When Emily Salgado asked me to join her consortium Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, I was thrilled. Her ambitions to highlight the talents of female percussionists and broaden the existing canon are overdue. ...
When Tim McAllister asked me to write him and his piano partner, Liz Ames, a piece for their ongoing “Project Encore,” I was delighted. The opportunity to write for one of the greatest saxophonists of all time is a great honor, if also a joyful challenge.
I was asked by both Jack and Zoe Johnstone and the Women Composers Festival of Hartford to write a new chamber piece for them. The Johnstones set me up with writer Scott Woods and the Women Composers Festival had me working with The Nouveau Classical Project. Both Scott and I write about subjects that are political (which is probably why Jack and Zoe paired us together) ...
I never saw snowfall as a child growing up in Southern California; it was more a phenomenon that I saw in cartoons or read in children’s books. I did, however, witness my first ash-fall when I was in elementary school.
I have never been to Olympic National Park, so I followed Brown’s example and combined my own experiences with what I learned from an artist who followed the Hoh River Trail, studied the Hoh Rainforest, and revered the Blue Glacier. We should follow her lead and do the same. We must “give [ourselves] a moment to feel this very mobile sense of how the balance is.”
I was asked by pianist Kristofer Rucinski to participate in his "Scriabin Response Project" in which twelve different composers composed twelve different responses to each of the Op. 8 Etudes.
I was asked by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble to write a piece that imagines the Brahms’s B Major Trio being heard through the looking glass, and all I could hear were cats.
"Foot Tapping Song" was written in five-and-a-half hours as part of an Iron Composer competition...Since my secret musical ingredient had to involve the audience "foot tapping," I thought I would give the audience something to tap their feet to.
Paula Deen is making her infamous "The Lady's Brunch Burger" (glazed doughnuts, hamburger, fried egg, bacon, and cheese) when she accidentally chokes on a doughnut and dies.
Next Stop was originally conceived as a Cincinnati-specific public sound art piece that eventually would be installed at different locations along the Cincinnati Streetcar route.
Since relocating across the river from Kentucky, I have been engrossed with violin virtuosity found in the Italian Baroque concerto and bluegrass music.
"Bullet Time" is a special and visual effect that refers to a digitally-enhanced simulation of variable-speed (e.g. slow motion, tim-lapse, etc.) photography used in films, broadcast advertisements, and video games.
This is the piece I wanted to write for the last eight years but was never cool enough to write it. Around this time I had a friend who introduced me to some songs by The Meters and a song by Ernie and the Top Notes, Inc. called “Dap Walk.”
There is something serene and placid about watching underwater creatures move in a contained space. Their motions are timeless and beautiful; their actions are purposeful but suspended in the aquarium.
At the beginning of 2009, I wanted to write a solo percussion piece, and to ease my way into it, I decided to use spoken text. Kendall A. wrote a sestina called “How to be a Deep Thinker in Los Angeles,” and with permission I was able to use it.
What’s the 88 for? This does not represent the 88 keys on the piano. I used an octatonic scale, but more importantly, this title is in reference to The Crazy 88, the group of assassins who were employed to help O-Ren take control of the Tokyo underworld.
"My end is my beginning is my beginning." Or so it was, the composer thought, back when she started this piece.
I treated these movements as stylistic exercises focusing on the darker gloomy sound of the horn rather than the bright and brassy quality of the instrument.
This piece was partly inspired by The Post, a film dramatization of Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee's publication of the Pentagon Papers in the Washington Post. The title comes from that newspaper's 2017 slogan adopted partly as a response to backsliding liberal governance at home and abroad ...
