May 2021 News
Sitting at Aaron Copland's desk at the Copland House
I began 2021 in residence at the Copland House which was such an amazing experience. It's one thing to get to visit the house where a famous artist lived that's been turned into a museum; maybe you get to sit at their chair or desk for a minute, but you are supervised when you are there and then have to go home after an hour or two. It's a different thing when you get to live there for 3 weeks alone, sleep in the bedroom, eat in the kitchen, and get to create art in the studio! It was certainly an experience I'll never forget.
While I was there, I wrote two new pieces: an art song called Mottainai for the Art Song Collaborative Project in Toronto, Canada, and a short piece for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano for the ONIX Ensamble in Mexico City, Mexico called Rock Hill (named after the original name of Copland's house). Mottainai is a Japanese expression of regret at the full value of something not being put to good use or the feeling of regret at something being wasted, and this song will be recorded this summer/fall as part of a collaborative opera focused on solutions to the environmental crisis. Rock Hill will be performed by ONIX Ensamble likely this fall as part of the RED NOTE Music Festival at Illinois State University.
After leaving the Copland House (and passing my doctoral comprehensive exams!) I then wrote a new piece called Gliss for OSSIA, the student-run new music ensemble here at Eastman, exploring my love of glissandi (the musical technique of sliding between pitches). I wrote it for a strange ensemble: violin, viola, cello, 3 trombones, and 3 electric guitars; all instruments who are capable of doing sustained continuous glissandi. I was lucky to have this wild piece performed last month, conducted by Maurice Cohn, with an actual in-person audience!
Somehow while writing Gliss, I found time to write two new songs which, combined with a song I wrote in 2016, formed a set of Three Love Songs for Voice and Piano dedicated to my wife Diane. In April, I performed them at Eastman with the incredible Jazmine Saunders.
Then I orchestrated the songs so that they could be performed with a small orchestra instead of piano, and I received a nice reading of them with Jazmine and the Eastman Philharmonia conducted by Austin Chanu.
At the end of this semester, I also got to premiere my new Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano "Chaconnesque" that I wrote last year, with Nicholas Shaefer playing violin. This piece took me a year to write and I was happy to learn that it was awarded the Howard Hanson Ensemble Prize from the Eastman composition department this year too!
This semester, I also received readings of my choral work Lord, Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace (with the Eastman Chorale conducted by William Weinert), A Meditation on Mercy for Concert Band (with the Eastman Wind Orchestra conducted by Lindsay Bronnenkant) and Out of the Depths for Concert Band (with the Eastman Wind Orchestra conducted by David Baker). Off campus, I also had a beautiful premiere of my Lamentation for String Orchestra by the Penn State Philharmonic, conducted by Gerardo Edelstein, at the Penn State 2021 New Music Festival and Symposium back in March.
Outside of composing, I'm proud to share that I received two other accolades at Eastman this semester. I was one of 6 graduate students to be awarded the Teaching Assistant Prize for Excellence in Teaching this year, and one of 21 students inducted into the national music honor society Pi Kappa Lambda!
This summer, I will be spending two weeks in June doing a residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, NE. This comes after having done an 8-week residency there back in 2012 shortly after I finished my master's degree, so I'm excited to go back and get a lot of composing done. I'm also planning to spend a few weeks hiking the Long Trail in Vermont in July as well.
I'll also start work on my doctoral dissertation this summer, as passing my comprehensive exams this past semester means I will spend next year, my final year at Eastman, focused on that. The dissertation is in two parts and both will explore the idea of Kingian Nonviolence (following the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr.) applied to music. I will create a new work for the Eastman Wind Ensemble inspired by Kingian Nonviolence and a research paper on how it can be integrated into music education programs inspired by Venezuela's "El Sistema".