What a day it was at the South Dakota Symphony. As part of my Music Alive residency, a workshop reading of my new piece in progress, complete with an eager, engaged audience. The orchestra tried out different versions and offered advice, and impressions from the audience reminded me how much people’s experience of music can vary. See my new blog post for more reflections. And here, enjoy a shot of our youngest attendees, a whole family who had never been to the orchestra before. What a way for these little guys to start, hearing short bits of music (including standard rep excerpts that inspired or relate to my efforts) all broken down by the composer. Thank you conductor David Gier, and all the musicians of
Read more →Teenagers on the Pine Ridge and Sisseton-Wahpeton Reservations, in South Dakota, have composed exquisite, highly personal pieces through the Composition Academies I had the opportunity to lead. As Music Alive Composer-In-Residence with the South Dakota Symphony, I worked with them, alongside other gifted composer-mentors, for a week each in the summer, then returned in September to help rehearse their pieces for the remarkable Dakota String Quartet and Dakota Wind Quintet (SDSO principals) and present them in public venues and at their high schools on the reservations. See a Facebook Live broadcast here. And now I’m deep into composing my own work, inspired by all my time in South Dakota. In a lovely luxury, the SDSO will hold workshop reading of my work in progress with
Read more →Fully inhabiting my role now as Music Alive Composer-in-Residence with the South Dakota Symphony, I am composing and prepping for a remarkable year. First off, in July and August, I’ll spend two weeks working with teen composers, mostly Native Americans, from the Pine Ridge and Lake Traverse Indian Reservations. The students’ pieces will be played, by musicians of the SDSO, on tour to all their schools in September. I’m also helping program community events, and (let’s not forget!) working intensively now on a new piece. Remarkably, the orchestra has scheduled an entire service to workshop my new piece five months before the premiere – allowing me to be much more experimental in my writing. In and around my ten or so weeks in South Dakota,
Read more →I am thrilled to join the South Dakota Symphony, Music Director Delta David Gier, and Executive Director Jennifer Boomgaarden, as Music Alive Composer-in-Residence until June 2019, through the national residency program of the League of American Orchestras and New Music USA. I’ll compose a new work for next season, lead cross-cultural composing projects with kids and adults, create community events, and more. Read the press release and stay tuned for news from South Dakota!
Read more →My Sinfonietta (2016) captures moments of spiritual experience, 21st century music inspired by the 14th century Sufi mystic Hafez – vignettes of hilarity, wonder, confusion, clamor. In West Virginia 2018 it connected with musicians and audiences in the most gratifying ways. The West Virginia Symphony and Music Director Lawrence Loh recently gave the first performances of the revised version (the South Dakota Symphony and Delta David Gier premiered the original version in 2017), first in the beautiful Clay Center in Charleston, then in a middle school auditorium in Parkersburg. (WVSO somehow fit The Planets onto that stage!) In both places, audience members had so much to say to me. Modesty prevents my quoting directly; suffice it to say, musicians enjoyed it more, the more they
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