I'm sorry...
That I haven’t been on here in close to two weeks. My schedule has been super-hectic: between coordinating rehearsals for the premiere of my new piece, “Modifiers #1”, writing chromakeying software in Max/MSP/Jitter for the video portion of the piece, re-tooling the proposal for my graduate thesis, and fending off burglars (yes, our house got broken into this week. It sucked. Now we live in a bank vault like the guy from Aphex Twin. Yes, I know his name is Richard D. James. It’s funnier to call him the guy from Aphex Twin.) I just haven’t had the time to devote space in my brain to blogging. However, I wanted to keep the blogging faithful abreast of some future projects: most of these amount to “what I’m going to do with my summer vacation”, but I think they’re pretty neat, so maybe you guys will too.
1: I’ve been commissioned to write a new piece for snare drum, which I’m totally pumped about. I’ve wanted to write a snare drum piece for a while, and I have some exciting ideas regarding how to write for it. I’m tired of hearing snare drum repertoire that centers around the whole “harder-faster-louder-longer” aesthetic: those values reduce the instrument to a stunt drum, reserved for displays of technical prowess and gimmicky tricks. Very few composers have actually explored the unique timbral properties of the drum; fewer still have investigated the instrument’s nearly singular ability (as a percussion instrument) to produce sound without being struck. I think that exploring the ways the drum can produce sound without being hit will be a fascinating journey, and I can’t wait to start!
2: I’m looking for a space to start work on this installation I’m planning for next year. I don’t want to talk about it much, other than to say that it will be completely interactive and very cool from an audience-experiental standpoint.
3: I think I’m going to learn Xenakis’ “Rebonds” this summer, something I’ve said I want to do for the past four or five summers. I have the score, so I think I’m finally going to bite the bullet and do it this summer.
4 (and this might be the most exciting one): tomorrow, I’m going to start recording Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint”. It’s probably my favorite piece of contemporary music, and I have a really special connection to it: it’s the first piece of non-pop music that I had ever heard by a post-1950 composer. Without “Electric Counterpoint”, it is safe to say that my life would be completely different: very simply put, the last eight years of my life would be completely different. I would not be a serious percussionist, a scholar of contemporary music, a music theorist, or an electronic musician without it; all those pithy little job descriptions you see to the left of this text would be replaced by something like “miserable law student” or “high school history teacher”. And what fun would this blog be THEN? I owe it to this piece of music to render it the way I have always heard it in my head, and words can’t express how much I’m looking forward to absorbing myself in this piece.
This, really, is as close to a personal mission statement as I might ever get. It is only when I am pursuing these sorts of endeavors, things that get me in way over my head and threaten never to release me, things that are time-consuming, personally taxing, and emotionally draining, that I TRULY feel like I am doing something of value, that I am fulfilling my “purpose”, or however you’d like to term it. I am gradually realizing that this kind of artistic and intellectual engagement isn’t something that I do; rather, it’s what defines me. Everything else seems ancillary and superficial by comparison. When I take on a project like the four I listed above, I feel focused, directed, in a way that I rarely feel otherwise: I am “in my element” sitting in a coffeehouse and writing until 2 AM, or holing up in some windowless studio writing Max patches and recording the same take over and over until it’s satisfactory.
I’ll try to blog as often as I can during the process: I apologize once again for my absence, and I guarantee that I’ll be posting more soon!
