Prepping for the concert season..

It’s time again to get dates put into the calendar and confirm those already there. Looks like a busy fall, with some new pieces getting their first performances, and some playing clarinet/bass clarinet with a bunch of colleagues (Nightmare Before Christmas! Façade! Nina Rota!)

One premiere I’m really looking forward to: the new piece written for Spencer Brand (trumpet) and Katrina Clements (clarinet) for their 2025 fall tour. It uses Joan Wickersham’s poem “The Eroded Lion” from her book No Ship Sets Out To Be a Shipwreck, a work inspired by the Swedish ship the Vasa and its place now in the museum in Stockholm.

The poem focuses on the elements of the Vasa that either did survive being in the harbor water of Stockholm for hundreds of years, or did not. I saw the ship in its bespoke museum a few years back, and delved into the museum’s digital sources for some of the video accompaniment for the duo.

An early still from the video – it’s kind of a melancholy piece.

Before that tour, I have another premiere at the Bar Harbor Music Festival this month. Allison Kiger asked for a piece based on a poem by an important person in the town, James Russel Wiggins. She requested two versions – one for flute, cello, and piano, and one for flute and strings. The first version will be played this summer at St. Saviour’s Episcopal Church, August 20th. It’s inspired by a poem by Wiggins that Allison sent, from WIggins’ time at the Ellsworth American –

Much later in the season, there will be a premiere by Boston Opera Collaborative, as part of its Opera Bites series. Librettist Cecelia Raker and I pushed around a few ideas for a short opera (an opera bite..), and kept coming back to this:

The workshops are spread through the fall, with the premiere mid-winter. It’s a really fun story, and I think the actresses in it will have a grand time.

Let the season begin…

A member of the audience..sometimes a guest…

As the semester comes to an end, I’m remembering some concerts and shows that I saw with other real live people over the past few months. These include some of the SCI Region I-II conference concerts we hosted here at UMaine, but they also include some performances in special venues in Bangor and Boston that I’m lucky to be able to attend in person.

The Penobscot Theatre is always a great place to see a show, and I’ve been to 3 so far this year (still an opportunity next week..). The space is intimate but substantial-feeling, with enough of both old fashioned decor and new fangled lighting that welcomes you.

Seeing the JFB show Parade on its post-Broadway tour at the Colonial theatre was another memorable treat for eyes and ears. A packed house, and real Broadway show orchestra, and a video feed of the conductor on the front of the balcony – all great.

And sometimes it’s nice to be a guest on someone else’s show – we hosted clarinetist Ilya Shterenberg in March, and he needed a basset horn player for the last piece on his recital. So, luckily I was able to find a good rental basset, and off we went. Really fun to play with both Ilya and Scott..

More audience/guest things coming up this summer – will report after all the end-of-semester wrap-up.

Yay, Daylight Saving Time. Spring is coming

It’s been a busy just-past-midWinter here in Maine, both in stuff to do and in weather. One day it’s 50 degrees Fahrenheit, the next we get two inches of snow. Heavy snow.

Luckily, the conference we recently hosted at UMaine (Society of Composers Region I-II) had sunny/somewhat cold weather without precipitation. Unluckily, some of the performers coming into Maine ran into snow storms in the southern U.S., making for rescheduled concerts during the festival weekend. Everyone rolled with the punches, and you can see the live feed of the concerts here.

In preparing for the conference, we programmed a few of the UMaine-performer pieces on our faculty concert just before the festival. One of these was a piece I wrote during Covid, Rose’s Pictures. This piece used some material from Scene 3 of my work for Guerilla Opera, based on the life of Rose Standish Nichols, I Give You My Home. The music in this version, for flute, piano, and video, rethinks the material as a kind of fantasia, with accompanying pictures both of and by Rose Nichols herself, from her published books on gardening and of her own garden designs. The performance by my colleagues Liz Downing and Laura Artesani can be seen here, featuring Laura’s appropriate lighting choice on her instrument.

This month, I’m working on my basset horn playing, which I have not done since around 1995, but which I’m enjoying. It seems like a good way to welcome spring. If you want to hear the results, come by UMaine on March 28th…

…and the semester starts with a bang (or at least a woodblock sound)

We are now at the midterm point of coursework at UMaine, and there have already been some cool concerts on the schedule, so this post is just here to try to keep track of events before the election and the holidays take over.

First, the inaugural offering of Ohio University’s Clickfest was an awesome time. Six well-curated concerts and an impressive talk by Kelli Smith Biwer on the ways that sophisticated audiophile equipment was marketed to difference audiences in post-WWII America. I play my loud-cat piece, Domestic Shorthair, and made everyone think about their past pets.

The following week, in addition to the Bryne:Kozar:Duo performing the set I wrote for them at the beginning of their series of concerts this fall, a new piece for euphonium and piano was publicly premiered by its commissioners, David Stern and Laura Artesani. They are both great collaborators and great colleagues, and they seemed to have a good time with the piece.

Now, I wrangling arrangements for UMaine’s own upcoming festival in February 2025, the Society for Composers joint Region 1-and-2 conference. Performers from both regions are selecting pieces from our submissions as we speak, and I hope to have news next month on this front.

And, today, Davy and I get to see a production of Gabriel Kahane’s show February House in Boston. We almost have the original cast album memorized, but we never saw that production – very much looking forward to seeing it live and in person.

And.. we also voted today.

A Memorable Spring

I would not have anticipated that my work as a music professor at UMaine and my work at the same institution for the McGIllicuddy Humanities Center would have resulted in the following photo:

Eve Beglarian, me, Josh Henderson and James Moore, performing I Sat at my Desk

This concert of Eve Beglarian’s work happened in February, after discussion planning for just about 9 months. It was a combination of pieces from Eve’s BRIM project and more recent pieces based on the poetry of James Tate. At the McGillicuddy Center, we’d begun canvassing for projects to do with a symposium theme of “Rivers and Culture..,” and Eve’s work sprang to mind from her well-documented trip down the Mississippi River in 2009. It took a fair amount of work getting everyone in the same room at the same time with the right equipment, but we did have a great time during rehearsals and the show itself. And I surprised some of my students who had never heard me try to sing. You can hear and see the results here. Note – the concert proper starts at 6:44 into the video.

That same week, I also performed a work that has recently entered the standard repertoire for clarinet, the Weinberg Clarinet Sonata. The piece was a heavy left for me from a technical standpoint, but well worth it, and working with Phillip Silver is always enlightening, especially in this style of music. You can hear the middle movement here, to get a sense of the piece – both Phillip and I thought this was the scariest movement.

I want to thank several fellow clarinetists that performed my pieces this spring, starting with faculty colleague at SUNY Fredonia, Andrew Seigel. He’d sent me a note about a bass clarinet piece of mine a while back, and then suddenly programmed it last month, with hopes of playing it again soon. Here’s the whole clarinet faculty concert at Fredonia, with my piece starting at timestamp 43:39.

Even more impressive were a couple of students who programmed my pieces on their recitals – they both chose pieces with video accompaniments, which is always a little nerve-wracking to rehearse and play live, along with the fixed media. You can see a bit of what they were dealing with in these photos:

Andrea Uremovich, clarinet, playing Lake Chatter at University of Oklahoma

Carli Castillon playing Sallee and Ramsey at Mann Gulch at University of Florida

There were lots of events in and around these concerts, some with guests (yay, Byrne:Kozar:Duo!) and some with colleagues (online presentations with Guerilla Opera friends, and the Visions 2024 Humanities Showcase, with a host of colleagues talking about their work, including many of my collaborators from across UMaine). It feels like it was an especially busy year for everyone, perhaps because we’re comparing everything to COVD still, or perhaps that we are making up for lost time. Now that the semester is almost over, it’s great to think back on these events again with gratitude for the whole package.

Happy summer (for those that celebrate).

New CDs coming in August –

The Bryne:Kozar:Duo has its CD on New Focus Recordings coming soon – it’s available for preorder now, and officially releases August 4th, with an event at LilyPad in Cambridge on August 6th at 4PM. It should be an excellent summer event.

https://www.byrnekozarduo.com

You can see Corrine and Andy play the middle movement of my piece here: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/714928971

Voices of Earth and Air Vol V

Later that month, the Navona CD with my piece Young Charlotte, for mezzo-soprano, piano and electronic sound arrives, with wonderful performers Aliana de la Guardia and Yoko Hagino.

It’s Summer!

with a few things coming up..

The next few months I’m hoping to get going on a new music-plus-video piece, but there are some events to break up the season. First, another showing of the I Give You My Home film is scheduled for Keene, NH at the Colonial Theatre, June 11th at 1PM. Having seen the movie now a few times on a big screen, I can heartily recommend that viewing/listening experience. Some of the visuals in the piece were recorded nearby, so we hope for Keene locals come out to see them.

Another event coming up is the release of another work of mine on Parma Records, after Parma’s release of the I Give You My Home CD.

This piece, Young Charlotte, was recorded by Aliana de la Guardia and Yoko Hagino in the Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport MA, which was a great experience in itself. The release date is August 24th, on the disc VOICES OF EARTH AND AIR VOL. 5. More info to come..

The Film! The CD!

It’s that time – Guerilla Opera’s work on my piece I Give You My Home is being released this month as both a movie and a CD/audio playlist. The first “single” just dropped, and on March 10th the whole CD will be released. The movie has several screenings scheduled for the live experience coming up – Watertown, MA – Keene, NH – Portland, ME included. There will be online experiences as well, and you can get all of the details in the links below.

We’ve been working on this piece for a while now, with public performances last spring and summer. Now it will be possible for many more people to see the Guerilla musicians perform, both in the Nichols House Museum that inspired the piece, and on location in and around the places that inspired Rose Nichols herself.

General info:

Guerilla Opera presents I Give You My Home, a world premiere operatic film inspired by the Nichols House Museum and the life of Rose Standish Nichols, a true-life women’s peace party and suffrage activist and professional landscape architect, and brings to light this singular Bostonian woman’s efforts to affect change. I Give You My Home features music and original libretto by Beth Wiemann and brought to life by the acclaimed filmmaker Cara Consilvio.

Learn more about the project at https://igg.me/at/igymh and view a full schedule of events at  https://guerillaopera.org/eventcal/.