I don’t have a piece on this event, but I am helping to provide sound for a very wonderful concert to help a very important cause. You can find a full lineup of performers here, so if you’re in the Burgh this weekend please come out and show your support while enjoying some terrific music.

Masterworks in the Making

Chandler Hall, Diehn Fine and Performing Arts Center
Old Dominion University, Norfolk
FREE

(You’ll need to click the Masterworks in the Making tab in order to see specifics for the concert.)

Two scenes from my one-act opera The Final Battle for Love will be premiered as part of the John Duffy Composers Institute. This is a wonderful step for FBL and needless to say, I’m really looking forward to it.

The phenomenally talented IonSound Project will kick off  the second year of its residency with the University of Pittsburgh at Bellefield Auditorium on Sunday, November 1st, 2009 at 7 pm with Reduce, a program featuring an original work by Pittsburgh film director and video artist Chris Ivey.  The program celebrates musical reductions of larger works including Maurice Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, my own Percussion Concerto, and Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder.  For this concert IonSound welcomes back Daphne Alderson, whose rich contralto voice shines in this moving work by Mahler.

Tickets are $8.50 general admission, $5 for students and seniors when purchased in advance through ProArts (www.proartstickets.org), and can be purchased at the door for $15/10.  For more information and concert updates please visit www.ionsound.org.

Because of my work with PNMNet, the PSO has tapped me to host two upcoming podcasts with visiting composers. The first is today(!) at 3 p.m. with PSO Composer of the Year Richard Danielpour, and the second is on November 11 with composer/DJ Mason Bates. You can log into the live podcast or stream it after the fact here.

Lost in the shuffle of announcing the premiere of Virgil Cantini: the Artist in Public is the fact that the film is on a continuous loop, alternating with three other short documentaries, during regular hours at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. I’m told that with normal amounts of visitors at the PCA you can actually here the music wafting through the building. The current exhibit continues through November 8.

And last, but most certainly not least, IonSound Project will perform my Percussion Concerto (Remixed) on November 1 at Bellefield Hall Auditorium. Tickets are available through ProArts. I’m really looking forward to the concert and hope you can come.

I just completed a score for Will Zavala’s short documentary Virgil Cantini: The Artist in Public. Will is an experienced documentary maker and an Assistant professor with Pittsburgh Filmmakers, so I was thrilled when he invited me to provide the music for this project. The film is one of four documentaries commissioned by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and funded by the Heinz Endowments. Each brief documentary celebrates a past PCA Artist of the Year and will be shown continuously in the Center’s video room during their opening to introduce their current Artist of the Year, Tim Kaulen. The opening takes place at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts on Friday, September 25 from 5:30–8 p.m. There’s a suggested donation of $5 and PCA members get in free.

Virgil Cantini worked primarily in metal and ceramic and created many pieces of public art including the sculptures on Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health (Man), in front of Pitt’s School of Law (Ode to Space), in Penn Circle behind East Liberty Presbyterian (Joy of Life), and many more. Cantini founded Pitt’s Department of Studio Arts. He passed away in May of 2009. It’s been a real privilege to reflect on the art he created through some of my own art.

Listen to audio from A Festival of Psalms

In the opening you hear a reading of the poem “Empty and Worthless is my Praise” by Krisitn Thomas (and I believe read by Thomas) woven in with Mark Peters’ reading of Psalm 130. The reading is followed by a very contemplative performance of Trouble (Kim Sopata, flute; Anna Najoom, clarinet; Matt Mantell, violin; Emily Mantell, cello; and Candace Peters, piano). Finally the segment closes with a beautiful rendition of “Precious Lord Take My Hand” by Mary Webster Moore, a Professor of education at Trinity. I’m fascinated by the different ways people are approaching this piece and integrating contemporary music into a modern worship service is far too rare an occurrence, so serious kudos to Mark, the rest of the organizers at Trinity, and the performers.

Pittsburgh has a surprisingly vibrant new music scene for a town with not a ton of 20 and 30 somethings. In my years here, I have tried to support it whenever I can…  (snip) But my role at the Post-Gazette as generalist (yes, most people would think that the classical music critic is a pretty specific post at a newspaper, but it is actually impossibly large of a beat, covering many genres and centuries), has kept me from covering contemporary music as well as I would like to…

But this is all to say that Pitt composer Phil Thompson is doing a great job catching what I miss by following the scene closely in his niche blog, Pittsburgh New Music Net. I am officially adding it to my blog roll (which is in serious need of an update). Enjoy!

He’s absolutely right about the level of new music activity going on in the Burgh. Soon after I started blogging the new music scene here I realized that I could easily post every day and not run out of things to talk about. It’s a good problem to have and I hope PNMNet helps to fill out the picture of cultural life in Pittsburgh.

Alia Musica Pittsburgh will perform Trouble on their spring concert titled Encore! Directed by Federico Garcia, Alia Musica is a composer/performer collective made up of young Pittsburgh composers. I’m thrilled to be the featured guest composer for their upcoming concert. The performance takes place on Tuesday, March 31 at Synod Hall, Oakland. You can read the full press release below the fold.

ALIA MUSICA PITTSBURGH PRESENTS
~ENCORE~
SPRING 2009 CONCERT

The contemporary music ensemble ALIA MUSICA Pittsburgh announces its Spring 2009 production for Tuesday March 31st, 2009, at 8pm, in Synod Hall. The concert celebrates the second anniversary of the ALIA MUSICA’s existence, featuring a performance of Trouble, by Guest Composer Philip Thompson, alongside with some of the most successful compositions of the group’s first two years. For ensembles between five and eight performers (including harp, percussion, and piano in addition to woodwinds and strings), the program spans, as is usual in ALIA MUSICA’s programs, a wide variety of style and influences, in a cross section of The Spring 2009 Concert is produced with the support of a Small Arts Initiative grant from the Heinz Endowments. 21st-century, Pittsburgh chamber music.

Philip Thompson’s Trouble, scored for violin, cello, flute, clarinet, and piano, is a beautiful, meditative, contemporary exploration of medieval contrapuntal techniques, built around the plainchant The troubles of my heart are multiplied: deliver me from my necessities (Psalm 24:17, a gradual for the Second Sunday of Lent). With a similar instrumentation, plus the addition of an obligato French horn part, Matthew Heap presents “And I Felt the Sun, Rising”. A 21st-century instance of serialism, the piece is luminous, melodic and coloristic, based on an anonymous poem that is alternatively whispered and depicted by the instruments.

Pop and folk influences find an echo respectively in Ivan Jimenez’s lunar park and green (for oboe, bassoon, and string quartet, inspired on The Beatles), and Ayo Oluranti’s African Rhythm, where the ensemble (violin, cello, flute, clarinet, piano, and percussion) is used primarily as a set of traditional drums and rhythms. The program includes also Mark Fromm’s Aqua Regia, praised since its 2008 premiere by IonSound, and a 2008 composition by Kerrith Livengood for the unique ensemble of oboe, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, harp, percussion, piano, violin, and cello: Song of the 144,000, inspired (as Trouble) by biblical references.

Program
Tuesday March 31, 2009, 8pm
Synod Hall (St. Paul Cathedral), Oakland
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Ivan Jimenez: lunar park and green (ob, bsn, string quartet)
Kerrith Livengood: Song of the 144,000 (ob, cl, bsn, tpt, pno, harp, perc, vl, cello)
Ayo Oluranti: African Rhythm (fl, cl, pno, perc, vl, cello)
intermission
Mark Fromm: Aqua Regia (fl, cl, pno, perc, vl, cello)
Philip Thompson: Trouble (fl, cl, pno, vl, cello)
Matthew Heap: And I felt the Sun, Rising (fl, cl, horn, pno, vl, cello)