Check my recent performance with 1st Construction of Evan Chamber’s Come Down Heavy! at Vaudeville Park. Above is the fourth (and final) movement.
1st Construction was co-founded by Danica Borisavljevic, Ela Polak, and myself last summer. We are currently hard at work commissioning pieces for piano/violin/sax and planning summer concerts. Stayed tuned!
[turning] the line between avant-garde music and performance art into a trip-wire for increasingly absurd booby-traps.
and Liz Lee and I were mentioned for our energetic performance:
The best went beyond influence with either energy — cellist Elizabeth Lee and saxophonist Zach Herchen’s vehement bow-pressure-and-multiphonic distortions in Ryo Nakayama’s “Xxxx xxx’’ — or efficiency….
Now that I’m almost a month late, it’s time to post lots of cool info from last month’s SICPP. This year I was on staff as a senior fellow! I was responsible for rehearsals, scheduling, and planning within my groups, though really that means being up late sending emails. The composer-in-residence this year was Tristan Murail and the (outstanding) faculty were Corey Hamm, Yukiko Takagi, Scott Deal, Stuart Gerber, Tanya Blaich, and John Mallia. As alwyas, SICPP is directed by Steve Drury.
Highlights from from 11 concerts throughout the week include:
John Zorn: (fay çe que vouldras) – Steve Drury gave an incredible performance by memory in the first concert of the week.
Frederic Rzewski: The People United Will Never Be Defeated! – Ursula Oppens ended her solo concert with this expansive piece.
Giacinto Scelsi: Okanagon and Joshua Fineberg: Counterfactual – Fineberg’s work for Callithumpian was paired together its basis piece by Scelsi.
Karlheinz Stockhausen: Kontakte, No. 12 1/2 – Steve Drury and Stuart Gerber gave a masterful performance of Stockhausen’s piece for piano, percussion, and playback.
Howard Bashaw: Hosu – Corey Hamm, as always, gave an awesome performance.
Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians – Smack in the middle of our 10 hour marathon final concert. It’s an experience.
Tamar Diesendruck: Still Telling – commissioned/premiered by The Callithumpian Consort
Time for some long overdue posts! This summer has been jam packed with awesome projects and events, including my sister’s wedding last week (congratulations Annie and Drew!). Things are somewhat winding down and I plan to focus on completing the Emerging Voices CD project and getting back to some type of consistent blogging. Enough talk, here we go!
Last month I attended the The Callithumpian Consort’s Spectral Summer Professional Performance Workshop at Boston University. For 4 days I practiced, rehearse, and worked with Joshua Fineberg and Steve Drury (photo above) on spectral music. Todd Moellenberg and I prepared Tristan Murail’s Transsahara Express, which is for bassoon/piano but I created a transcription for bari saxophone and piano. I also worked on Fabien Lévy’s L’air d’ailleurs – Bincinium for alto sax, playback, and delay, and Gérard Grisey’s Anubis-Nout for solo bass or bari sax. Fellow SICPP alumni Danica Borisavljevic also participated in the workshop.
The workshop ended with a concert of music prepared by the participants and Callithumpian Consort. The program featured the world premiere of Joshua Fineberg’s Counterfactual: hommage à Scelsi (commissioned by Drury and Callithumpian), a reimagining of Giacinto Scelsi’s Okanagon extrapolated it to a different historical timeline. I only performed Nout from Anubis/Nout because I didn’t feel ready to run the whole piece, though I did play the full work a few weeks later at SICPP!
Program: Tristan Murail: Transsahara Express
Fabien Levy: L’air d’ailleurs Tristan Murail: Feuilles à travers les cloches
Gérard Grisey: Echanges
Gérard Grisey: Nout
Joshua Fineberg: Counterfactual: hommage à Scelsi
Contour Lines:
I am booking a series of concerts presenting contemporary electroacoustic and solo works for saxophone. The program includes commissioned works by Benjamin Taylor, Paul Leary, and Victoria Cheah alongside pieces by Gérard Grisey, Fabien Levy, JacobTV, Kati Agócs, and Katarina Miljkovic.
1st Construction:
Check out my new trio's recent performance of Come Down Heavy! by Evan Chambers.
Emerging Voices Project:
Over the past year Elisabeth Halliday and I have fundraised, commissioned, recorded, and premiered new music for voice and sax. The result is our new CD, Emerging Vocies, available at my store.
