Play Like a Girl in NYC!

Play Like a Girl will receive its New York premiere on Sunday 8 February at the DiMenna Center. Salome Scheidegger will play three variations of the 8 factorial possibilities, and I can’t wait to hear her do it.

See you there, I hope!

new music gathering

I’m heading to San Francisco tomorrow where I will meet up with Giacomo Fiore and Mary Rowell to put together a bit of RiverProject music for the New Music Gathering, Thursday evening at 7 pm. really looking forward to seeing old and new friends!

A Monthly Series of New Music From Avant Media – NYTimes.com

A Monthly Series of New Music From Avant Media – NYTimes.com.

A commemoration of what would have been John Cage’s 102nd birthday will open the season, with a roster of new-music stars (among them Eve Beglarian, Vicky Chow, Nick Hallett, John King and Mr. Gibson) performing Cage’s 1970 “Song Books” (Sept. 5). 

 

perpetual happiness

Tony de Mare will be playing some of the Sondheim reworkings he’s commissioned on a concert in NYC on Sunday 12 May at 3 pm. It’s also being streamed, so you can check it out from wherever you are. My piece is a response to Happiness from Passion. It’s part of the WONDERFUL Tribeca New Music Festival: check out the whole series of concerts!

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.

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.)