A Little Welch For Your June

Dear Friends, at the end of the summer I’ll be moving up to New Haven to study at Yale. I’m very excited to dive right in and compose a bunch of new music (time for which has been scarce for me these days). It has been an amazing ten years in New York, I can’t ever see how it won’t be a major part of my life in retrospect and continue to be so in the future. I’d love to see many faces this summer despite my reclusive disposition these days (don’t worry I’m not going far).

I have 2 performances coming up that I’d love for you to check out, so there’s a start!

During the first hour at the Bang on a Can Marathon (some where around 11ish-ish in the morning) my Double Concerto for Bagpipe, Piano and Percussion Ensemble – The Self and the Other will be performed by 8 percussionists from the Queens College Percussion Ensemble, Amanda Accardi on piano, myself of bagpipes and Michael Lipsey conducting. This piece is a doozey to assemble and it still feels in some kind of premiere mode even though it’s from 2004 (you can find a recording on my Tzadik CD Dream Tigers). The Queens College group performed this a month ago with me as part of their Spring program, and are now gearing up for the marathon. This work was written during an intense time of gamelan study and an intense time of reading Borges (“The Self and the Other” is a poetry collection of Borges). The magical yet erudite world of Borges motivated a similar fictional musical situation in myself, and many Borges inspired works have followed this one. At the Marathon we’ll present 2 out of the three movements. So come catch the many acts at the marathon, and come early to see this one!!!

June 19 – Bang on a Can Marathon – World Financial Center – Winter Garden 11am-12mid

http://bangonacan.org/marathon/schedule

June 29 – REDSHIFT Ensemble will premiere at Galapagos my newest composition (for violin, clarinet, cello and piano + tape) called The Favrile Opalescence. This piece is a year of ideas all wrapped up into one little package. As some of you know I have been subjecting myself to two years of intense counterpoint and harmony in private studies (which almost completely takes over the writing part of your life), and for a while have been getting addicted to Early music. This piece may perhaps be a sign of a new or further evolved compositional language for me – or this poor piece had to suffer some extreme multi-faceting on my part as I slowly wrote it and imagined the shapes of the lines along side many metaphorical streams of thought (the creative nebula of the idea really grew like an organism over the year). It is dedicated to my nieces Sophie and Camden in the spirit of new growth, but along with that are visits to chicago, Frank Lloyd Wright, stained glass, Tiffany glass’s opalescence, iridescence, the iridescence of blackbirds, bird sounds and songs in Alaska, wildlife land- and soundscapes, Kathy Turco’s “Birds of the North”, being cold (the part of this piece that made through this winter), the chromaticism of Gesualdo’s late madrigals, contrapuntal extension of Balinese kotekan (interlocking techniques), the shattering of a sound object (shards of which overgrown with ivy) and somewhere buried in there an original Welch bagpipe tune that is very asymmetrical with respect to convention . . . . . I thought if my ingredient mixing strategy to composing were to burst at the seams, this is it – I’m really curious to hear it, it’s gonna be totally weird in a way that is . . .

June 29 – REDSHIFT presents Arctic Sounds + Mivos Quartet @ Galapagos 7pm

http://galapagosartspace.com/event/redshift-mivos-quartet

and July, I’ll be around for hangs (no gigs, and we at Welch Industries like that idea for July)

also I’ll be publishing a number of chamber pieces over the rest of the year with the American Composer’s Alliance starting with my string quartet Siubhal Turnlar (also on my Dream Tigers CD)

hope to see you!

MW