Tag: classical-music

Into summer..

Lots of travel over this spring while I was on leave, often for musical reasons, and sometimes just to see a new place. 2026 started with a MacDowell residency, where I worked on a piece to be performed by the Bangor Symphony in 2027, and continued work on the fairy tale opera “Blondine.” The studio setting was wonderful, although the size of the snowstorms during January was impressive.

in the studio..

There were performances to attend at the UGA New Music Festival, and the Splice Festival, where the ‘Vive Ensemble continued touring with my piece based on a poem by Joan Wickersham, Eroded Lions. Since the piece is for clarinet, trumpet, and video, most of the performances need to have a dark stage, and here’s what it looked like at Colby College’s excellent space.

Spencer Brand and Katrina Clements

The duo also played the piece at the SEAMUS National Conference in San Antonio, and later this month will play it at the New York City Electro-Acousitc Music Festival in lower Manhattan.

Seeing the piece live a few times inspired me to use some of the music from Blondine in another form, which was in turn inspired by an illustration from the edition of the fairy tale that I’m using for the opera.

Blondine rides on the back of a tortoise for a very long time in the fairy tale..

So, now there’s a new piece for bass clarinet and video, Turtle Crossing, and a demo of the piece is up on Vimeo. Most of the images in the video are historical paintings or public domain photography (thanks, publicdomainpibtures.net). But the Blondine image does appear as well, and one photo I took on a tourist trip to Quebec City, at the Shrine of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré:

The tips of the shoes do not appear in the video..

Now that this “distraction” of a piece is done, it’s back to the original summer plan, working on the fairy-tale that has giant tortoises, evil parrots, albino deer, and a host of other magical creatures. There will be a couple more performances of other pieces in Maine, as part of the Bar Harbor Festival and a solstice concert that’s part of the Vigorous Tenderness series. Plus, I need to practice the clarinet part for La Traviata for August, which will be a great segue into the school year. Which will be here before you know it…

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).