing for x # of choruses, head, ending.' Andy Meyerson and Travis Andrews, who together make 'The Living Earth Show' are going to perform these works a bunch in SF very soon... They are using Two of my chords:
• • • 12.20.2010 Doppelgangers Testing out the new site... finally was able to snatch this domain. Thanks to these fine gentlemen it's extraordinarily difficult to create a traceable web footprint... or a domain name that wouldn't divulge my middle name. and! • • • 12.18.2010 # 2 Lately I have been spending most of my time not composing but filtering noise. Tension Study # 2 has become less of a composition in the traditional sense and more of a perforated construction through which a rich wall of sound can be filtered and experienced. This music can be heard, then, as the remainder of reduction rather than the product of creation. Or, for example:
• • • 11.29.2010 The Bay I was in San Francisco last weekend and was reminded for a brief moment of what it was like to live in a quiet place. I had a couple hours free, so I drove here:
I also had the great pleasure of hearing the SFS perform movements from Alban Berg's Lyric Suite, which I believe became famous for all the wrong reasons. • • • 11.12.2010 Home Grown on Common Ground II I know this is extremely last minute, but if you happen to be in the New Haven area tonight, you should really come by Sprague Hall for 'On Common Ground II' featuring Ben Allison and Andy Akiho. Or, you can watch it online here. • • • 11.7.2010 Tension Study # 1 If you are in NYC on Tuesday night, please come to Carnegie Hall to see Tension Study #1 for electric guitar and percussion. Three amazing performers will give the first interpretation: Max Zuckerman, John Corkill, and Yun-Chu Chiu. I feel so fortunate to be able to work with them - they are some of the finest musicians this generation has to offer - no doubt about it! Where? Carnegie Hall When? 8:00pm Green? $15 - 25 • • • 10.4.2010 Audio A sample from Tension Study # 1 is posted below. The 'electro' component of most of my electroacoustic music is generally comprised of nothing more than simple 'acoustic' sounds, which have been exploited/exploded to either conceal themselves entirely (like in gain or speaker) or to exist so that the 'object sonore' is clear. I find either way to be satisfying so long as I allow the acoustically-rich spectra to remain in tact. Tension Study will be a work with the pitched 'electro' and 'acoustic' material coming from the same loudspeakers. Max Z. will play the electric guitar, so the signal I'll be working with is relatively pure (as opposed to a violin whose spectrum is something you must be very brave to fuck with). Looking forward very much to the performances in November of study # 1 and the subsequent west coast performances of studies # 1 and # 2 by Andy and Travis Andrews. This sample was made with sonic 'fragments' of Paul Dresher's Stratocaster and a Kolkata drone harmonium.
• • • 9.26.2010  Lisa Moore plays piano step this weekend @ Firehouse 12 in New Haven, CT. Also on the program is works by Schumann, Janacek, Martin Bresnick and Andy Akiho. It should be a great program, and Firehouse 12 is one of my favorite places to hear chamber music. Lisa will be joined by BoaC's newest member Ashley Bathgate. More of me? - can't it be 2011 already? Where? Firehouse 12 - Orange and George in New Haven, CT When? 7:30pm Green? $15 for students and seniors - $22 for those who are neither learning nor learned. • • • 9.25.2010 Done! It is official: I am no longer a student. After a long and meandering summer, I have situated myself in Crown Heights, where I plan to work and write for the next couple of years. I am excited about a couple upcoming projects - a work for guitar and two percussionists that will be premiered in Carnegie Hall on the 9th of November and a chamber work for Lisa Moore, Ashley Bathgate, and Karen Bentley-Pollick. But I am most excited about my new job working at Achievement First Crown Heights High School as the director of musical activities. The students here are strong-willed and talented, and it is going to be a tremendous pleasure working with them in the coming years. Other upcoming projects include a repeat of the Duke Ellington concert @ Yale with Andy Akiho and company and some west coast performances of new works. More to come soon... • • • 6.17.2010 Lisa Moore @ Norfolk If you have nothing to do this Saturday evening, and you are in the CT/NY/MA area, c'mon up to Norfolk to check out Lisa Moore at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. She'll be playing my unmannerly Piano Step alongside the music of Ingram Marshall, David Lang, Don Byron, Leos Janacek, and others. The concert is free, and the doors open at 7pm. A great excuse to drive to the northern Connecticut countryside. Where? Norfolk Music Festival When? 7:30pm Green? Nada • • • 6.11.2010 Hello! Welcome to my new website! I am very excited about this process - finally removing myself from the digication website of the yale school of music. this website is still technically under construction, so things will change (maybe drastically) in the next couple of weeks. Thanks to serendipitously stumbling across the website of Naomi Reis I discovered indexhibit. This web-based 'archetypal' site designer enables me to have much more creative control over my own space... sorta... There are many things that I am quite excited about. First and foremost, I graduated! That means, that I am done for school for (I think) forever. It also means that I'll pack up my shit and move to New York City in search of inspiration... or something like that. In other news, on Sunday evening at 7:30 you can catch ensemble ACJW play a new work I wrote for the ACJW collaborative Dance Suite. I was responsible for writing one movement, so I wrote two and compressed them into about 3 minutes. The suite also includes works by Timo Andres, Marcos Balter, Matthew Barnson, Lembit Beecher, and Ted Hearne. This is the final concert ACJW is putting together this year, so it should be a lot of fun. Also, dance suites by Igor and Johann are on the program. Where? Le Poisson Rouge When? 7:30pm Green? $15 |
