Category: News

Firehouse Festival

Mary Rowell and I will be participating in the Firehouse Festival at Sandra Sprecher’s amazing space on Saturday night 27 April. We’ll be doing some stuff you’ve never heard, along with some favorites. The whole lineup looks like big fun! Click the poster for more info and tickets.

firehousefest

Building the Bird Mound premieres Thursday

On Thursday 18 April, the Voices of Ascension under the direction of Dennis Keene will be premiering a new commission for chorus and organ called Building the Bird Mound. Click the photo for tickets and more information:

Building the Bird Mound was inspired by a visit I made to Poverty Point, a pre-historic mound complex in Northeast Louisiana, while traveling down the length of the Mississippi River by kayak and bicycle in the fall of 2009. Poverty Point, which was built sometime between 3500 and 1500 B.C. is structured as a series of long concentric half-circles that radiate from a center mound which is in the shape of a winged bird. When I stood in the center of the mound that November afternoon, I had a glimpse of something very powerful, a sense of being sheltered — held — in the body of this giant effigy bird, and close to the ghosts of all the people who had scrabbled in the dirt to pile up and carry soil, basket by basket, to build this sacred place. I knew then that I wanted to write a piece of music about this place and the people who built it, and Building the Bird Mound is the result of that afternoon’s inspiration.

Locrians play River Music

Here’s what Allan Kozinn of the New York Times had to say about Night Psalm and I’m Worried Now, but I Won’t Be Worried Long:

Mr. Faiman also gave a lovely account of Eve Beglarian’s “Night Psalm” (2009), an appealing meditation in which velvety descending arpeggios morph into a quietly rumbling harmonic haze. Ms. Beglarian’s “I’m Worried Now, but I Won’t Be Worried Long” (2010), though composed only a year after “Night Psalm,” inhabits a different universe: electronic sound, a droning cello line and tactile, rhythmically solid harp writing form the backdrop for a soulful, almost folk-song-like soliloquy for the violin, played here with a rich, deep sonority by Miranda Cuckson.

Village Voice talks of Book of Days

from The Village Voice, 1 June 2011

Wednesday, June 1 (tonight!); 8 p.m.
Eve Beglarian: Songs from A Book of Days

For over a decade, Beglarian has been working on this song cycle, which she describes “‘mulling over’ pieces, made in the spirit of commonplace books, collections of found thought that please me, and of medieval books of days.”

Whether she’s pivoting off Plato to create some early electro-percussive damage (circa 1985) that could’ve schooled Reznor, or turning Whitman’s “We Two” into a lovely duo for herself and Corey Dargel, she’s as intellectually erudite as she is deeply intuitive.

(Where else to hear Beglarian: On the New World-issued Tell the Birds CD, as well as the compilation Lesbian American Composers.)

heading home

I am finally heading back to NYC after nearly a year away, first paddling/biking down the Mississippi River and then working at a really fine series of artist colonies (Montalvo, the Hermitage, and Ucross.) I’ll be starting out tomorrow from northeastern Wyoming, thinking perhaps to head up through Canada a bit and down to Vermont, where I will drop off the kayak and the bike and the car, and then hop onto the Ethan Allen Express down to Penn Station on Saturday. Woo hoo!

One of the pleasures of coming home is that in the first days after getting home, there are gonna be a couple of premieres of my work: definitely an excellent way to get settled in!

On 8 June at Merkin Hall, Mary Rowell is going to premiere a brand new piece I wrote for her, called I’m Worried Now, But I Won’t Be Worried Long. (The title comes from a song by Charley Patton.) We’ll also be doing my James Tate setting, It Happens Like This, in a new arrangement, and the whole festival looks really wonderful, check it out here

And on 12 June at the Invisible Dog, the happening guitar quartet, Dither, is doing the first ever live version of The Garden of Cyrus, an electronic piece from 1985. I’m really excited to hear what they do with it live, for sure! Go here for more info.

So if you’re in New York, I hope I’ll be able to see you at one or both of these shows, and if not then, soon!!!