Caprices for Solo Mandolin It’s been a long time coming, but it’s time to release the hounds… er, Caprices for Solo Mandolin. Begun during the pandemic lockdown, the seven caprices are technical challenges that I wrote for myself. While difficult (extremely difficult in some cases), they are all playable with practice. Below are the notes on the Caprices as… Read More
L’Esprit Inquiet I’ve been struggling with how to compose a piece in response to the rapid disintegration of norms and rights in the US under the Trump administration. While I’m generally all in for political protests, I’ve always found overtly political art to be hackneyed and ephemeral. Yet, watching the ever-coarsening discourse and the un-accountability of both… Read More
Three Preludes for Un-Specified Instrument and Computer Yeah, I’m a slacker who hasn’t composed or gone to many festivals this last year. I know. I also have a really good excuse – I’ve been teaching at both Mott Community College and Oakland University. That tends to take up a lot of time, as did the CD project. But despite having all of my free… Read More
Concrete Oasis I haven’t composed much this year. In fact, I’ve only written two pieces: Mechanical Landscapes (commissioned and premiered by East Lansing High School) and now, Concrete Oasis. The latter is a pretty big work though. Clocking in at just under 50 minutes, Concrete Oasis has been my main project for nearly a year. Generously sponsored by the Arts Council… Read More
Infinite Apple ID Loop ***UPDATE*** It looks like this may be a wider spread problem than I thought. I had it happen again on my iPhone this morning – apparently, this is a pretty serious/widespread issue that Apple is taking their sweet time to work on. Apple Care is no help. ***UPDATE*** So I’ve been stuck in an infinite loop of… Read More
What am I Doing? Oh, Yeah… That… Well, as ominously promised, here’s the big announcement now that the press conference is over and the proverbial cat is out of the bag. I have two major projects that will be taking up the majority of my time for the next year. They are: I’m one of the 2016 recipients of the Arts Council… Read More
You say particles, I say granular The last two weeks have been pretty busy. In one fell swoop, I drove (yes, from Lansing) to the International Computer Music Conference (yes, in Texas) and then to the Electro-Acoustic Barn Dance (yes Virginia, it was in… well… Virginia…). Great conferences, lot of great pieces, great people, and great post-concert discussions of aesthetics/compositional techniques/orchestration/coding (pronounced… Read More
Mini-Me and the Ramones The last three pieces I’ve written have been miniatures (Isomorphic Haiku, Mind the Gaps, and Separation Anxiety). All are in the sub three minute category. I’m not embracing a Ramones style approach to composition – in fact, my current projects will both be quite a lot longer – but it has got me thinking a bit about… Read More
The Chao of Coding I’ve recently been working on a pretty involved coding project focused on analysis/comparison of contours of ordered pitch intervals in Pd and Processing (via OSC). Pretty heady stuff, with a ton of Googling in the [vain] hopes that there’s already an object to do what I need to do with lists. Since there usually isn’t,… Read More
Exit, Day 2 The site is now back up – and overall, much improved. The new theme is much better than the old one. More modern (whatever that means), and dynamic (really, whatever that means). Auto-updates and backups have been configured, as has remote backups via my iPhone. Hopefully, this won’t crash again and force me to spend… Read More