full steam ahead.

I have had the fortunate opportunity to come in contact with many awesome musicians and artists over the past year, and I’m even more fortunate to say I’ve got a laundry list of badass projects that I’ll be involved with over the next year or so.

I’m going to be working out several small vignettes for an Autumn soiree put on by Misha Penton at Divergence Vocal Theater. The performances for this will be on October 14th and 15th. I get to work with a tabla player and play electric guitar on the same program as Donizetti. DVT is awesome and is doing some great things in the Houston music community. If you get a chance to check out any of their performances (especially at the DVT venue), then I highly recommend going. On November 12th, Scordatura Music Society will be premiering six new compositions (of which I am one) and six new paintings as part of their 12 X 7 Commissioning project. I have only just begun writing the piece, which is scored for violin, viola, and piano. There will be a number of videos that each of the involved composers will be making leading up to the performance. On February 19th and 20th, the University of Houston’s contemporary music ensemble,  AURA, will be performing a new work of mine on a program that is tentatively titled “Topography.” I only just received the details, and I can let a cat out of the bag for my writing plans: there may or may not be some Yes and Roger Dean album art involved.

I have been working with a poet/hip hop artist/social worker named Christopher Perri on a piece called The Capital of Punishment, which is about the juvenile justice and delinquency system in America. The work centers around a spoken word piece that Christopher wrote, and will feature a largely electronic score and possibly a video element. There is no set date for a performance as of yet, but we are working on it. If the piece is anywhere as intense to others as it has been to me, then I’m sure that it’ll be received rather well.

Lastly, I am going to be writing a bunch of music for a dance production, to be premiered in over a year. The music will be performed by a new ensemble that I am assembling. The details are few for this at the moment, but I shall be finding out more over the next few months.

I’ll update again soon, to give a little more detail about each of these things.