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Dear Friends,
I hope you’re doing well. I’m really excited to let you know about some of the upcoming premieres and performances in the year ahead.
This season kicks off with a portrait concert in Basel, Switzerland. As part of a residency with the Laurenz House Foundation, I will present an evening of six of my works along with my fellow resident (and wife) Carrie Sun, who will read from her forthcoming memoir, Private Equity.
In October, I’ll be back in New York for the world premiere of Ode to Joy, an homage not (directly) to Beethoven, but rather Frank O’Hara’s gorgeous poem of the same name. A joint commission of the Park Ave Armory, Sandbox Percussion, and Blow Up Percussion, the premiere will take place at the Armory on October 1 and 3. A few weeks later into the month, on October 21st and 22nd in Rome, Blow Up Percussion, will present the Italian premiere.
October being Percussion Month (in my mind), Third Coast Percussion will bring Meander, Spiral, Explode to Switzerland to perform with the Winterthur Orchestra October 25th through the 27th. TCP premiered the work back in 2019 in Chicago and Oregon—and I’m so happy it’s having its European premiere.
On November 3, Lorelei Ensemble will bring Beaufort Scales, a new 36-minute oratorio for 8 voices and live electronics, to Mass MoCA. This piece draws inspiration from various iterations of the Beaufort Wind Force Scale created by Sir Francis Beaufort in 1805, along with texts from Melville, Fitzgerald, and Anne Carson. The piece tries to posit—through both historical sources and technological intervention—what increasingly tempestuous weather is doing to our lives. A few days later we’ll record the work for release on Cold Blue Records.
Following this, on November 11 and 12, I’ll be a Kulas Foundation Visiting Artist at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where I’ll give a masterclass and share a portrait concert with the late, great Kaija Saariaho.
2024 begins with Sandbox Percussion and Conor Hanick at the 92nd Street Y in NYC on January 31. They’ll perform Don’t Look Down, a concerto for piano and percussion in a concert that can be viewed live and streamed.
In late March, the Phoenix Symphony will perform The Age of Wire and String on the 22nd through 24th. This work is a six-part orchestral suite that I composed especially for my good friend Tito Muñoz to premiere, and it’ll be a joy to see this work in his hands in the spring.
The spring will also include a performance of a new work for two pianos at the Gilmore Piano Festival Young Artists Recital and a premiere of a new work for wind ensemble and soprano by the University of Illinois with Lindsay Kesselman. Lastly, I look forward to working with Ensemble Vonk from Tilburg, Netherlands, on a new piece to be premiered summer of 2024.
A few months ago marked the release of In a Grove, my new opera written with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann. I’m profoundly excited to share that the world premiere recording of In a Grove is available now as a digital download and a limited edition CD (designed by Still Room), and for streaming on all major platforms from In a Circle Records.
You can buy a CD/digital download from Bandcamp, stream on Spotify, Apple Music, or any of your other favorite platforms.
The album features the luminous voices of Lindsay Kesselman, Chuanyuan Liu, Andrew Turner, and John Taylor Ward, as well as the incredible instrumentalists of Metropolis Ensemble. The reviews have been very generous, and you can read a few below:
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