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, I’m planning travel and (of course) fishing – a complete immersion in a world quite new to me.
