News: June 22, 2011

Summer’s proving to be busy as well as ridiculously exciting. Foremost in my mind is the beginning of Wild Rumpus, a new music collective dedicated to the collaborative development of music by young/emerging composers. I’ve written a bit about the motivation behind starting the group here, but essentially I’ll be working with my two wonderful co-directors (Dan and Sophie) and a brilliant group of musicians, bringing music we love into the world in a way that gives composers lasting and meaningful support. Things have been really busy the past month or so getting the administrative side of things off the ground: sending off applications, launching our website, and sending out our call for scores. Soon, we’ll be announcing our season’s programming (with the exception of our Commissioning Project composers) as well. One of my upcoming projects is a piece for the ensemble!

I’m also very honored to be a recipient of one of the Staubach Honoraria, a program sponsored by the Eiler Foundation and the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt. I’ll be writing a chamber work for premiere by Talea in July 2012 at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (International Summer Courses in New Music), a contemporary music festival with a long, rich history held in Darmstadt every two years. Before that piece is finished, however, I hope to finish a song cycle for contralto Karen Clark, string quartet, and percussion quartet that I’m working on, as well as a piece for pianist Gloria Cheng, who will be playing graduate student works as part of an upcoming residency at Cal.

I’ve also just finished writing a piece for my friend Tiffany Ng, associate carillonist (and music history grad student extraordinaire) here at Cal. She’ll be premiering Fixed Pattern of Distant Stars on July 3 in a program that also features premieres of works by Michael Nicholas and Andrew Ly, before taking her program on tour to Ireland and Denmark over the summer. The experience of writing for a 20-plus-ton instrument that can be heard from five miles around was a truly novel experience. Hope you’ll come hear the results!