Upcoming Performances

_{ChamberQUEER 2023: WE REFRACT (New York - June 9-11)}

ChamberQUEER’s Pride Month performances feature a collective of composer-improviser-performers, and I am so honored to be part of the group. We first gathered for a week of workshops in April, where we each brought new material to explore with our ensemble. Together, we have built an evening-length program of new works that highlight the queer experience and includes everything from improvisatory soundscapes, to clacking fans, to sonic storytelling. We have three shows this weekend as part of the Five Boroughs Music Festival (event links below):

Friday, June 9th at 8 pm EST - Littlefield (Brooklyn)

Saturday, June 10th at 8 pm EST - Red Eye NY (Manhattan)

Sunday, June 11th at 3 pm EST - Newhouse Center at Snug Harbor (Staten Island)

_{Make Music Day: Flowerpot Music in Ann Arbor (Michigan - June 21)}

Bring your own flowerpot and join in the fun! I will guide everyone through a performance of “Flowerpot Music,” a Make Music Day collaboration written by my dear friend, Elliot Cole. We will be playing in the Gaffield Children’s Garden at Matthaei Botanical Gardens in Ann Arbor. I will lead a short "rehearsal" before we all make music together. This is BYOF (Bring Your Own Flowerpot), but mallets and all other materials will be provided. If you’re interested in joining the performance in Ann Arbor, Michigan, please fill out this simple Google form. Hope to make music with you soon!

_{Source Song Festival (Minnesota - August 6-11)}

I am participating as a MNSong Composer this year with the Source Song Festival, writing a new song in response to Kurt Weill/Maurice Magre’s “Je ne t’aime pas.” There are a series of events open to the public, including workshops, masterclasses, and of course, concerts of new songs! If you’re in the Twin Cities area, come say hello that week and hear some of my music on August 9th (featuring a song from my work with Opera Omaha last year) and August 11th (featuring the world premiere of my response song to the Weill/Magre).

_{Open Reading Workshop of New, 20-Minute Opera by Alexis, libretto by Emily Roller (Michigan - early September, date TBD)}

Be on the lookout for more information about this soon, but I have been awarded funding through University of Michigan to host an open reading and workshop of a 20-minute opera I wrote with Emily Roller in 2020. Because of the pandemic, we are just now getting around to bringing the music to life, but it is going to be a real pleasure to gather a set of world-class performers around this project for one day. If you are in the Ann Arbor area and want to attend, please write back and let me know— I will keep you posted!

_{Michigan Music Teachers Association Conference (Michigan - October 20-21)}

I have been selected as this year’s commissioned composer for the 2023 Michigan Music Teachers Association Conference and will be writing a new piece for saxophone quartet! The premiere will take place during the conference, held this year at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.

Album Updates: Yes, and… a collection of “percussion plus” solos

We are one-third of the way through the recording process! 3 recorded, 6 to go! It’s funny when one attempts to create a collective album with peers across the country… sometimes schedules just don’t line up the way one plans…

The release was initially slated for this month, but as you can see, we have a few more recordings to make. Rest assured, the quality is definitely going to be worth it!

I want to thank everyone who contributed to the Indiegogo fundraiser for this project; it was fully funded!!! The lineup of musicians on the record includes Malcolm Taylor, Alyssa Resh, David Degge, Britton-René Collins, Austin Shoupe, Louis Raymond-Kolker, Raychel Taylor, Andy P. Smith, and myself. Engineering by Gavin Ryan, mastering by Melissa Harris Chambers— I told you it’s an all-star lineup! More updates on the way, and we’re looking forward to releasing this album when it is ready!

Refugia Festival Announcement!

Now, back to that dissertation…

As you may know, I spent a good bit of time last year traveling to remote places around North and South America, recording my natural surroundings and improvising with them to see if and how they responded. This ended up serving as the field research for my dissertation. The question at the heart of my dissertation is how human music can interact with natural soundscapes; specifically how our music can coexist with, or be in service to, our natural surroundings without being threatening. Of course, music is performed in outdoor spaces and venues throughout the year. However, this composition will be significant in that it will consider the environmental impact of our sounds and incorporate our surrounding soundscapes into the work through improvisation.

I’m referring to it as a “sonic Mad Libs,” where the skeleton of the work remains the same with each new performance, but there is room in the music for performers to listen and respond in real time to their surroundings. In this way, the piece will be site-specific.

But this got me thinking… I have written about nature-inspired themes in my work for almost a decade at this point, but I have wanted to go deeper. Is there something else I could do to turn this music into direct action and not just thematically address it?

Introducing… REFUGIA FESTIVAL! Refugia Festival is a two-day festival advocating for environmental conservation and preservation through the sense of sound. Our festival highlights the sonic beauty of our natural surroundings through music performance, oral histories, poetry, educational programming, and community service to create meaningful environmental change on a local level. The festival will take place in multiple regions throughout the United States each year, meeting every new sonic ecosystem with curiosity and care. With each presentation of the Refugia Festival, communities will take steps to preserve and celebrate their ecosystem through awareness of and interaction with the surrounding soundscapes.

The inaugural Refugia Festival will be held on April 20-21, 2024, at Nichols Arboretum in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have received some seed funding and excellent guidance from the optiMize Social Innovation Challenge as well as other University of Michigan sponsors, and there has been an enormous amount of community support. Lots more to come on this front, but please reach out to me if you are interested in learning more about it or if you know folks who may be in performing, leading educational workshops, or investing in the festival!

New Publications

Last year, I presented a conference poster at the Pedagogy into Practice Music Theory Conference at Michigan State University. This presentation was awarded “Best Student Poster,” and the winnings included a publication in the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy. So, I now have my first academic journal article! The article walks through my process of building a curriculum that allowed for group composition work in a large ensemble setting. I piloted this curriculum as a band director in 2018, and I am eager to share it with others. You can read it at the journal’s website.

Derek Shapiro and Jonathan Caldwell spearheaded a new textbook of études for conductors by commissioning living composers to cater to the pedagogical needs of the exercises, and I contributed a piece! This textbook is FREE, available online, and will be an excellent source for any conducting classes. Check it out here!

Shoutout Corner

I have made some incredible friends over the years, and I want to feature some of them with each quarterly letter. Cheers, friends, for all that you do!

In this letter, I want to shoutout my New Haven-based friends, Frances Pollock and Emily Roller. Together with other artists, they founded Midnight Oil Collective. MOC wants “…to end the trope of the starving artist” by serving as a venture studio for other artists to build and scale their projects. It has been unbelievable to see the amount of work MOC has been up to in the past three years, and Frances and Emily were elected to the Board of Directors this past year as CEO and COO, respectively. They recently invited me to present on Refugia Festival at the Yale Innovation Summit, where MOC curated the first Arts Track of this entrepreneur conference. I am SO proud of what they are doing and always excited to share their updates. You are both total rockstars in my book!

This newsletter is long enough, for now! Thanks for reading, and hope to hear from you soon!