Since February flew right by and I forgot to post an update, I'll just cover both months right here. How's that? Fine? Fine.
The Norton Lecture and the Oklahoma Student Composers Workshop keynote were both well-received, with the creativity-based Norton lecture generating a lot of comments. I'm planning on turning that lecture into CMS presentation or journal article (or both!), and there's still a lot of ground to cover. Composition Pedagogy and Creativity in Music kind of lie at an intersection of Music, Psychology, and Philosophy, which translates into a lot of reading to figure out how I want to tackle it.
I totally gave up on this piece. At least, I gave up on what I had. Don't worry, it's not a total loss, that music will probably show up in another piece someday. But it won't be in this piece. This piece has all new music to it, and I've finally moved away from the Writer's Block stage of the piece. I'll post a more substantial update when I have more substantial music, but I really like the direction this one is going. Lots of notes.
Business as usual. We'll be presenting some new works at the inner sOUndscapes series concert on April 15. I may or may not be playing melodica.
The theme for February and March was performances, which is spilling out into April. Most of these I've gotten to attend, thankfully. It started with the premiere of Joyride by the Boreas Ensemble at North Dakota State University in February, and a repeat performance of that piece at the North American Saxophone Alliance (NASA) regional conference at South Dakota State University in March. My new work Tempest in a Teakettle received its premiere at OU's Faculty Composers Recital a few weeks ago and received some great comments. I spent part of last week at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas for the south central regional conference of the College Music Society. The fixed media piece Remnants of Creation was presented at the first concert, and the clarinet quartet version of Caffeination received its premiere by a talented and fun group of students (Anthony Clark, Megan Hearn, Ashlynn Kegley, and John Platt) led by Dr. Steven Becraft on the second concert. They're repeating their performance on Wednesday, and I would love to go but there's no good way to get from Norman to Arkadelphia.
Coming up soon is the inner sOUndscapes concert, where I'll be trying out Cloud Music for the first time, assuming that it's working. And of course NYCEMF in June.
Meanwhile, it's back to grading, composing, and coding (though not in that order)
