Category: Uncategorized

It’s always a pleasure to hear one’s work played well but even more so in the continuing era of Covid-19.  Yesterday I enjoyed listening to a rehearsal of my duo, Incantation, by violinist Euna Kim and violist William Lane at the beautiful and historic Haw Par Music.William is the founder and Euna a member of Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, a group doing more than any other to promote contemporary music in Hong Kong.  Yesterday’s gathering was a bit of a test run for what we all hope will be a future performance of this work once the world opens up a bit more.

Incantation was premiered in 2013 at the Aspen Music Festival, where I was one of ten Fellows working with Steve Stucky, George Tsontakis, and a venerable group of visiting faculty composers.  It seems both like yesterday and a lifetime ago.  The title evokes the repeated phrases, spells, rituals—these simple syllables—which have the power to stir emotions and also spirts.  In my music, at first these spirits take the form of repeated gestures and later raging scales and clusters.  Are these perhaps the same thing?

In advance of our rehearsal—and also during and following it—I made some revisions to the piece.  I rarely revise my work beyond a few small details and notations, but in this case I felt the need.  Somehow the several days of work I did a decade after “finishing” the piece—while only about 15% different—seem to make the piece around 30% better.  This is what we call musical math.

George Crumb (1929-2022). Often imitated. Never duplicated. We feel your music in our bodies as much as we hear it through our ears. From some primal state, it communicates with us directly, the way we experience Nature or the Spirit Realm: being alone in the woods and encountering an animal or a sudden rustling of trees.

The quote that I read or heard you say that I come to again and again was when you spoke of a very difficult period when you were unable to compose for a couple years and before you had found the sound(s) we now know as yours: “I couldn’t allow myself to write what had already been written” …or something very close to that. Is it too bold for me to believe I understand you?

Of course you had retired from Penn by the time I arrived, but with four of your students as my own teachers—Rouse, Ricardo, Jim, and Jay—your voice and wisdom were never far: “Crumb used to say…” and then your gentle cadence. Has there been an American composer whose actual speaking voice has been more widely imitated?

One of the blessings of being in Philly for 14 years was hearing the premieres of a few of your American Songbooks. These were huge pieces, dozens of percussion instruments on stage. Your sounds penetrate us. They haunt us. Beautiful dreamer…

When I say you’re a genius, I mean that when we study your music, we can see how it fits together, but that tells only part of the story. When the sound stops and the applause finish, we’re still left grasping as we ask: how did a man imagine this world?

Rest in peace, George Crumb. A Genius From West Virginia.

I’m very happy to share that I’ve been awarded a Project Grant from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council in support of my composition project titled Neon Sounds. Ever since I arrived in Hong Kong in 2016, I’ve been looking for a way to honor Hong Kong’s beautiful heritage of neon lights, an instantly recognizable part of the streetscape for decades. Finally, that time has come. In this project, I’ll work with local architects and preservationists, as well as musicians and lighting designers, to create new music inspired by historic neon signs. Significantly, the musicians and lights will share the stage together in performance, a kind of neon choreography in which light and sound mimic each other in captivating ways.

Finnish friends: look out for a performance of my solo violin work, immaus, scheduled for December 12 at the Sibelius Music Institute in Hämeenlinna. The work will be presented by violinist Sini Virtanen, who did a splendid job with it in Tampa in March.

Last night I enjoyed the premiere of my new work, Parallel Lives, by ensemble mise-en at their venue in Brooklyn.  The performance was wonderful, and it was especially meaningful to hear my work live for the first time since the pandemic began.  

As long as I have been doing this (around 31 years since I set pencil to paper), I always encounter some doubt as to whether what I heard in my mind will succeed in the corporeal realm.  Lucky for me, I seem to have pulled it off again with the support of the excellent musicians of mise-en and their conductor, Moon Young Ha. 

Having heard the work and the reaction from some of the musicians, I am considering extending it or writing a companion piece.  It seems the Parallel Lives of the title may have just been a Parallel Life after all.  Sometimes the sounds we create leave us wanting more.  So it will be back to pencil and paper at some point soon.  And likely an eraser, too.

Very happy that Sandburg Songs, my 2016 song cycle on texts from Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems, is on the first ballot for Best Contemporary Composition in this year’s Grammy Awards. Making this recording on Albany Records was a real labor of love, and I was blessed to collaborate with soprano Tony Arnold and members of Zohn Collective, conducted by Tim Weiss. Thanks to my friends and colleagues in the Recording Academy for your listening and support!

I’ve spent the last two months at the Library of Congress going through the Steven Stucky Papers as part of a 2-year funded research project from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council.  What began as a planned one-month visit turned into two, and now it’s clear that there’s enough material to warrant at least one return trip later this spring.  My goal going into this was to write about Stucky’s orchestrational technique and the scope and limits of compositional influence.  I still plan to do that, as well as bring some of these materials to a wider public.  

But what I want to reflect on here is my personal response to my time with these materials.  It has been a privilege to spend time with the artifacts of my former teacher’s professional life—scores, sketches, correspondence, programs, teaching materials, and so much more.  Having known Steve for twenty years, I knew he was smart, organized, committed, and, of course, an incredibly talented artist.  But what these materials crystalize for me is the extent of these traits and how hard a worker he was.  The breadth of his skills—artistic, academic, and interpersonal—is not something we all possess.  Not every excellent composer is also a great writer and public speaker and skilled in the art of interpersonal diplomacy.  An important part of Steve’s legacy must be the scope of his influence, from whole series like the Green Umbrella with L.A. Phil to discussions of harmony with lesser-knowns like myself.  Through my work, I hope I can illuminate some of the myriad means of expression that remain Steve’s lasting work.  

I’m looking forward to speaking with students at Kent State University this coming Monday, October 3! When speaking with students, I find it useful to think a bit about how we learn to compose and how our backgrounds and early experiences influence us. I also plan to share some of my recent works from my Albany Records portrait CD. Thanks to composer Adam Roberts for the invitation.

My 2016 song cycle, Sandburg Songs, part of my recent portrait CD release, will be featured on this week’s Modern Notebook on WUSF in Tampa. Tune in to hear Tony Arnold, Zohn Collective, and conductor Tim Weiss this Sunday, September 26, starting at 8pm EST.

I’m happy to confirm that my new work for ensemble mise-en, Parallel Lives, will be premiered on October 28 in New York.  This work was one of six that were selected from a worldwide call-for-proposals as part of the mise-en Festival scheduled for June 2020, and subsequently rescheduled a number of times due to Covid.  Better late than never!

Parallel Lives is scored for a conducted ensemble of flute, clarinet (doubling bass clarinet), trombone, violin, cello, percussion, and piano, which constitutes the core instrumentation of ensemble mise-en. While this is a unique combination, it mirrors my 7-piece instrumentation for Sandburg Songs, my 2016 song cycle, except for the addition of the soprano and the inclusion of a guitar instead of trombone. In both works, I looked for ways to create vibrant, mysterious, and alluring colors.  The title, Parallel Lives, stems from my own life experience: going back and forth from Hong Kong to the U.S. over the last five years, the way we find ourselves in unexpected situations, and the way our current lives and memories can coexist and blur.  

This premiere will be the first time I’ve heard my music live since the start of the pandemic. It’s true that a composer’s work is often solitary; no one would argue otherwise. But that time alone must be balanced and nourished by the shared in-person experience of collaboration and music-making. I am so much looking forward to hearing my composition and being in New York again after so long.

After significant delays due to Covid, I’m on my way to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to begin archival research on the music of my former teacher, the late Steven Stucky (1949-2016).  My work is part of a two-year funded project supported with a General Research Fund (GRF) Grant from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council.  While I intend to investigate and publish on Steve’s orchestral work, in particular his orchestrational technique and what elements contribute to his style or ‘voice’, the outcome of my research depends in large part on what exactly I find at the Library.  The Steven Stucky Papers have yet to be processed (a process I know something about), meaning my work will first consist of sifting through dozens of boxes to see what I have to work with and then making a determination about what there is to say about these materials and, significantly, which of these materials might need to be shared with the world.  I have no doubt my time at the Library of Congress will be meaningful, giving me new insights into a man I first met twenty-one years ago. 

Tune in to Modern Notebook on WUSF this Sunday night at 8pm EST to hear Dieter Hennings perform my guitar work, They Say. This 3-movement work is part of my recent Albany Records portrait CD release. Thanks to host and composer Tyler Kline for featuring my work!

Thanks to the crew at Take Effect Reviews for their review of my recent Albany Records portrait CD, Sandburg Songs.

My former teacher and dissertation advisor, James Primosch, has died, age 64. Jim was an honest, warm, caring, compassionate human being, and I will miss him. I learned the music of many wonderful composers through him: Davidovsky, Perle, Martino, and others. We got along splendidly from our first meetings and shared many laughs and a lot of dark humor. (We also share a birthday.) Jim wrote some truly stunningly beautiful pieces, especially some of his songs—I hope he knew that, I told him so—and I believe that beauty will live on and Jim through it. Rest in peace, my dear friend.

I’m absolutely thrilled to announce that Sandburg Songs has been released on Albany Records. My portrait CD features the renowned soprano Tony Arnold with Zohn Collective and conductor Tim Weiss in my large-scale song cycle based on Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems, along with four other chamber works that span a decade of creative work. These works are scored for solo piano (Inner Truth), solo guitar (They Say), clarinet and violin duo (Noticing), and a trio for clarinet, violin, and piano (In Search of Planet X) and represent different points in my artistic output. The musicians are stellar, and it feels great to finally share this music with the broader public. I am especially grateful to the entire team at Albany Records and Oberlin Conservatory, including recording engineer Paul Eachus, and to my friend, the video artist, David Colagiovanni, whose art are found on the album cover and throughout the liner notes. The disc is available for purchase online here.

I’m very happy to hear that Eunmi Ko will be performing Inner Truth at the Swan City Piano Festival in Florida this June. Eunmi has been championing this work, which I wrote as part of a larger series of commissions honoring the centennial birth year of Isang Yun, since she first presented it a couple years back. I’m glad that in-person events are becoming possible again and will post details once I have them.

I was happy to receive a copy of the new book, Crossing Borders, Making Connections: Interdisciplinarity in Linguistics (Allison Burkette and Tamara Warhol, editors), in the mail today. This volume, published by De Gruyter, features a chapter I co-authored with Jiyoon Lee (University of Maryland, Baltimore County), titled “Comprehensive review of the effect of using music in second language learning.” Our interest in this subject goes back to a funded projected we pursued at the University of Pennsylvania in 2010, which included short melodies I composed to aid and test second language vocabulary acquisition.  I’m glad to see our work coming full circle in this new book and look forward to reading the other chapters in weeks ahead!

I’m very happy to have been awarded a General Research Fund (GRF) Grant from Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council to support research on the orchestral work of my former teacher, the late Steven Stucky.  The GRF Grant is the most significant and competitive grant for Hong Kong academics and will fund my two-year project, “Patterns of Influence: Steven Stucky as Orchestrator,” including archival work at the Library of Congress.

I first met Steve when I studied with him as an undergraduate at Eastman in 2000, and he remained a caring, generous, and inspiring presence in my life throughout his time on this earth.  I think very often about some of our discussions and wish he were still here for me to ask the many unanswerable questions for which he always seemed to have answers.  I hope my work over the next two years will play some small part in maintaining his legacy as a wonderful human being and a composer of finely-crafted, beautiful music.

My solo violin work, immaus, will be performed by violinist Sini Virtanen during the New Music Festival and Symposium at the University of South Florida in Tampa in March.  I’m especially grateful that my work will be included as part of this excellent event during these complex times for the performing arts.  I’ll be sure to post details on how to watch the performance, which will be streamed online, as soon as I have the them.

With the uncertainties of the pandemic, it’s not surprising that many performing arts groups are being forced to cancel or reschedule events. With this in mind, I’ve learned that the premiere of my work, Parallel Lives, as part of the mise-en Festival in New York, has been postponed to next season at a date to be determined. I’m looking forward to working with Moon Young Ha and his incredible crew then.

I’m so pleased to learn that my upcoming portrait CD with Albany Records has received funding from the Alice M. Ditson Fund at Columbia University.  I expect the CD to be out later this spring and am so impressed with the level of musicianship of soprano Tony Arnold and the members of Zohn Collective.  The CD will feature my large-scale Sandburg Songs, along with chamber music from the last decade.  Thanks to all the staff at Albany Records for their support of my work.

I’m very pleased to be one of seven composers from around the world selected to compose a new work for New York City-based ensemble mise-en for this year’s Mise-en Festival, to take place June 23-28 in New York.  My planned work is tentatively called Parallel Lives and is inspired by my own experience traveling back-and-forth between Hong Kong and the US (and many other places!) over the last four years.  I’ve become fascinated with how much activity is taking place at once, whether in a particular building, on a single street, throughout a whole city, or between two points on opposite sides of the globe.  Darting to and fro around the world, I’ve gained a new appreciation for how time passes—sometimes quickly, other times at a laborious place—and how our perceptions shift over vast distances.  The sudden shifts of time, place, and energy fascinate me and are something I want to explore musically in my work.  I’m very much looking forward to working with the stellar musicians of ensemble mise-en and their conductor, Moon Young Ha, this summer.

Over the last two weeks, the stars have aligned, and three old friends descended upon Hong Kong to once again prove how small the music world really is.  To begin, percussionist Sean Connors of Third Coast Percussion was in town giving performances and masterclasses with his fellow quartet members as part of Toolbox Percussion’s International Creative Academy.  While I was unable to make these events, it was great to catch up with Sean and meet his colleagues.  Sean and I were both undergraduates at Eastman, and he performed a work of mine (for trombone and vibraphone!) in a very memorable concert in which the ceiling started leaking and…during an especially active passage, the vibraphone began to move!

In addition to Third Coast Percussion’s stopping by, Beare’s Premiere Music Festival, led by Artistic Director Cho-Liang Lin, brought composer Lei Liang and violinist Aaron Boyd (among many other fantastic players) to the city.  I was so pleased that Lei was able to visit HKBU and introduce his music to our students.  We met in the summer of 2018 at the Valencia International Performance Academy and Festival in Spain, where my string quartet, City Lights, we premiered by Mivos Quartet.  I have long admired his work, which spans a great emotional and coloristic palette.  Besides visiting HKBU, a new duo of his for violin and percussion received an outstanding premiere by Cho-Liang Lin and Zhe Lin.  I was quite impressed with what I would call Lei’s “narrative flexibility”—the way the music moves from one passage or idea to the next.

Violinist Aaron Boyd, Director of Chamber Music at Southern Methodist University, performed in several of the festival’s concerts, including in a unique version of the Mendelssohn Octet.  He is one of my oldest friends, although it has been years–at least 17 years, in fact!—since we last saw each other.  Aaron and I went to high school together in Pittsburgh, and it’s safe to say that he was among the older classmates (He was the class of ’96; I was ’98.) that I looked up to as a young person.  In fact, Aaron has the distinction of having performed in the first public performance of any of my works, which took place in the spring of 1995 during the annual “Composers Concert” at CAPA (the Pittsburgh High School for the Creative and Performing Arts).  Who would have thought that all these years later we’d still be making music?  And on the other side of the world?!

Hong Kong has been taking a lot of hits since summer because of the protest movement.  It was a relief to have some downtime and share wonderful music being made by old friends.  This spiritual nourishment is needed now more than ever.

I’m very happy that my percussion quartet, Kinetic Attractions, has been selected for performance by McCormick Percussion Group, Robert McCormick, director, during the International New Music Festival at the University of South Florida, in Tampa, this coming April.  This will be my third visit to USF, having most recently enjoyed the premiere of my solo guitar work, They Say, with Dieter Hennings in 2018.

Kinetic Attractions was premiered in 2014 at the Athens International Film and Video Festival at Ohio University by NOBROW.collective.  Like a number of my works, it has an extramusical inspiration, in this case the video art of Melissa Haviland and David Colagiovanni, specifically the rhythmic smashing of fine china in their work, Music for Teacups.  I’m planning to revise and edit the work before the USF performance and look forward to working with Bob and his excellent ensemble in bringing the improved version to life.

With my recent travels, I was unable to honor the great  Chou Wen-chung in a timely way following his death on October 25.  I would simply like to say that hearing him speak about his life and work when I was a graduate student was one of the more memorable and moving encounters I can recall with a composer.  His music is beautiful and captivating.  It represents the true and authentic vision of the much-overused slogan of “East meets West”: life experience fused through technique into a personal sound statement.  His is a path we all must follow in our creative work.