With the big up and down’s in temperature over the past few weeks, it’s been hard to know what to expect for my regular commute. But, as things have turned out, my regular commute isn’t happening much this month, due to gigs in Maine and “away.” So the difficult driving job is more Davy’s concern this month – he’ll be coming up to Bangor tomorrow after spending today clearing out the mostly unexpected snowfall of Feb. 5th. The snow is coming down quickly as I write this, even though here in Bangor we’re weren’t supposed to be in on the action for this storm.
Davy will get here in time to hear the UMaine faculty concert where Phillip Silver and I will premiere a new work by Paul Schoenfield – the 2nd Sonatina for Klezmer Clarinet and Piano. The piece was commissioned by a group of clarinet players and their friends, a Clarinet Collective, a couple of years ago, and regional premieres began happening last fall from other Collective members. This February was the earliest I could schedule the Maine premiere for my contribution to the Collective, but I think the extra time with the piece will serve us well. For both of us playing, it’s a fun 10 minutes of music – lots of klezmer references with metrical games throughout.
Last weekend I also stayed in Maine, for the performance of “Astonishing,” the School of Performing Arts fundraiser this year, and for the UMaine Humanities Center’s Pecha Kucha event. Curated by Liam Riordan, and run by Bangor’s own Pecha Kucha obsessive Gibran Graham, a host of people showed up at CoeSpace downtown, and made the space feel like summer in spite of the spitting snow outside. Lots of people, pretty warm in the room:
There were 8 of us presenting our 6 minute 40 second stories-with-slides: in my case, stories-with-slides-and-music. There were colleagues from UMaine as well as artists from the area that I hadn’t met before. Because of the relatively unfamiliar format for all of the speakers, we dress-rehearsed beforehand, which lead most of us to change our tactics a bit when it came to the public event – mainly a process of editing for impact, and editing for keeping up with the slides’ timing. I chose to speak about the ongoing project with Jennifer, our chamber opera UNTIL THE WAR IS OVER, and used the preparation for this event to get back into planning for the workshop of scenes 1 and 4 this June in Hauck Auditorium.
Next up – working on taxes with Davy (we did start, at least with the paper receipts – now we move to the online collection of stuff we’ve paid for this year) and then on to West Virginia to hear a performance of “The Only Color I have” at Marshall University. Will there be snow there, leftover from the January blizzard?
Also next up – getting some materials ready for the Back Cove Contemporary Music Festival’s concerts in honor of Elliott Schwartz, the long-time champion of new music in Maine and beyond – just a few of the events planned throughout the year for Elliott’s 80th birthday. More info to come on those April events, with the hope that by April the snow will have stopped for a while.
beth wiemann 