Greetings!
I am thrilled to announce that I have finally finished the next piece in my Modular Music Project for Citywater: NorCal Water Music, for chamber ensemble and multimedia. On Sunday November 10, 2019 at 3pm, Citywater will premiere NorCal Water Music at the Crocker Art Museum on the last day of the Festival of New American Music. NorCal... dives into issues concerning one of California’s most important resources - water - and celebrates the beauty, majesty, complexity and fragility of the Sacramento River Watershed. In this piece, the performers play music derived from maps representing the watershed. This video represents a video-animation that will cue and accompany one movement, entitled "Shasta" (note: the audio is a mockup mixture of real and 'plugin' instruments). At the premiere and future performances of this seven-movement suite, the ensemble and myself will determine an order of the movements (and their respective components), and then I will cue that arrangement as a video-jockey, or 'VJ', with animations featuring different geographical areas spanning the entire watershed.
NorCal Water Music is the third piece in a developing series of compositions that break the 'fourth wall' of concert music performance that I call The Modular Music Project, in which I integrate performers and interactivity between computers and mobile devices to create music along the deterministic–improvisational–aleatoric continuum. NorCal's movements, its components, and video animations are modular: the musicians can play the movements and their sections/parts thereof in different arrangements, and the video projections can be broadcast at different times. Thus, this piece can be 're-composed' in different ways at each performance. With this piece and others in the series, I seek to create ‘living’ multimedia works through a communicative flexibility between myself, the performers, and the audience to address socio-political challenges of our contemporary moment.
And!...my friend and colleague Christopher Adler will perform an oldie-but-a-goodie of mine, Three Pieces for Piano as part of our Guest Artist Series at Cosumnes River College this Thursday, October 10, at noon in the recital hall. Chris is currently on tour promoting his new album and performing his collection of piano pieces, City Lights & Other Stories. He will be performing my suite again at SoundOn 2020 in La Jolla, CA, about which I will be blogging later this year.
Hope to see you at the Crocker Art Museum on Sunday, Nov. 10 @ 3pm for the premiere of NorCal Water Music!