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).
beth wiemann 