JUNE/JULY 2009

I will be leading the 32 voice women's choir at  North Carolina Governor's School East, based at Meredith College (for more info on this incredible program, visit www.ncgovschool.org This is an amazing program for 800 gifted HS juniors from all over North Carolina in all disciplines. The performing arts program especially is geared toward challenging young people to discover cutting edge arts-- thus no Mozart, instead John Tavener, or thus... no Brahms, but instead Aarvo Part. This is going to be way cool, and Sherri, Aidan and I love North Carolina anyway, ya know! I'll blog about this and post progress, concert dates, etc. We are going to present two very amazing programs-- and actually, the second program will be mind-blowingly deep and very theatrical.

I have been asked by the Incheon City Chorale (the Korean Choir that blew people away at the recent ACDA national convention) to write a short mass for Fall 09 performance- perhaps other works as well. This is an amazing opportunity, as I know I can write ANYTHING for them and they WILL sing it! The mass project is something I will tackle in my spare time while in Raleigh.

I have just been asked by Nancy Menk to be one of the clinicians for her 25th anniversary women's HS choir invitational in South  Bend, IN. Nancy is awesome- and how amazing is it that she has been doing this now for 25 years?! This event will be Nov 19th-20th.

Roger Dean has just announced they will be publishing three more of my pieces. They will be out Feb 2010- more info later, but I can say that one is Winter Solstice, a very gorgeous holiday piece for SSA/harp or piano

Sales at Walton of Peace on Earth...and lots of little crickets continue to be through the roof. Also at Walton, more and more performances lately by college choirs of Play with your Food!, including a very solid and enjoyable rendition which I attended last night by the DePaul University Singers right here in Chicago, led by the very animated and  fun Clayton Parr- great performance (and some very cool programming overall) and a BIG THANKS from me!

 

Late March 2009

Coming up for this summer- Loosin Yelav, SATB version, will be in the directors choir repertoire for the Illinois ACDA summer convention, directed by Rick Bjella. Play with your Food will be in the repertoire for this summer's Interlochen Music School and Festival, and some of my advanced SATB pieces will be sung at the Iowa ACDA summer sessions in late July.

March 2009

IN PROGRESS:
I'm going to gradually publish score errata (there are only a few) and performance suggestions for pieces. I will place them on each piece's webpage, but here are some right away I want people to see, as the two pieces below are being performed a lot right now:

ERRATA in Alley Cat Love Song, published by Santa Barbara; opening piano tempo should be quarter note equal to 76-80, NOT 120. In addition, in the first measure, the very top note on beat three is a tied over C#, not the odd D natural some computer gremlin threw in just before we printed the piece.
We'll fix these errors at the next reprint!

Peace on Earth...and lots of little crickets: Please visit the page for that tune for some performance ideas (new gnus- this piece has now sold 9,000 copies in its first few months in print- go, crickets!) AND some nice performances on YouTube. Search the song title!