Dear Friends,
I hope you have been keeping safe and well during this time. Yesterday was a very important day, the birthday of my longtime friend and collaborator Katie Procell! You can read my glowing tribute to this amazing woman in my last blog-post, but she deserves a special Happy Birthday and I hope it was a happy one!
Also! 1 month from today Katie is putting on a live-cast concert with pianist Valerie Hsu, hosted by An Die Musik on Saturday, June 20, 2020 at 2pm. In addition to works by Purcell, Bernstein, Beach, and many more, she will be performing If They Delight, my setting of an excerpt of Gertrude Stein's long poem Stanzas in Meditation, a perfect selection for Pride month! Registration for the live-cast concert costs $5 and will be open up until 1 hour before the concert. Click here to sign up!
The beauty of live (even live-cast) performance is the spontaneity and seeing how the performer continues to live and evolve with the work. This will mark Katie's 3rd public performance of If They Delight, so I'm very excited to hear how she has continued to grow with the piece. You can listen to her most recent performance from August 2019 here!
I am continuing to scratch away at new projects, with the latest being a completed setting of Edgar Allan Poe's The Valley of Unrest for SATB Chorus. While this text was suggested to me by soprano Arianna Arnold as a possible vocal piece for her, I found the text's atmosphere demanded more voices. The work is dedicated to Arianna with great apology and the promise to have music for her with at text that fits her aesthetic just as well! Inspiration has been very fickle during this period, with a number of projects to finish for a variety of ensembles. I am trying to adapt to our current situation and go where my own creative needs take me, but I am not forgetting my responsibility to the wonderful musicians who have honored me with asking for music. I hope to deliver some of those projects soon!
As much as possible I hope you will continue to stay home and exercise safe physical distancing. Very little about the many states' decisions to open up has to do with the world being safe again. Money and political gain continues to take precedence over human life in American politics. We must VOTE and hope for a better world than the one our leadership can be bothered to deliver.
Best,
-Peter