I'm beyond lucky to have seen two beautiful performances of my music in the past few weeks. Natalie Hunt and Yukiko Oba performed my art song "To S.M. a Young African Painter Upon Viewing His Works," with poetry by Phillis Wheatley.
And at the beginning of the month Jeremiah Cossa and Cory Gross performed the first three movements of my song cycle, "I Keep Writing In Place of You." Poetry by Xu Lizhi. The final three movements are going to be performed by Felix Aguilar-Tomlinson this fall.
I'm maybe a little burnt out on how much vocal music I've been writing lately but every time I think I'm going to take a break from art songs and choral writing, I get another new idea for a project. So here I am again, finishing a song cycle, working on an opera, and starting work on a piece for string trio and baritone.
Last night I (late to the game) watched the Bomb the Music Industry documentary, Never Get Tired. I have so much respect for Jeff Rosenstock and his work and it was pretty beautiful and inspiring to see everything laid out on film like that. There have been a lot of comparisons with Fugazi and "Instrument" but I really think these are different sorts of documentaries. Instrument is really more of an abstract portrait of a band while Never Get Tired is a straight up chronological talking heads documentary. That's not a judgement call it's just pointing out a difference. Bomb the Music Industry only played all ages shows, capped ticket prices at ten dollars, really never sold any merchandise, and gave away all their records free. They're really an inspiring group and deserve to be immortalized in this way. But really just try not to cry at the end when they splice all the performances of Future 86 together.
Dérive is about to record demos of our new album so I have frantically been writing and rewriting and rewriting lyrics. The Boston Conservatory Contemporary Music Ensemble is going to be performing my piece, "Sweet Rivers" on Tuesday April 4th.
Today I am snowed in at my partner's house in Manchester, NH so I am spending the day writing and editing.
Short current listening playlist:
1.) Beethoven String Quartet 8
2.) Dag Nasty - Can I Say
3.) Zemlinsky String Quartet 3
4.) Ligeti Requiem
5.) Fauré Requiem
6.) Holy Molar - Cavity Search
7.) Vacation - Bomb the Music Industry