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I will be participating in the Boston Cyberarts Festival this Spring, collaborating with Bettina Bloc, Olivia Robinson, and Amy Scarfone, creating an installation reconstructing a communication network out of low-tech materials.
Our work will be installed, along with work by Bill Seaman, and some Brown University graduate students, at 675 West Kendall Street. The Cyberarts Festival (and our show) runs from April 22 through May 8, 2005.
My new piece Victory/Concession will be featured in this weekend’s Graduate Exhibition, SNOWNO SHOW, at Rensselaer. Work by all of the graduate students enrolled in my program will be included.
Victory/Concession depicts the Bush and Kerry presidential campaigns at the moments of their closure. Victory/Concession retraces the myths of evangelical Christianity, moral values, urban and rural, and red and blue, and exposes devious campaign strategies and a complicated country.
The show will run from 5-9 PM on Sunday, December 12 with a reception at 4 PM and a screening and performances at 6 PM. The show is all around West Hall on the Rensselaer campus in Troy, NY. Feel free to email me for directions.
This Saturday and Sunday (while celebrating my 23rd birthday which occurred on Friday, I attended the Western Massachusetts Sacred Harp Convention in Northampton. The WMSHC is one of the biggest and best conventions in the Northeast and this year’s convention was spectacular, with well over 300 singers in attendance and 128 leading about 200 songs.
Attending last year’s convention lead me to begin writing shape note music, and in the wake of this year’s convention, I’m hoping to finish work on my first set of compositions and begin arranging some performances. I’m now working on a couple of new pieces as well as porting all of my old compositions from Finale NotePad to Sibelius. As I make these changes, I will also update the shape note section of this site to include full-size scores as PDF and GIF files as well as MIDI files for each piece represented. I will also add a selection of new shape note pieces I composed since posting the current selection.
I’m planning on working with Pamela Slea and Laura Neuman to provide my shape note pieces with words, but I have plenty of pieces and I am eager to work with any interested writers. Please email me or fill out the form on the Contact page if you are interested.
Over the last few days I’ve been talking to a few friends about moving forward with some new sound and video projects. I’ll be working with Laura Neuman, a New York City-based writer on a new concert work featuring a live performer running a SuperCollider program, and two vocalists, one live, one pre-recorded, reading from a text written by Laura.
Beau Martin, another friend of mine and a teacher at the Kildonan School in Amenia, New York, will be working with me on a curriculum for an experimental music composition course. Beau will teach the new course during the Fall of 2004 at the Kildonan School.
I recoded parts the site today in PHP, a change which will hopefully make updating some parts of the more efficient.
I went to Middletown, Connecticut today where a group of 25-30 shape note singers brought together by Neely Bruce sang a selection of shape note songs, largely from the Sacred Harp songbook. A reporter and photographer from the Hartford Courant attended and reported on the event. The selection of songs was meant to illustrate the history of the tradition, from “Old Hundred,” the oldest song in the book, to recent works.
The group sang four pieces from the shape note sketches found on this site, including “Hampshire” and “Monday,” as examples of recent compositions in the tradition. Thanks to Neely Bruce for the opportunity, and to Anne Rhodes and Mark and Linda Pearlman Karlsberg for advice and support preparing for the singing.
I initiated a new project today to conduct surveys of audiences at new music events in an attempt to gather information on their reasons for attending new music events, their reception of new music, and the relation of those receptions to the aims of composers and performers. If you know of or are affiliated with new music events and are interested in distributing surveys, please let me know.