march 2021 :: videos, recordings, miniatures
Performance schedules, mine and everyone else’s, continue to be decimated by COVID restrictions, although once-postponed performances by Trio Accanto and a premiere by ELISION can hopefully take place later this summer more or less as planned. [Update: not two days later, I learned that the Trio Accanto performances had indeed been postponed again, to 2022.] In the meantime, several direct-to-video live studio recordings of my work have been released in recent months (notably, Ground and “indolentiae ars”, a medium to be kept by Carl Rosman in Musikfabrik’s “Lockdown Tapes” series) and more are coming soon, from Musikfabrik (a particularly exciting large-scale premiere) and ELISION. They’ll be on the “performances” page when they are available.
Nothing can replace the ritual of performance with people with bodies sharing air—at least not for me, or for my work—but these professionally-produced video recordings are a worthy substitute: they enable an intimacy with the demanding physicality of the performance of these works that can’t really be experienced any other way.
Meanwhile, several portrait recording projects are brewing: later in 2021 a CD of my as-of-now complete piano works will be released (more details on that later in the year), and a disc of my clarinet and solo vocal works and another album of (mostly) recent chamber music are also forthcoming in the next eighteen months or so.
Compositionally, 2021 so far has been consumed with miniatures related to these recording projects: 2 Rückenfiguren for solo voice and L’art de toucher le clavecin, 1 for piccolo (finally completing that trilogy a decade after the more recent of the other two component pieces!). There has also been in modo esalando, a small bass clarinet solo in honor of the fiftieth birthday of one of my closest collaborators, clarinetist Carl Rosman. I’m also looking forward to writing a booklet essay for a new disc of music by Einar Torfi Einarsson, an Icelandic composer whose work has been fascinating me for years now.