well, it was quite an event, my last concert with BMOP. it is now july, and since that night i have been to armenia, ojai, seattle, vancouver, san francisco, and back home in nyc. for weeks, though, the glow from my last concert has not faded. a few things remain - next month we will be editing and mixing about 150 minutes' worth of music for my 2-CD set, which will be released on BMOPsound in february 2010. and of course i will continue to help the new Score Board - 35 Boston-area composers who are forming a discrete arm of the BMOP board structure to sustain and vitalize composer activities now that my tenure is up!

but this will be my last post here as your CIR. mostly i just want to share a few pix from that last couple of days, and express my deepest gratitude to everyone in the BMOP and boston music communities for making me feel so much at home. i will always count boston as my second home now! and i look forward to seeing where all of these new relationships will lead - i'm sure there will continue to be new paths to follow, new adventures.

and a special special thank you to Music Alive - the program, jointly administered and sponsored by Meet The Composer and the League of American Orchestras, that underwrote my 3-year residency with BMOP. what can i say? i can't imagine a more proactive way of bringing new music and its champions together, supporting the passion and energy behind new music where it is most likely to blossom and innovate, than this program. with this support, we were able to have a limitless feeling of collaborative spark, for three solid years. for me as a composer, this was a life-changing opportunity. THANK YOU!!!

and then of course there is the BMOP board, who helped amplify and expand on this residency, making even MORE things possible - and gil rose and catherine stephan, my partners-in-crime, who showed me nothing but green lights for 3 years as i came up with one cockamamie idea after another. and - of course - the players. BMOP players are a unique breed, a kind of musical citizen one finds very rarely, and almost never in such numbers, all in one place.

here are some pix from the last concert, which featured a couple of the players in solo roles (bob schulz in eric moe's drumkit concerto, and ina zdorovetchi in thomas oboe lee's harp concerto), plus the world premiere of my 'in medias res' - a concerto for orchestra written with great gratitude and affection, a gift to gil and the band. au revoir everyone! don't worry i'll stay in touch, you do the same....

xoxo

well, one of the very exciting things happening this week is that on friday night we will be launching the Score Board, which is a brand-new discrete arm of the BMOP board structure inhabited entirely by composers who are also superb musical citizens and advocates. we are around 30 strong! and we will be taking over various of the composer-in-res activities i've been doing the last few years, but with much more manpower and diversity!! to begin this transition, we hosted a special added club concert last night, which was curated entirely by new Score Board members robert kirzinger, dalit warshaw, marti epstein, kati agocs and andy vores. it was a boston composers extravaganza! not only were there pieces by john mallia and Score Board member jonathan bailey holland, but also by my composer-in-res predecessor elena ruehr, who was also a radcliffe fellow with me last year. plus robert k contributed a brand-new solo viola piece for kate vincent, written especially for the occasion! a duo by jan swafford and a solo piece by loevendie (in which our own gabby diaz stomped out rhythms with sleigh bells strapped to her ankle, while simultaneously playing impossible things on the violin!) rounded out the evening.

the truly amazing thing last night was the real surge of new energy in the room, as composers from all over the boston scene, new Score Board members looking forward to the launch on friday, friends and colleagues of the players - the place was lousy with composers! it was pretty exciting. here are some pix!

a couple from the performance, with sarah brady on flute, david russell on cello and kate vincent on viola:


and some group shots of me with the co-curators from the newly-minted Score Board:


and gil was there, enjoying a relaxing evening during an otherwise very intense week of rehearsals for five (gulp!) premieres this coming friday!



later on NEC student matti kovler (whose piece was on the january BMOP concert) joined us too:


it was a real night to remember - thanks guys! i feel very happy about the vitality of BMOP's composer community. it makes it both harder and easier to say goodbye!

we're diving into my last week here as BMOP's CIR (sniff...) and so so many things are happening around here! before i launch into reports on the events of this week - rehearsals for this friday's concert, prepations for tonight's special extra club concert (which will be the curating debut of some members of the new composers advocacy group i will be launching this week, the Score Board!), and the premiere and recording of my huge piece In medias res, which takes material from several of the synopses i wrote over these past 3 years and weaves it all together - i need to catch you all up on a very eventful april!

so - speaking of synopses, april saw the premiere of the last one of these little pieces, Synopsis #15: Two Days After You Left I...   here is ina zdorovetchi at the club cafe, where she premiered it on a club cafe concert dedicated almost entirely to synopses - a kind of retrospective:



the concert was a veritable synopsis-fest! here are some of the other players, many of whom have become some of my most cherished boston friends :) here's bob schulz playing "It Takes One to Know One:"



charles dimmick playing "Where's the Guy With the Directions?:"



rachel braude playing "Most Rumors About Him Are True:"



michael norsworthy playing "What I Did Over Summer Vacation:"



sarah brady playing "I Think We Should Tell Her:"



and terry everson playing "He Figures Out What Clouds Mean:"



in answer to the many of you who have asked me over the years if the Synopses series was inspired by Berio's Sequenzas, i performed his crazy Sequenza III for voice at this concert too! that was quite an adventure, requiring a broad range of extreme emotional shifts. the many faces of sequenza III!!!



meanwhile i was joined onstage by another important BMOP friend, without whom none of these things would ever have been possible - ED catherine stephan:



(i think she was in the process of making me blush...)

and also, the first MC appearance of robert kirzinger, who is one of the Charter Members of our new composers group, the Score Board. in fact, he will be taking the stage tonight, along with some other composer colleagues, while i sit at a table and eat a salad :)



see some of you tonight! more here soon as this epic week unfolds.

it's true - much of this past couple of weeks in boston have been much more like winter than spring. so - in keeping with the chilly air, we spent some wonderful time re-mounting an historical concert performance of John Harbison's earliest opera, "A Winter's Tale," which featured many of the area's finest voices, john's own libretto (in retro-collaboration with The Bard, of course), and the fearless BMOP players. it was a very intense week for all of us, since the piece features some jaw-dropping singing responsibilities (especially from baritone David Kravitz, who keeps leaping into falsetto as his Leontes grapples with paranoia about his own cuckoldry), some truly virtuoso playing in the orchestra (especially in the winds and brass!), and an especially emotional week for all of us as we saw this very early piece by a cherished established composer come to life in front of us.

here are a couple of pix from the dress rehearsal, featuring the full chorus of shepherds and shepherdesses:





and a couple of pix from the huge ovation as the composer took the stage:






and some very happy people afterwards, like john and david kravitz, backstage just moments after the curtain call:



and john with gil and myself, plus mezzo janna baty, whose performance was also such a daunting and dazzling part of the evening:



then we all got to spend some more time with the piece at mechanics hall in worcester to record it! this process is always my favorite - a real opportunity to get inside a piece, listen intensely and closely and watch the performers hone their performances even further. here is a happy composer-conductor shot:



>john and gil still smiling in the midst of an incredibly detail-filled recording day...

and in the midst of it all (ah how appropriate, since the piece is called 'In medias res' !), my concerto for orchestra arrives from the printer !!



i can't believe that the next time we all come together it will be for this last big piece, which is basically a huge Thank You-Farewell gift to everyone in and around BMOP - that's you too, if you are reading this !!!

that's it for today but i'll log in again soon to catch you up on some other things that are brewing in the boston composer community...  let's just say, it takes a village to make new music, and i've been spending an increasing amount of time these last few months finding some great colleagues to build a village with!

it was a standing-room-only ticket on tuesday night at the club cafe! so great to see so many of you BMOP regulars, and new faces too! unfortunately i had such a great time that i completely forgot to take pix :) but suffice it to say that there was a record number of boston-area composers there. i was able to invite FOUR colleagues up on stage with me during the evening to tell us their favorite color (and, in some cases, something about their pieces): dalit warshaw (whose 'desert call' for solo cello was played so so brilliantly by david russell), marti epstein (whose delicate trio 'goldfish on the roof' created a hush in the room that i've never heard at the moonshine room), adam roberts (whose fiery solo violin piece opened the program - played flawlessly by gabby diaz), and finally, berklee hornist and composer michael weinstein, whose 3-movement piece for trombone and string trio certainly made us all wonder why this unique quartet is not a standard instrumentation - let's all write them! hans bohn is sure to advocate for new trombone-friendly chamber music, for sure - he is the one who introduced me to michael and his piece.

elliott carter and i were also both served quite nicely during the evening too! i felt very happy about these latest synopses - for gabby and hans, respectively - and as the deadline for the big concerto for orchestra nears (less than a month away, eek!), the synopses have more and more concrete connections to it. gabby and hans - you will feel right at home in rehearsal in may, your solo pieces are all over this concerto!

down below are the program notes from those two pieces, for those of you who are synopsis-tracking. i'm off to nyc today to start rehearsals for the whitney museum performance of 'chance encounter.' then directly after that i will be on a plane to san francisco (my hometown!) for philip glass's 'music in twelve parts.' what a month!

SYNOPSES #13 and 14 - Program Notes:

Synopsis #13: Thy Sting is Not So Sharp, for Gabby Diaz, takes its title from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Gabby (by nature a happy person) and I share a particular affinity for the aching, yearning side of artistic expression. I wanted to write her something that she could really ache through, so I turned to Shakespeare, who really knows how to grab your soul. One thing I learned from him – a useful piece of wisdom that can help an artist in any medium! – is that in all tragedy there is an element of comedy, and vice versa. As You Like It is, I suppose, technically a comedy, but it is rife with achings, yearnings, poignancies. In it the character Amiens, one of the Lords of the Duke, is asked to offer a song to comfort and entertain, but the words he sings takes us to one of  Shakespeare’s darkest depictions of the human soul:

Blow, blow thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
    As man’s ingratitude:
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
    Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho, unto the green holly.
Most friendship is faining, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho, the holly,
This life is most jolly.

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky
That dost not bite so nigh
    As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy Sting is Not So Sharp
    As friend rememb’red not.
Heigh-ho, sing, &c.

My first meeting with trombonist Hans Bohn, on the other hand, consisted of a series of comical conversational snapshots of his life as father of three in a seemingly exuberantly-spirited household. I left the meeting thinking that Hans must be a very cool dad. So I wrote Synopsis #14: No, No, No – Put That Down as a vehicle for him to share his dad-ness with us.

i'm definitely enjoying a slow day today, what a week! it was a great pleasure to put together last night's concert, for several reasons: five of the six composers presented on this concert were in lively attendance at rehearsals, and all five participated in my pre-concert discussion. two of them - kati agocs, NEC's newest composition faculty member, and matti kovler, NEC student and winner of the annual BMOP/NEC composition contest - were friends of mine already from other contexts (kati and i met in nyc around 8 years ago and have kept in touch since, and matti and i met at tanglewood this summer). plus - both of them performed in their own pieces, AND i got to sing in kati's piece! it's been a couple of years since i've sung with BMOP, and it was a wonderful pleasure to be up on stage with them again.

here are a few pix, from rehearsals!
here is matti, consulting with gil during the first rehearsal of his piece:


and a few days later, in his role as narrator, in the dress rehearsal:


here is BMOP's own angel subero in the dress rehearsal of michael gandolfi's "from the institutes of groove," a rollicking concerto for trombone:


and here i am with kati in the dress rehearsal of her piece!


last but not least, here's a nice backstage shot of kati, gil and me - in our fancy threads, ready for a little post-concert merriment


(thank you kati for insisting on the red dresses! not every composer-in-residence responsibility allows for such indulgences!)

it was a great week for me in terms of my collaboration with the players too - every morning this week i worked for a few hours on the concerto for orchestra, which is due in march and will be premiered on may 22 at the final concert of the season. then i went to rehearsals, with my own orchestrational questions fresh in my mind, and was able to hear the players work, and ask specific questions when needed. this kind of access to orchestral players during the process of composing for them is practically unheard-of. i felt very lucky to be hearing them put together such a broad stylistic range of pieces this week - it really got my imagination going.

now i will spend the rest of today putting the finishing touches on "Synopsis #14: No, No, No - Put That Down!" for trombonist Hans Bohn, who has three kids and probably has said this sentence hundreds of times...

i'm getting ready to get on the train from nyc to boston, crawling out of a luxurious six-week period of almost uninterrupted work on the big Concerto for Orchestra i'm writing for BMOP. it's been an incredibly productive time! and in many ways this past couple of months have been the core of the whole BMOP residency experience. ironic, since i've spent them almost entirely in solitude! but i wonder sometimes, as i look at the big sheets of music paper, how many composers have had the opportunity to write music for so many individual friends at once. instead of 'clarinet' i see 'michael.' instead of 'piccolo' i see rachel. and instead of a string section, i see charles, krista, kate, gabby, and on and on... it's pretty incredible. i seem to be right on schedule with it. the piece is due in march, so i have a couple more months to go.

it's probably good timing for a week of human contact, though, so i am looking forward to this coming week of rehearsals leading up to the upcoming boston connection concert on saturday night. this time i get to sing! kati agocs's piece features two voices, so she and i will finally get to sing together, for the first time. i've known kati for years but we've never managed to be on stage together at the same time!

meanwhile, i have posted some photos from the november concert. there are so many, i just made an album of them so you can see them here.

it was a very full week in november, actually, and last time i wrote i still had most of it ahead of me: in addition to rehearsals for the concert, i also served at a half-day meeting of the Middle School for the Arts task force over at the boston arts academy; served as a panelists for the BAA student grant presentations (which involved reading and evaluating grant proposals written by seniors for projects they design themselves! let's hear it for BAA for giving students practical as well as artistic training!); and a lovely pre-concert dinner with various of the BMOP boards, at which we spoke about (sniff, sniff....) plans for the future, after my now-visible departure from my role there. but it's a great discussion! we have grown a lot together, and there are some wonderful ideas percolating about how to continue to grow composer activities at BMOP, and how i can help.

ok - it's off to amtrak now, and a whole week of contact with other human beings - i hope i still remember how to do that!

finally got everything worked out here in my new pad - yesterday i arrived for my second boston run - this time i planned a longer stay so i can have some unscheduled time to enjoy my new 'hood and take in the beautiful late-fall somerville vibe.

lately i have been having great, long, luxurious chats with various of my composer colleagues from all of the music schools and universities here, talking about ways to organize ourselves so that there is as much city-wide composerly community as possible. today i had lunch with NEC's latest faculty addition, kati agocs, an old friend from when she was at juilliard (i had her doctoral 'coming-out' party at my apt!), and last night i had dinner with keeril makan, MIT's recent addition, who is spending this year soaking up the kingly benefits of the coveted rome prize. he's in 'town' (meaning: the USA) briefly to enjoy the world premiere of his new chamber orchestra piece at zankel hall. also on the docket for dec 5: his concerto for violin and viola with the MIT orchestra - information here - i'll be there! it should be a great night!

tomorrow we begin rehearsals for the nov 14 concert, 'concertos for strings and orchestra.' it will be great to see my old BMOP buddies Elliott Schwartz and Ken Ueno again, and always a pleasure to spend time in the company of maestro schoenberg. perhaps he'll grace us with his presence in some indefinable way as well. but before the rehearsal i will spend the morning with teaching interns at the boston arts academy, giving them some ideas about how to use cross-disciplinary teaching methods in the classroom while teaching core curriculum subjects, like math and history. i love that stuff :)

hi everyone! ok i am finally on the brink of my first trip up to boston of this, my third year as composer-in-res with BMOP. tomorrow (which is also conductor gil rose's birthday!!) i will settle into my new pied-a-terre in davis square (that rhymes), and monday morning i will begin meetings with all of the BMOP community, including my boston arts academy colleagues, to launch the activities of this year.

meanwhile, i've been working very hard on the Concerto for Orchestra for the last concert of this coming season, on may 22. i'm slowly emerging from the cocoon stage, which i would liken to the first trimester, when things are still rawther unformed and news of the creative process is necessarily scant. but i think it is safe to declare that there is indeed a concerto for orch being written, and i'm sure it will continue to tumble forward with the stimulation of the week ahead.

and also meanwhile, while i was not working on the piece, i had another jaunt across the ocean, to spain and italy, where i performed with philip glass and john zorn, respectively. here's some live TV footage from the performance in zaragosa, where we premiered a new piece by philip created in collaboration with a fireworks guru, for the closing ceremonies of the world expo! needless to say, the whole stage was shaking with the explosions, and the sound of a quarter of a million people lining the river. it was a little challenging to hear my monitor at times...

definitely a night to remember. see many of you very soon!

the Jazz and Improvised Music Salzburg experience!!

After a week of spelunking around Eastern Europe (mostly Budapest and Berlin), i arrived for my duties as composition teacher-participant in this terrific festival in Salzburg. I'll share some links to pix here - they tell the whole story! here i'm singing 'a collective cleansing' at the opening faculty concert...

here i'm improvising on that same concert, with phil minton (leading us all in this whimsical exercise, waltraud krauter, frances-marie uitti, and jim black):



here is my composition seminar, some really talented and fun folks from all over europe:



on wed the janus ensemble came from vienna and performed an excerpt from 'chance encounter,' with me singing:







...and at the closing night concert, when all the students performed, i got a chance to help premiere some of my students' pieces, performed by the composition seminar students and - in one case - by several of us faculty types (this first one with mark dresser and frances-marie uitti):









and then of course we danced the night away, with students jamming into the wee hours...