I had an amazing, performing-filled summer wrapped up by a gig playing Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint with Mark Stewart and Dither Quartet at Lincoln Center Out of Doors and the Ellnora Guitar Festival. It was also my first time in a while without any big looming composing deadlines, so I spent a truly luxurious amount of time chipping away at a piano/electronics piece for my dear friend Paul Kerekes and finishing up a whole new batch of music for a re-formed (not reformed) Marateck. It's Fall now though, and that means it's time to hunker down and write a whole bunch of music.
My next month or two will be hammering out a guitar/electronics piece for my old teacher Jack Sanders for a Feb 2016 premiere, and doing a bunch of planning work for Invisible Anatomy's new show for the National Sawdust in January 2016. I've got one other big project for February that I'll announce properly soon, but it's a doozy and I can't wait. I'll write more about it and the new IA show soon.
Meanwhile, I'll be digging into Anthology, a big, semi-theatrical, electronically-focused piece for the NY-based Soldier's Tale ensemble Exceptet that will be premiered on MATA Interval on March 6. I'm really excited for this piece, as I'm trying to synthesize several ideas I've explored in the past few years – the use of physically demanding music to create inherently dramatic performance situations, the use of simple technology as a musical and dramatic amplifier, and the construction of coherent larger forms out of music whose mid-scale surface elements vary wildly and behave in unexpected ways. In one movement, the violinist will be close-miked, amplified, and asked to play extremely quietly, bringing out the non-violin sounds of her bow on the strings, breath, and singing. In another, the clarinetist will perform wearing muscle activity sensors connected to oscillators that emit sound when he isn’t relaxed enough. I think it'll be really weird and fun.
On writing breaks this fall, I'll be playing more Reich with Dither in October, a sweet Brooks Frederickson jam in November, and a bunch of stuff on Matt Welch's Stone residency in December. Also, Bearthoven are playing my piece Simple Machine at Shapeshifter Lab on 9/27, and Ken Thompson is doing Nausea on the SONiC Festival on 10/18. To distract myself in the meanwhile, I added a couple recordings from the spring and summer to my Media page.
Into the vortex...