My first month at IRCAM has just ended, and I'm excited to share my first experiment. Give it a listen HERE. Many thanks to Jack Stulz for trying out different viola preparations together. And to artist Dalia Meiri at the Cité des Arts for showing me how to carve a bow!
In September I will begin a 10-month training and composition residency at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. I will be studying new tools in music technology and computer assisted composition with composer Hèctor Parra and the different research teams at IRCAM. I'm very excited about this opportunity to go deeper into MaxMSP, OpenMusic, Antescofo and other IRCAM tools, and to make music in this new environment.
It was so wonderful to get this CD in the mail this morning! It features my bass clarinet concerto Crumb Child along with beautiful pieces by Christiann Wolff, Bernhard Lang, Helmut Oehring, Petr Kotik, and other fellow composers from the 2013 Ostrava Days Festival. The performance is by the fantastic Czech clarinetist Irvin Venys and the equally fantastic Ostravska Banda Orchestra, under the baton of Carl Bettendorf.
Jeremy Eischler from the Boston Globe describes Mother Tongue as "vividly imagined" in his enthusiastic review of Sunday's concert. It's been a week. I'm back home in San Francisco. And I'm still thinking of that concert. And still feeling thankful to the Terezín Music Foundation and the Boston Children's Chorus (and their wonderful soloist Maddy Kline!). Now I just need to figure out what to do with all this new vocal music in my head...
A year ago I was commissioned by the Terezin Music Foundation to write two new choral works in honor of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi camps. Tomorrow these works will be heard for the first time in the US at Boston's magnificent Symphony Hall. I am so honored to be in the company of Andris Nelsons and members of the BSO, of fellow composers Pablo Ortiz and David Post, of the Boston Children's Choir and Coro Allegro, of poet Richard Blanco, and of the foundation's inspiring director Mark Ludwig.
As a teenager in Tel Aviv, I spent many hours at the Felicia Blumenthal Music Center on Bialik Street - one of the most beautiful and quaint spots in the city. When Yaron Deutsch from the Tzlil Meducan Festival told me that my new chamber work Bela would be performed there, I couldn't have been happier. And now that the score and parts are finished, and my ticket to Tel Aviv is booked, I'm really looking forward to my first rehearsal with the fantastic Musica Nova Ensemble.
Pierre-Andre Vallade and the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra made A Thousand Tongues sound like the most magical haunted forest… seriously, working with them was like a dream come true. And I felt honored that the performance was part of IRCAM’s Manifeste Academy & Festival. I’m pretty sure I got to meet more new people and hear more new music during those three weeks than I did during my whole 9-months residency in Paris….
