projects

 

Concerto for Steel Pan and Wind Ensemble

  • This piece was my DMA dissertation at Michigan State. I have a whole page about it here.

SoundNotion

  • SoundNotion is a weekly podcast focusing on the discussion of new music and current events in the art music world. Giving a voice to contemporary music, our panel comprises composers and performers who actively promote new compositions and approaches to performance. Join us each week as we discuss news in the professional orchestra world, art music’s influence today, recent compositions, commissions, and performances and much more. We post new episodes for downloading and/or streaming every Sunday evening. Subscribe on iTunes and never miss and episode. video – audio

Sampolin

  • I saw a presentation by composer and performance artist Laurie Anderson at the University of Missouri while I was an undergraduate student. In preparation for her residency, I learned about some of her past work, including an instrument she created, the tape-bow violin. The Sampolin is a digital version of Anderson’s instrument. It controls playback of audio samples on a computer. The Sampolin is currently a work-in-progress, and I will be writing about it on the blog. In the near future, I’ll be creating a page on the site that focuses on the Sampolin.

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 twitter feed 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.

Old projects

These projects have been finished (or laid to rest). I’ve learned a lot from each of them, but my current projects (above) have taken over time from the ones listed here.

Guidonian Hand

  • Guidonian Hand was a blog project that I started in 2008. Contributors to the blog included 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. I let the site sit around fallow for many years so people could continue to read the thoughtful essays published there. However, I recently ditched the hosting plan it was on so that I could use the Guidonian Hand domain name for a forthcoming project. (Trust me, it will be worth it.)

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 was March 2010 at the NASA convention. Here is my blog entry about our experience. Check the blog page for updates.