Last night Symbiosis Duo (Gail Robertson and Stacy Baker) performed my new work Mirages at the University of Central Arkansas as part of their ongoing tour. Watching from the live stream, it was the first time I've heard the piece performed with live musicians, and they sounded so awesome together. Check out the stream! (Mirages begins at the 45 minute mark.) Huge thanks to these two for their musicianship!
Last night, euphonium artist Gail Robertson performed a recital at the University of Central Arkansas, including my work for unaccompanied euphonium, "Paracosms." She's a rockstar in the euphonium world, and I've known her since my undergraduate days at Tennessee Tech. Besides being a terrific performer, she's a constant supporter of new works for tuba and euphonium.
Check out her website here: https://www.gailrobertson.com/ Next weekend, Feb 5-8, the annual US Army Band Tuba Euphonium Workshop will be held at Bruckner Hall, at Fort Meyers, VA. Besides a solid line up of artists putting on recitals and full concerts, the exhibition hall is full of horns, equipment, gadgets, and sheet music. Some of my recent works (Mandelbrot's Dream, Tomes of Redemption, and 15 Orchestral Etudes for Contrabass Tuba) will be for sale at the Hickeys Music Center booth with the other Cimarron Music charts. Huge thanks to Cimarron and Hickeys for getting it out there for the tuba/euphonium community. Very excited that the North Texas Euphonium Quartet has released their new album, Machines, including my piece Goldberg's Machine. I had watched some livestreams of them playing this before, but I was absolutely blown away by the recording. Their signature attention to detail and musical nuance was on full display. Be sure to check this album out, on iTunes, Spotify, and CD! Some new projects coming down the line that I'm very excited for.
First up is a piece for Contrabass Trombone and Recording, the brainchild of lead consortium member Shelby Kifer. This is going to be a raucous piece featuring drum beats by Christian Teele, son of the late legendary bass trombonist Phil Teele of the LA film scoring scene. The piece will also be dedicated to Phil. Next is a book of 15 Advanced "Performance" Etudes for Euphonium. These are meant to be challenging etudes that push musicality and technique, without being impossibly hard. Each etude will also function as a standalone unaccompanied work for recitals. Also in the works is a new duet for Euphonium, Tuba, and Recording, utilizing elements of rock, jazz, metal, and electronic styles. If you heard my recent work for solo euphonium and recording, Mandelbrot's Dream, the flavor will be similar. There aren't many pieces out there for this combo, and with electronic accompaniment, this will make an ideal piece for guest artists to play with resident studios! Apart from more brass music, I'm work on music for concert band as well! In other news, over the weekend I happened to see that the extremely talented euphoniumist Dr. Gail Robertson was in town, and got to meet up for dinner with her and her incoming student Thomas Janssen. It was so awesome to get to sit down with someone I've been listening to since I was in high school! I've been watching posts go by on Facebook all week of friends and acquaintances and colleagues looking sharp at the International Tuba Euphonium Conference at the University of Iowa. Going to one of these is always a spectacle. The best tubers and euphers on the planet playing recitals all day long for a week...you come away AMPED. Well okay, first you come away never wanting to hear another goddamn tuba again, but THEN, you get excited by the possibilities.
This year I wasn't able to attend. Sucks! But I did still have a number of performances of new and older works. It's always a thrill to know someone is performing your music somewhere, even if it's just a small recital hall that 7 people show up to. The fact that someone is putting their skill into bringing your music to life is an honor, every time. Having performances at the biggest low brass conference in the world sure is swell, however. Dave Saltzman (dir.) and the Bowling Green State University Tuba/Euph Ensemble performed Evolutions, Dr. Irving Ray gave the world's second performance of Mandelbrot's Dream, Matt Hightower (dir.) and the University of Kentucky Conner Ensemble performed Apperceptions, and finally the renowned North Texas Euphonium Quartet performed a work I wrote for them previously Goldberg's Machine. On the off chance any of you or your students see this, THANK YOU SINCERELY FOR YOUR EFFORTS AND MUSICIANSHIP! Also, my work for euphonium, tuba, and piano, Dualities, was a finalist for the Harvey Phillips Award for Excellence in Music Composition! New works on the way soon! I guess c. 6 months is long enough to go between blog posts... Currently I'm running a consortium for a new euphonium work with mp3 accompaniment. The details can be found on Facebook. It's a piece I've been thinking about writing for a long time so I'm interested to see what becomes of it. It's always exciting to watch an idea take root and grow into something new; it's always, ALWAYS different than you imagined it, yet you can also still see the germ of that concept within the final form, no matter how subtle. Also in the works is a new etude book for solo tuba, featuring etudes based on the standard orchestral excerpts tubists are required to master to advance in orchestral auditions. The book will be edited by Preston Light and published by Cimarron Music. 2018 has been a great year that's seen me move to beautiful southern Oregon among an arts-loving town. 2019 is already looking to be very busy with writing and premieres. Cheers everyone! Today I delivered my concerto for tuba and band to Tim Northcut and my publisher at Cimarron Music, Bryan Doughty. This was the most challenging and rewarding piece I've ever written, and it took a lot out of me to create, but it was worth every effort. Honestly, I'm a little numb and in shock that the last double bar has fallen.
Written in 3 movements, the work is dedicated to my musical hero, Winston Morris and his career at TTU. It clocks in right at 20 minutes long. It's tentatively scheduled for a premiere at the 2019 US Army Tuba Euphonium Workshop in Washington, DC. There will be a piano reduction, as well as a SPECIAL EDITION that I'll talk more about later. Keep your eyes and ears open, tuba folk! |
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