News

Wow, it's almost April, and I've been silent. Part of that has been due to a very large - huge - typesetting job, an opera, which consumed me from before Christmas until a couple of weeks ago. The little time I had was devoted to preparing for the classes I am teaching. Now I feel like I have some time to devote to my true calling.

One of the things that has happened during this period, and it happened only Monday of this week, is that a new version of Paradiso has been chosen to be premiered at the College Music Society National Conference in Louisville on Oct. 24. So what is this new version and when did I have time to write it? When I saw the call for scores, I thought that maybe that the time was ripe for a premiere of the original version for chamber orchestra. The 12' time limit meant that Chaos and Symphony No 3 were out of the question, and after I decided to go for it, I realized that the available orchestra didn't include soprano saxophone, piano, nor harp. Annoying, yes, but I had already arranged it for sinfonietta, without harp or sax, so why not include piano and put a few things back in that I'd removed for the sinfonietta version. I got to the ending, which I needed to change anyway after the performance of the sinfonietta version, and found that it didn't work as it was without piano, so I made a major change, adding two bars to the ending to make it work. That doesn't sound major, but it involved changing the meaning of the ending in my head. I still have to decide whether to go back and change the other versions.

Aside from that, I need to get down to writing my tenor sax piece (tenor and string quartet). I've started and stopped several times, in some cases even short of writing things down. I really need to start keeping a composing journal again - a paper one. At least I could remember some of the fleeting ideas I had for it.

What else? I want to write 3 more movements to add to The Black Pool. It's the water movement of an Earth, Air, Fire, Water piece. The plan is to make them all around 2 minutes long and orchestrate them each in (or after) a style of a different composer, without actually copying the compositional style. Air was going to be Webern, Fire possibly Stravinsky, and Earth Lutoslawski, although my orchestration isn't far from his anyway.

I might also write a few more movements to Temps (cl, vl, vc, pf). There is a solo clarinet movement and Time Knot already finished, and I might borrow a movement or two from Labyrinth, since it is the same harmonic material, probably the second. I was also thinking of the third, but I'm not sure it would work with this ensemble.

A Mighty Fortress is still on the back burner, and the last movement of Night Visions is still a pipe dream. With the assistance of my Advanced Music Engraving class, I have also created a version of Chaos for sinfonietta, which I'm hoping to get a performance for, in the near future.

Well, that's all for now. Time to cook some dinner.