october 2021 :: recordings, writing, and a gradual return to public life
After finishing several small pieces early in 2021, I took the longest compositional hiatus of my life (since undergrad, anyway), working on nothing at all for several months. This was due in part to life being busy — selling one house and moving to another, COVID restrictions affecting the lives of the children (though everyone has remained healthy here, thankfully!), and so forth — and in part to the fact that my schedule of future projects has yet to recover from the various delays and uncertainties the last 18 months have brought. And in part because it was, frankly, long overdue.
In the meantime, though, among the things I have been doing is helping usher a recording of my complete extant piano music into the world; it is available as of 1 November on the small but wonderful all that dust label, performed by the extraordinary young pianist Ben Smith (with Ian Pace on the two-piano work I originally wrote for Ian and Frederik Croene, which also lends part of its lengthy title to the disc itself: “atendant, souffrir”, lists, little stars).
This whole project was Ben’s idea; when he emailed me to propose it in 2018, I had only the foggiest notion of who he was. But as it turns out he is, despite his youth, an astonishing musician, and I am glad that the recording (beautifully captured by Newton Armstrong and edited by Mark Knoop) captures his touch in the quietest regions of the dynamic spectrum, where much (though by no means all!) of this music resides. I am particularly pleased to have his beautiful recording of the new work he commissioned as a part of this project, mes pleurants, which as my own work goes I am unusually happy with.
Also on the recording front, a professionally produced video of Musikfabrik’s late-2020 in-studio performance of my lengthy, even-by-my-standards spare and quiet piece for clarinet and string trio, in nomines (1-4), surrogates, limbs, etc., is nearly ready for release and should be available soon.
In the meantime, things may be coming together for future projects; stay tuned. I have intensified work on a small but slow-burning project of the sort that is very near to my heart: a duo for basset recorder and basson du chalumeau for Carl Rosman and Erik Bosgraaf entitled In paradisum, based distantly on a reading of the well-known chant melody (following on one of the ways I spent my summer in the absence of compositional work: a study of the notation and rhythmic practice of Gregorian chant, particularly the attempted standardization thereof undertaken at the Abbey of Solesmes by Dom André Mocquereau and the philosophy of rhythm, agogics and expression that goes along with it).
Hopefully, several performances towards the end of 2021 (including the much-delayed premiere and further performances of the revised version of Plan and section of the same reservoir by Trio Accanto) and more tentatively planned for 2022 presage a return to something resembling normalcy in my own concert life. We can only hope.