Really could not be happier with how this premiere came off.
Ryan Day synced his visual art to the audio mix-down. Performed by IonSound Project, audio recording by Chris Boyd, and mixing and mastering by myself. Can you tell how much I dig Ryan’s art for this project? Seeing as I splashed it into my banner? Since even now, I have a still from the video as my desktop image? Just sayin’.

IonSound Project will premiere my multimedia collaboration with Ryan Day, Kecow hit tamen, on November 20 at Bellefield Hall Auditorium. The concert takes place at 7 p.m. and tickets are available at the door. General admission is $15 and student/senior admission is $10. Also on the program are premieres of works by Nizan Leibovich and Christian Kriegeskotte, along with Robert Frankenberry’s transcription of Pictures at an Exhibition. All the compositions were inspired by (or in my case, developed in parallel with) visual art, and the art for each work will be projected on a screen at the back of the stage. The entire evening will be a feast for the ears and the eyes.

About Kecow hit tamen

My father is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, a tribe whose history is far more difficult to ascertain than that of other eastern native peoples. Modern Lumbee trace their ancestry to Eastern Siouan, Cherokee, and Tuscarora, with one of the enduring legends being that the tribe is descended, at least in part, from the intermarriage between members of Raliegh’s Lost Colony and the Hatteras. The Carolina Algonquian phrase “Kecow hit tamen?” means either “What is this?” or “What is your name?” The phrase was recorded by Thomas Hariot during Raliegh’s initial expedition, and, given the competing theories on Lumbee history, seems like an appropriate starting point for my own reflections on that history.

Thomas Hariot’s translations of Carolina Algonquian and additional vocabulary derived from John White’s annotated watercolors supply the best samples we have of the language spoken the by native peoples they encountered. Sadly, only a hundred or so words remain of a much larger effort and these describe mostly the local flora and fauna.

I approached the composition of Kecow hit tamen almost as I would a vocal piece, sketching a melodic fragment for the question itself and for each of Hariot’s and White’s words. These fragments then became the basis for a series of overlapping micro-variations that constitute the instrumental layer. I have not tried to mimic Native American musics in any way, but rather evoke the experience of learning a new language, with the need to say a word in different ways in order to feel where it should be in the mouth and throat. The instrumental layer then, is designed to capture the visceral feeling of exploring new words while the audio samples surround the listener with approximations of how the spoken language might have sounded.

The idea of developing Kecow hit tamen as a multimedia work emerged when my good friend Ryan Day and I were discussing his Translation series of images, works that “translate” texts into color patterns. The idea of a visual artist and composer both working with the same non-narrative text turned out to be a fruitful one, and we developed the piece collaboratively from start to finish. I will leave the detailed description of the art to Ryan, but to me, one of the most exciting aspects of this digital painting is the subtle, continuous animation that transforms the work as the music unfolds.

The River Cam

So it’s hard to believe that I still haven’t blogged about my time in Cambridge last August, but that is how this year has been going. I’ve been very busy in mostly good, musically satisfying ways, and now it’s time to catch up on reporting about all that good, musically satisfying activity, so here goes!

From August 8-August 12 I was at Churchill College, Cambridge where I co-directed a symposium and festival hosted by the Centre for Intercultural Musicology at Churchill College, which is directed by Akin Euba, Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Euba was one of my first professors when I began my graduate studies at Pitt. His course on creative ethnomusicology was one of the formative experiences of my time in grad school and I  was also very fortunate to have him on my dissertation committee.

Named for Winston Churchill, Churchill College is by far the newest and most modern of the Cambridge University Colleges, and it's reflected in the public art on the campus.

The theme of the symposium and festival at CIMACC was titled Bridging Musicology and Composition: the Golbal Impact of Bartók’s Method. Dr. Dr. László Vikárius was the keynote speaker which was amazing. As the director of the Bartók Archive in Budapest, Dr. Vikárius has an encyclopedic knowledge of Bartók’s influences, methods and contributions. It was a real privilege to learn from this brilliant and gracious man.

Seminars were held in the Fellows Dining Hall which is decorated by a numbered Warhol print. It was like being back in Pittsburgh!

Since this was both a symposium and festival, there were papers and performances, all of which dealt with how Bartók’s integration of research into traditional music with his creative output continues to influence composition today. I gave a paper titled “Intercultural Music Through Collaboration: Case Studies in an Emerging Compositional Trend” in which I discussed various collaborative processes for creating new music ranging from the Imani Winds, to Fred Ho, Ravish Momin, and Patrick Burke/Emily Pinkerton. The paper was well received and I got some very helpful feedback.

Akin Euba makes a point during one of the seminars.

I was also fortunate to get a fine performance from Roger Zahab and Rob Frankenberry of my 1997 duo for  violin and piano, Emergence, a piece in which I derived the rhythms in the driving second movement from my experiences with djimbe drumming. Emergence is an oldy but a goody. I still am very fond of the piece all these years later, and I still want the meditative first movement to be played at my funeral, just not any time soon. It was a good fit for that event and my UK debut to boot!

Violinist Roger Zahab and pianist Rob Frankenberry Perform Emergence at Churchill College.

I’m reasonably sure it will be a long time before I attempt to direct an international conference again (for a lot of reasons!). What a huge amount of effort involved in communicating with everyone in advance, finalizing the program, and adjusting for the inevitable schedule changes that occur when visas don’t make it through, flights are delayed, or someone falls ill! But in the end, everything came together, attendees had a positive experience, and in some small way, what we do at CIMACC helps to push at the boundaries and break down barriers of how we think about composing. It’s a privilege to have played a role in such a forward-looking event.

Outside the Recital Hall at Churchill

Photo: Rachel Greenberg

I just created a new page about the performance of scenes from Final Battle for Love that took place this past June at the Virginia Arts Festival in conjunction the John Duffy Composers Institute. It’s complete with video! Visit the page for all the FBL goodness, or just watch the video here.

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.

I’ve been working so hard at keeping Pittsburgh New Music Net going I haven’t been taking time to keep up with my own site! But I wanted to briefly touch on some upcoming events I’m involved in.

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.

Correction: The opening begins at 5:30, not 5 as originally posted.

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.