Dream Lights (Riverbank)

Listen to this. 

Click here if you want the score.

The Behavior of Clouds

New piece for violin and viola. Check it out:

Sorry I don't know how to post .pdfs on here. But there'll be a website soon enough.

London

To say that this city has a lot going on would be an understatement. Wednesday night, after hearing one of the producers for the BBC talk about a music/film series she curated, some friends and I went to go hear the Budapest Festival Orchestra perform Schoenberg's Transfigured Night and Mahler's Song of the Earth. They weren't on their A game for Transfigured Night, but the Mahler was killer. Afterwards we walked along the river to a bar called The Rake, which is very quickly becoming my favorite, mostly for their selection.

Thursday morning I met my friend Lee, from home, at Waterloo station. He's in town visiting family but had a day to hang out, so we had an extremely fresh lunch at Borough Market, by my flat, followed by tea in the courtyard of Southwark Cathedral. From there we went to see the Rothko exhibit at the Tate Modern, then to a lecture on campus by George Benjamin, about French musical life in the 70's and to introduce Grisey's Espaces Acoustique, which will have it's first performance in the UK next week. For the evening we went to go see a play called Riflemind, mostly because Philip Seymour Hoffman was directing it. Good stuff, although the lead actress was pretty weak.

And today was a whole bunch of studying and composing and running a few errands. I think I'm a bit saturated for going out and doing things anyway. Gotta go keep writing/listen to Benjamin Britten's Church Parables. 

Has It Really Been Since June?

Apparently I'm not very good at keeping up a blog. Maybe that's a good thing though, as I've been spending just about all of my time doing music since last time I've updated. Here's what happened this summer:

1. Graduated UCSD, degree in music and political theory. Cool!

2. Moved to Paris, to study for summer at L'Ecole Normale Du Musique Du Paris. I spent most of my time doing counterpoint and harmony and ear training and the like in the Nadia Boulanger method, but got to compose a bit under Michel Merlet, who was a student of Messiaen's. Also made some great friends, from all over the place. I wrote a string trio, that I started during an all-nighter on the sidewalk in pouring rain in a small town called Arras, after seeing Radiohead and Sigur Ros there. You can hear it from the Paris show at the end of July here.

3. Went back to California for a couple of weeks, where I helped out some friends in The Honest Iago Music and Arts Collective with some recording and writing. I'll put a link up to their site when the songs are released. Also had shows with them, which went very well.

4. Said a very sad but hopeful goodbye to my friends and girlfriend and family and moved to London. I'm now here and studying composition with Rob Keeley for an MMus at King's College London, and generally enjoying the music scene and meeting people. Finally saw the Rite of Spring live and it was a religious experience on Wednesday, especially when coupled with Ligeti's Atmospheres and performed by the London Philharmonic. This is a great town for music, as that concert was only 4 pounds, and they seem to have something similar almost every day. The next night (Thursday) my friends Tom, Nil, and I went to go see Strike Anywhere at the Camden Underworld, also a great show. I did get a very solid kick in the face, but it feels a bit better tonight. It looks like we are starting a composers'/new music ensemble at King's with some of the other people in the program, and I'm getting close already with a guy from Cornwall named Tom, and an Irish guy named Donal, who are both composers and really great guys.

5. There's a duo for violin and viola on the way, and it's going to be entirely new territory for me. That's all folks.