New music out on Full Spectrum Records! if the thought evaporates for ensemble and electronics.
New Music out on Sawyer Editions - Snow (2023) for violin, cello, percussion and piano. Marijn Meijer, violin; Colin Stokes, cello; Benjamin Damann, percussion; Kory Reeder, piano.
Volumes 4, 5, and 6 of the Texas Series are out now! (forgot to post about them here…)
Volume 3 of the Texas Series is out now!
Volume 2 of the Texas series is up!
Over the past five years of living in Texas, I have amassed a large body of work and I'm extremely excited to have a large body of recordings of that work. However, most of these recordings are archival and not something I have any intention of releasing commercially; many of them are from noisy concerts, reading sessions, rehearsals, or DIY recordings with friends. Still, I want to share this music with the world somehow and I figured the best way to do that would be to put it on my Bandcamp for free. That being said, I have over 10 hours of music in the archive, so I’ve decided to share this music in monthly installments of a more manageable size, curated into volumes based loosely on instrumentation. The first of these volumes is out today, my 30th birthday, and will be released the 11th of every month until the end of the year
Very excited to be heading off to Princeton/Newark in July to work with with Institute Director Steven Mackey, guest conductor Case Scaglione, and the New Jersey Symphony with a final concert of my "Walls of Brocade Fields" (2019) for large orchestra performed at NJPAC’s Victoria Theater in Newark on Saturday, July 15 at 8 pm. If any friends in the greater NJ/NYC wanna make the trek out, I'd love to see ya! Check out the whole thing here.
New imprint from Sawyer Editions: Sawyer Spaces.
Hello friends, I hope you are doing well on this lovely Bandcamp Friday. I'm writing to share with you that I have started a new imprint called Sawyer Spaces. Sawyer Spaces will be a new sub-label, imprint, whatever you want to call it focusing on field recordings and soundscape composition. I have a real love for soundscape composition, acoustic ecology, field recordings, and all the ways artists have used the natural world either to inspire their work or as the raw material for their work. While some of the SE releases have featured the sounds of the natural world, I want to have a space where I can share this my love for this music without shifting the focus of SE itself. So if this sounds cool, please check out Sawyer Spaces on Bandcamp!
Sawyer Spaces runs the same as SE: I have 5 albums to show you, released in batches, available to purchase in batches, but only limited to 10 copies of each disc, each batch will feature a small piece of visual art as well by an invited visual artist or a composer in the batch. So come on down and check out the inaugural batch of Sawyer Spaces releases - Self-portrait as a meditation on Somewhere Else by me; Trails (2019 - 2022) by Kevin Good; MÚSICA SACRA by Sergio Cote Barco; Resonance Ecology by Garrison Gerard; and to be noise and dance by María Alejandra Bulla.
Raising Money for Composing in the Wilderness
I am very excited to share that I have been selected as 1 of 6 composers invited to participate in the Composing in the Wilderness’s 2023 Lake Clark trip. The project will include travel to Alaska with a 10-day excursion into Lake Clark National Park & Preserve. We will be transported by bush planes into the remote and stunning wilderness of Lake Clark National Park where we will camp, hike, and paddle while drawing inspiration from the wildlife, geology, scenery, and dangers of their surroundings. After this, I will compose a substantial new piece for wind ensemble reflecting on the experience (personal, environmental, etc.). The work will then be performed by a consortium of ensembles including Tamey Anglley and the SFA Wind Ensemble (Texas), Carolyn Barber and the University of Nebraska - Lincoln Wind Ensemble, and The Grand Valley State University Wind Symphony under the direction of Kevin Tutt (Michigan) all set to perform the works. We plan to invite more ensembles to present the works as well. Now in its eleventh year, the unique Composing in the Wilderness program is led by adventurer-composer Stephen Lias and offered by the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival in collaboration with Alaska Geographic and the National Park Service.
This excursion is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience the fragile frontier first-hand, and to reflect on the environment in a public-facing, educational, and artistic setting. For a young composer, the opportunity to compose for wind ensembles is exceedingly rare, and it is extremely difficult for young composers to have the opportunity to compose for projects that guarantee more than one performance of a work. This project will provide me with the opportunity to enter this lucrative performance space and share my work with a much wider audience.
I'm excited to share that I have most of the budget covered by extremely generous funding from the UNT College of Music and the Division of Composition Studies, but need a little help to get the rest of the excursion covered. I still need to purchase my flights to and from Alaska and cover the final expenses for the whole excursion. If you are able, I would be extremely grateful for any support to make this truly unique and life-changing experience possible!
Some really great projects in the works. Pieces in Japan, Argentina, the UK, albums in the works…. all of this and I still can’t seem to get in the habit of updating my website…. I’m in the process of creating pages on this site for every piece in my catalog; these pages will include a recording and a score of the works as well as a little info for each piece. I’m working chronologically through the spreadsheet linked below, so it will take a little time, but for now everything listed in bold on my Pieces page will link so something, and eventually this paragraph will be removed once I get caught up.
This year has been an absolute stellar musical year. I put out 3 albums, started a record label that has put out 10 albums, played or had my music played somewhere at least once every single week, had my music played on 5 continents, received an abundance of affirmation and support from friends and strangers, somehow wrote a literal symphony, and managed to write and then rewrite my 100-page dissertation.
Thank you to Steve Smith for including Codex Vivere in his 22 for 22’. several of these releases are on my end of year list and I’m grateful to be counted among the “recordings to which I returned over and over for uplift and transport, revelation and joy.” I hope next year will bring even more music!
I’m beyond excited to share the release of my Codex Vivere on Another Timbre. AT is my absolute favorite label, and I’m honored to have my work in such amazing company performed by Apartment House… the best contemporary ensemble around.
Hello everyone, I'm extremely excited to share with you my dissertation! This piece is pretty huge, and certainly the culmination of a whole lot of ideas, friendships and I’m very excited to have this out in the world. Thank you to everyone involved in this project from the performers, to the folks who helped me set up chairs. Some folks on this recording I’ve worked with on over a dozen pieces, and it feels really great to get so many people together to make a piece this big come to life. There’s too many people in this post to tag, and the facebook algorithms are not super kind to me anyway, but I wanted to give special accommodations to Júlia Coelho and Kathy Crabtree for standing up on stage next to me, and for all the projects you've endorsed and come along with over the last few years, as well as Chris Poovey and Patrick Reed for the last-minute help on setting up this recording. Hope you dig it!
NEW ALBUM OF MY GUITAR MUSIC OUT NOW
Pre-orders are available for my upcoming release on NCTMMRN "I am not here," containing all of my sparse, minimal guitar music. I'm really happy with how the record came out; it feels to me like sitting on my porch with a guitar, daydreaming and playing a few tones here and there. Something bluesy, something nostalgic, something perhaps fleeting.
Half of this album was recorded in Russia by Denis Sorokin, and the other half in Virginia by Stephen Hennessey. I think the meaning of that has changed a little bit in the last few years. This album was agreed upon in 2020, and a lot has changed since then, but especially this week, it feels different. I haven’t quite figured out how to articulate this, but my heart aches for the people of Ukraine and Russia. I’ve seen a lot of posts from folks in both counties, and the resounding consensus (no surprise to anyone) is that the war happening is a pointless and tragic event that nobody wants. I understand that saying this on the internet, about an album of music is probably the least important thing in the whole wide world, but something is stirring in me. I don’t want to be toxically positive about things, but putting out music with friends from so far away first under the conditions of the pandemic and then now the brink of WWIII gives me some hope for the affirmations we can give to each other, and how we can say that things are still possible. Perhaps highly improbable, but certainly still possible. Thanks to Sergei Tumanov for making it all possible.
Happy New Year! I’ve started a small-batch edition and I’d love if you checked it out. This has been a real labor of love; my entire artistic drive is to share and make music with my friends, and to find great new music, and this edition is really a high-point of that. A lot of folks in the contemporary music scene don’t have focused releases, so I’m hoping this might be a start to making some great records of from not only my friends, but folks I haven’t heard before. I had a great time recording with Conner Simmons, Joseph Reding, and West Fox, and for Aaron Michael Butler for all his help making this possible. for these recordings, and it’s been a good time figuring out how all this works. There is some great music coming out from Anthony Donofrio, Jack Langdon, Gabrielle Cerberville, Darcy Copeland, and myself.
Contemporary, experimental, and improvised music. Everything releases January 7th, we have limited physical discs handmade by me!
Please check it out, give it follow, listen to the music, share around!
This was my first piece at an in-person festival since a few days before lockdown at the 2021 Composers Conference at Brandeis. It was an absolutely wonderful experience, and thank you so much to Kurt Rohde for everything you do with the Conference. I’m really happy with this piece: it pushed me in a lot of interesting directions with my work, but also felt like a synthesis of a lot of ideas. Compared to a lot of my recent work, this also feels like a “fast” piece and even a “Romantic” piece. That might just be me, but it feels like something a little different.
New release on Impulsive Habitat. My work Self-portrait as a Meditation on Someone Else has been release to this wonderful net label of field recordings, soundscapes, and all sorts. My piece can be found by following this link, but there are plenty of amazing works on the site, and I highly recommend culling the catalog.
I’m really excited to share that some of my scores are available on Edition Wandelweiser. Aside from how excited I am to have some of my work here, I’m extremely happy have a place where folks can find my music and explore. The PDF score pages on Edition Wandelwesier were an essential part of my education, and brought on an entire reshaping of my work and my performance practice. I look to them regularly for music to play with my friends, creative inspiration, and a place to explore new music. If anything, I hope that someone else might find some inspiration, or get some joy from these pieces as well. The pieces are part of an on-going series of pieces I’ve been calling “Grid Pieces” (for want of a better name), that use text and pitch matrixes to initiate performance situations. I’ve really loved these pieces, and I’ve written a lot of them for some really great people. Performing them has been a blast the last few years, and I’m really excited to be able to share them with the world in this way. There’s 23 on the EW site right now, and I’m working through nearly 200 (!) of them, and filtering through my favorites for the future!
New music for Woodwind Quintet!
New music on BandCamp today! I know the world is on fire, but I'd like to share 3 hours of new music!
This piece is quite long, and is probably one one of my more ambitious pieces of the last few years, and I don't think it would have come to life without Antoine's encouragement last summer. I really miss playing together as often as we used to, and although nobody was in the room with us, this recording session was one of my favorite musical moments of the year. Thank you so much to Anne Dearth Maker, Mia Detwiler, Kourtney Newton, Erin Cameron, West Fox, and David Cavasos for all the beautiful music you make. And a huge shoutout to Stephen Hennessey for putting this recording together with me, cleaning up my bad recording in a terribly noisy room.
I have not done well at keeping this space updated with news. There’s been a lot of developments, and a lot of great things have been happening and will be coming down the pipes. I’ve been very fortunate to know so many amazing artists and work with so many amazing people through social distancing. I certainly have not slowed down! I’m looking forward to the day we can all make music in person again, but until then, I hope you’re safe!
Until there, there’s a lot of new music on my Pieces page if you’d like to explore.
Always more coming.
Excited to share the release of love songs/duets on Edition Wandelweiser Records! Thank you again to Stephen, Luke, Erin, Alaina, Linda, Mia, Jonathan, and Samuel for everything you’ve done to make this happen, and a big thank you to Antoine for your unbridled affirmation and encouragement! Below is the first piece on the record, Folie à Deux I
ORDER HERE with Order Reference Number EWR 1913
love songs/duets
1 folie à deux i (2018)
erin cameron, luke ellard (bass clarinet)
2 somewhere, some place else (2018)
wind collision:
jonathan kierspe (saxophone), samuel anderson (bass trombone)
3 folie à deux iii (2018)
alaina clarice, linda jenkins (flute)
4 hiro yokose (2018)
mia detwiler (violin), kory reeder (piano)
duet: the act of being together