Small Updates, Round 2

Here we go...

1) Jane Eyre is getting off the ground-- we had our first two orchestra rehearsals this weekend, and the sitzprob all day this coming Saturday. Between now and then, installing new timpani heads.

2) We had the first round of showings for the KSU Student Dance Festival coming up in early March, and I'm really excited about the pieces I saw-- it's going to be great seeing these pieces grow and develop over the next month

3) I had my first performance with the Akros Percussion Collective this weekend at the Akron Art Museum, and we had a great time and a great crowd. If you came, thanks for coming out. The next Akros show is at 3pm on May 3-- it's part of the Kulas Concert Series at Guzzetta Hall on the University of Akron campus. There will be works by Gyorgy Ligeti, James Tenney, and two premieres.

4) My friend Tanner Menard deserves his own post, and when things slow down I'll be able to get to it. Tanner is a wonderful sound artist I met out in Arizona, and he's now in New Orleans. He's curating an all-night sleep concert modeled after the ones Robert Rich gave a couple decades ago, and he's commissioning audio for the 9-hour event. (Caveat: Tanner will probably end up modifying submissions to a certain degree. Also, submissions will be released under a Creative Commons license.) If you're a sound artist and would like to send him something, you can read more about the concert and Tanner's call for audio on his blog. (If you'd like to hear my first submission for the project, you can listen to it here.)

5) Three big deaths in the new-music community: George Perle, Lukas Foss, and Max Neuhaus. Perle's music is some of the most beautiful atonal music there is, and he was a very important counterbalance against the more systematized atonal music that gained prominence after World War II; Foss was the music director of my hometown home-team orchestra, the Buffalo Philharmonic, when it was a new-music powerhouse several decades ago; Neuhaus' early LP recordings of pieces like Morton Feldman's King of Denmark introduced me to that very important body of experimental music for percussion. The music community is poorer without them.

6) We might top 60 degrees on Wednesday, and that would be welcome.

UPDATE: 5a) The NY Times remembrance of Max Neuhaus is here.