First and foremost: The composition recital that Kyle, Roc, and I have been working toward is in less than a week! It's tentatively named "Perspectives," (that hasn't been ok'd by everybody else yet). The program is below:

Perspectives
A Recital of the music of Kyle Gullings, Roc Lee, and Michael Oberhauser
The Artist's Inn Residence
1824 R St. NW
Washington, DC
June 4, 2010
8:00pm

String Quartet No. 1: At Best It Sometimes Rhymes (2009)                                     Kyle Gullings
II. Two Music Boxes
III. Emanations
I. There Is a Child
                                                         *Destiny Hoyle, violin
                                                          Kate Northfield, violin
                                                       *Elizabeth O'Hara, viola
                                                           *Diana Curtis, cello
*member of Altra String Quartet

Four Poems (2010)                                                                                     Michael Oberhauser
III. Haiku
IV. Free Verse
                                                       Cristina Verderese, flute
                                                          Henry Valoris, viola
                                                              Roc Lee, piano

Three arias from the chamber opera Oblivion (2010)                                                Kyle Gullings
The Plumtree
Night in Kalapa
Sorrow Is My Own Yard
                                                      Rachel Barham, soprano
                                                      James Rogers, baritone
                                                      Cristina Verderese, flute
                                                         Kyle Gullings, piano

Piano Suite (2005)                                                                                                       Roc Lee
tristesse oblige
sepia
                                                         Hilary Henry, piano

in memoriam Hibakusha (rev. 2009)                                                                       Kyle Gullings
                                                       Kyle Gullings, baritone
                                                        Hilary Henry, piano
                                                                 narrator

The Name on the Door (2010)                                                                      Michael Oberhauser
                                                    Sarah Philippa, soprano
                                                  Katherine Sanford, soprano
                                                    Joshua Brown, baritone
                                                     Elena Forbes, clarinet
                                                       Henry Valoris, viola
                                                     Elizabeth O'Hara, viola
                                                       Yufen Chou, piano



Next part of this post: Encounters.
Working here at the Cosmos Club, I saw that there was a recital by the Vocal Arts Society scheduled one of the days I was working. I had no more work to do, so I could have gone home, but I popped upstairs to see if they needed anything. Turns out the recital was made up of all Lori Laitman's music. There were two singers there... and the composer herself on piano. I mentioned to the woman sponsoring the recital that I was a composer, and she invited me to listen to the recital and meet Lori afterwards. I did both! What a wonderful concert (everyone, look up her "Pentecost." It's incredible.), and what a sweet, friendly person! She and I are actually friends on Facebook now! :)

Part three: Raise
I mean, there's not much to say about this, except that I got a raise at work... and I'm taking on a lot more hours: Instead of working weekends, I'm now working Monday through Friday 9-5. The worst part about this is I had to give up my dogwalking job. I'll miss the mutts, but the extra money will definitely be nice!
 
 
I've been inspired by a lot of things recently.

First, on Saturday, May 1, I went to the University of Maryland, College Park's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center to see a production of Ned Rorem's Evidence of Things Not Seen. I was absolutely stunned. The piece itself is incredible- stunning music for four soloists- Soprano, Mezzo-Soprano, Tenor, and Baritone with piano. The poems Rorem picked for the song cycle are incredible, too. All in all, it's 36 songs (solos, duets, trios, and quartets), with poems written by 24 different poets (Whitman, Auden, Wordsworth, Paul Goodman, and many others).

The piece is broken into three movements: Part One: Beginnings, Part Two: Middles, and Part Three: Ends. It's an hour and 40 minutes of incredibly powerful music. The singers and pianists (they switched off every couple songs) were incredible. I was so moved.

I want to write songs again. The last song I wrote just because I wanted to and not for a class or anything was in 2007. I think I need to add a song cycle or at least a handful of songs to my list of things I want to compose soon.

Other inspiration: This morning, my web browser had, on its home page, a story about a young woman who wore the same little black dress every day for an entire year, but styled it differently every day. (Without going too much into detail, the dress could be worn backwards. It had buttons down the front -or back, depending on how you look at it. She wore different things underneath, and different accessories to make 365 strikingly different looking outfits.)

I also kind of want to do something every day, like little black dress girl and my friend Kyle with his Haiku-a-day that he wrote while he was in Hawaii.

My idea is to start a new piano piece and write one measure of it every day for a year. My plan is to write it all in 4/4 at about 80bpm, which would make the entire piece  18 minutes and 15 seconds long, assuming I don't change tempo at any point. I also think I'll break it into four movements, based on the seasons. I'll try and write a measure each day before I go to bed, reflecting on how I felt that day, what I was thinking about, the weather, or whatever else. I'm also planning to not look back at too much of the music before - perhaps only look at the past 5 measures each time - to make the composition more in the moment. When I'm finished with a movement I'll look back and made minor edits to make the whole thing more cohesive.

The summer solstice this year is on June 21- I'll start work on the new piece then!