Find Stephen on:
Tag Archives: Pictures on Silence
New recording, new performance
Pictures on Silence premiered Plunge, for harp, alto sax, and electronics, on Friday, Nov. 12th. Jacky and Noah did a fantastic job with this, and I’m really happy to share this recording from the performance. Their gentle pacing and plaintive lyricism is exactly what I was looking for:
Plunge
More info on the piece can be found here.
If you’re in the Boston area on Friday, Dec. 11th, come check out the world premiere of a new arrangement of And They Sing This, for Bb clarinet and electronics. The piece was selected by the Boston New Music Initiative from a call for scores. Written last spring for oboeist Emily Madsen, And They Sing This uses recordings I made in India around Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi, interviews I conducted with my great-uncle before just before he died, and a delay patch on the live performer. This new version for Clarinet will be performed at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 11th at Lilypad in Cambridge, MA (tix $10), along with pieces by Jason Bolte, Kyong Mee Choi, John Gibson, Moon Young Ha, Jeff Herriott, Mary Kouyoumdjian, and Kirsten Volness. Map/directions here.
Lots of stuff coming up to announce
If you’re in Indianapolis on Saturday, November 13th, come and see Blake Wilkins and the Moores School Percussion Ensemble from the University of Houston play Push at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention. More info on that event here. They’ll be premiering the piece on Monday, November 1st at a special preview concert at the University of Houston before they hit the road for the trip up north.
Closer to home, Pictures on Silence will premiere Plunge, for harp, alto sax, and electronic sounds, on Friday, November 12th on a concert in John Paul Hall at Catholic University in Washington, DC at 7:30pm (free!). As promised in my August post, this piece involves sounds I recorded while traveling this past summer with my trusty microtrack. Most of them come from the harbor in Southampton, UK (the place where both the Mayflower and the Titanic left from!): lots of boats and docks creaking in the waves. Giving in to my long-time fascination with British accents, I also used a bunch of conversations I picked up around town. Pictures on Silence will take the Plunge on what’s shaping up to be a pretty exciting event: lots of electronics, some pieces that involve film, and another world premiere by composer Anna Rubin.
Signals, commissioned by the NOW Ensemble last year, will be played by DC’s Great Noise Ensemble on Friday, December 3rd. Info and tickets to that event can be found here.
On Sunday, October 3rd, Collide-O-Scope Music got off to a great start this season with an opening event at Christ and St. Stephen’s Church in NYC. Along with my piece Surely Some Revelation?, we featured works by Cage and co-director Christopher Bailey. In addition to this first event, we’ll also be putting on another NYC event at the Issue Project Room on Feb. 24th, and on March 11th here in DC at the Atlas Theatre, as part of the Intersections DC festival (Collide-O-Scope’s DC debut!).
Summertime updates
I’m just wrapping up a commission from the Moores School Percussion Ensemble at University of Houston. Director Blake Wilkins, a composer as well, does wonderful things with this group. They’ll be premiering something I’m tentatively calling Push, for 12 percussionists, this fall. More info to follow.
Collide-O-Scope Music will ride again: we’ve got some very cool things lined up for our second season, which we will be ready to announce shortly. I’m also just starting work on a commission from Pictures On Silence, a fantastic harp and sax duo based in the DC/Baltimore area. In that piece, I’m hoping to involve some sounds I collected while traveling in Turkey and the UK.