June 2022 News
Virtually participating in the INK STILL WET workshop in Austria (I'm the bottom left square on the screen!)
I'm thrilled that I've been selected as one of six composers from around the world to be part of the INK STILL WET Composer/Conductor Workshop at the Grafenegg Festival in Austria! This incredible workshop gives me the opportunity to travel to Austria in late August where I will get to workshop a new orchestra piece of mine and conduct the premiere of it myself (!) with the Tonkünstler Orchester, one of Austria's top professional orchestras! I also got to attend the first part of the workshop virtually in March where I worked with acclaimed composer Georg Friedrich Haas and conductor Baldur Brönnimann. Now it's time to work on my conducting and German this summer!
In January, I found out that my choral setting of The Wayfaring Stranger for Solo Female Voice and SSAA Choir won the 2021 Gregg Smith Choral Competition at Syracuse University! The work was then premiered in April beautifully at Syracuse by the Crouse Chorale, conducted by Wendy Moy, with Mary Tehan doing a beautiful job as the soloist.
In 2014, pianist Christopher Janwong McKiggan commissioned me to write a piece for his "Resonance of Hope" project which paired composers from countries in conflict with each other to create piano works based on folk songs from their partner's country. I was paired with pianist and composer Cheol-Woong Kim who grew up in (and later escaped) North Korea. He sent me a song called "Sound of Cowbell" (I sent him "Go Tell Aunt Rhody") and I had a great time writing an incredibly virtuosic rhapsody on the tune that Chris tackled masterfully. I'm so glad his amazing recording of it has finally been released on the Sheva Collection label, have a listen!
In April (quite appropriately), the Eastman Wind Ensemble conducted by Mark Davis Scatterday premiered my arrangement of John Foulds' masterpiece April-England. I've loved this piece ever since I first heard it, and I hope that many more wind ensembles will play it and get to know Foulds' wonderful music.
In March, I traveled to Syracuse to perform my Three Love Songs for Voice and Piano with soprano Jazmine Saunders (who is headed to Juilliard for graduate school next year!) at the College Music Society's Northeast Region Conference at Onodaga Community College. I was surprised and delighted that our performance received the Elliott Schwartz Composition Prize as well.
In a single day last summer, I got inspired to make a choral version of the first of the love songs, My Love It Should Be Silent, in which I explored a bit of singing with non-word syllables a la pop a cappella music. I was fortunate that the Eastman Chorale was able to premiere the work last month and that it has been selected by the spectacular Polish vocal group Vocore from out of almost 500 submitted works to their call for scores to be performed by the group next year!
For the past three years, I've had the privilege of singing in the Schola Cantorum of Christ Church, a wonderful choir in Rochester that sings mostly renaissance music for weekly compline services in candlelight. For my last performance with the group, I was pleased that we premiered my new Te Lucis Ante Terminum, a prayer of protection during the night.
In February, the ONIX Ensamble, who premiered my piece Rock Hill in Mexico last November, also released a video recording they made of the piece. Check out their stunning performance!
But all of these pale in comparison to the two biggest events of the last several months. Firstly, I completed my dissertation and graduated with my PhD from the Eastman School of Music last month! My dissertation was in two parts and explored Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolence philosophy in the realms of composition and music education. I composed a 12-minute work for orchestral winds entitled Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Beloved Community? which portrays King's ideal of "Beloved Community" is Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of the ideal society musically by uniting different groups of instruments, each performing in a different musical style, into one harmonious texture while retaining their diverse identities. (The piece also won Eastman's Wayne Barlow Prize for composition this year!) My dissertation paper was entitled Enhancing the Social Justice Outcomes of El Sistema-inspired Programs by Integrating Kingian Nonviolence (which I just presented at the ARTs + Change Virtual Conference last week hosted by the University of Rochester.) The final tally was:
70 pages and 19,023 notes for the composition!
126 pages and 31,037 words for the paper!
Sideview showing the size of my dissertation documents
But even bigger news than that was the fact that Diane and I welcomed our son, Theron, to the world in February. He decided to arrived about a month before his due date, which we think must be because he likes the number 2; he was born on Tuesday ("Twos-day"), 2/2/22 at 1:38am (which happens to be 22 minutes before 2am)! Despite technically being considered premature, he's had almost no health issues and is now a happy and healthy 3-month-old!
Dr. Dad