projects

Concerto for Steel Pan and Wind Ensemble

  • This piece is my DMA dissertation at Michigan State. The plan is three movements, 15-20 minutes. I’m working with my friend, Skip Thompson, an accomplished percussionist and steel pan soloist. I’m still working on the premiere for this work. Let me know if you’re interested!

SCENE&heard

  • SCENE&heard is a new music concert series at the  (SCENE) Metrospace gallery in downtown East Lansing. Our goals are to bring what we (composers and performers of new music) do in the College of Music to a wider audience and to make it more culturally relevant. Stay tuned to our website for information on future concert dates.

MSU Composition website and webcasts

  • In the fall semester, 2009, several MSU composers and I began webcasting concerts in the College of Music. Webcasts allow us to share our performances with colleagues, family, and friends. More importantly, though, they offer an opportunity for people interested in new music to see what we’re doing here at Michigan State. We use a combination of cameras (including the College’s own Canon GL-2), along with a PC running VidBlaster Pro and streaming live from UStream.
  • In December 2009, Sam Merciers and I designed a new, dynamic website for the MSU Composition Area (http://comp.music.msu.edu). The website is not only a resource for prospective students, but also for current composers and performers at MSU and elsewhere. A point of personal pride on the website is the MSU New Music Finder, a web application that I designed and implemented to connect performers with MSU composers. It allows composers to enter works into a database that can then be searched by instrumentation, duration, and composer.

Guidonian Hand

  • Guidonian Hand is a blog project that I started in 2008. Contributors to the blog include many of my composer and performer friends. I decided to start the blog after having a lot of interesting conversations with my friends about music, art, and culture. I wanted to use essays/blog posts to help me clarify some of my own ideas and present them in a clear and concise way. As of this writing (Feb. 2010), Guidonian Hand is a little bit on the dead side. However, if you’re just discovering it for the first time, there are some really interesting and well-written essays.

Folio

  • Folio is an art rock band made up of several of my composer/performer friends, including Nate Bliton, Ty Forquer, Sam Merciers, and Matt Schoendorff. We try to blend what we do in an academic setting with popular music. I actually don’t know much at all about popular music. These guys have to teach me about Led Zeppelin. (Weird, right? I don’t understand it, either.) Check out this video of us on YouTube.

Folio Publishing Cooperative

  • In 2008, I went to the North American Saxophone Alliance Biennial Conference in Columbia, SC to hear the premiere of Inner/Outer Monologue. There were several sheet music retailers there, but there was one publisher in particular that had scores from one particular composer who has written a lot for the saxophone. That publisher’s booth was a table full of scores by this composer and a couple of iPods on which to listen to any of the pieces. I thought to myself, “Heck, I could do that.” Folio Publishing Cooperative is my version of that booth. FPC is a group of composers pooling resources to promote our music directly to performers. Our first try at this will be in March 2010 at the NASA convention. If we succeed, we may continue this project in the future at other conventions. Check the blog page for updates.