A friend suggested that I write a violin concerto, and I have one in process.  It starts from big violin tunes, melodies.  The style is rather traditional, using a classical-sized orchestra and most often a regular pulse.  It doesn't feel like nostalgia to me, though, it feels alive in every fiber.  I've been listening to the Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Bartok, and Higdon concerti, hmm, also Ligeti and Norgaard, I guess.  The Schoenberg appeals to me most right now, in its lyrical moments especially.  But I'm aiming for something as transparent as Mozart, and as lively.

I began studying trombone about two years ago, and last Spring I played in the Gordon College wind ensemble, which was a lot of fun.  The director Dr David Rox, suggested that I write a piece for band, so I started arranging some children's piano pieces by Bartok.  This gradually developed into a twelve-minute band piece, the first I have written since high school.  I think it's an entertaining piece, rather extroverted in tone.  Dr Rox is interested in performing it, we'll see.

A little while ago I ordered some scores by Jürg Frey and Antoine Beuger from the Wandelweiser catalog, and had a brief email exchange with Antoine Beuger.

One of the pieces I received is Beuger's 'monodies pour mallarmé,' which consists of many pages of score, each of which offers a group of four whole notes.  The performer plays each note for a long time and adds silences of indeterminate length between them.

For some reason, Beuger's piece really got me going, and I wrote a group of pieces based on some of his tetrads.

harmonies for mallarmé is for organ, synthesizer or ensemble. It uses four-part chords generated by manipulating some of Beuger's four-note groups.  Like much of the Wandelweiser music, it is rhythmically very simple and slow, lasting over 9 minutes.

Loving Phrases  for three soprano instruments (3' 15") .  This uses some of the note sequences that I generated from the Beuger tetrads, making them into a series of heterophonic phrases.  I was thinking of flute, harp, and violin, but any soprano instruments of about the same weight would work.

endless dream for piano, one hand (2' 40").  This uses note sequences as in the pieces above, using the pedal to accumulate clouds of pitches.

buildings  for multiple voices of similar range (2' 15").  Here some of the tetrads are made into phrases which build from unison pitches into four-note chords. 

All of these pieces should be easy to perform, in keeping with my desire to avoid virtuosity in a significant portion of my work.

The score fragment above is from a choral piece by Jürg Frey, a member of the Wandelweiser group of composers and performers.  I used it as the banner picture for a new Facebook group, 'New Music for Choir.'  I was surprised that such a group did not already exist.

I am hoping that composers and new-music choirs will use this group to exchange information and promote new choral music.

​I have offered to change the banner picture to other score fragments that members send to me.

On a recent trip to Istanbul I passed through a street full of music shops, and there I saw and heard a duduk for the first time. This is an Armenian double-reed instrument with an amazing sound, and as I found out later, at least one amazing performer, Gevorg Dabaghyan. You can find his recordings on Amazon - recommended.