There are three musical events in January that I'm involved with that are all different from one another in some ways, and totally interconnected in others. The first event - a commission from the Seattle Rock Orchestra is a bit of an outlier from what I usually do (they're an orchestra that does arrangements pop music from the last 60 years), but I'm really excited about the working with a new ensemble and getting to explore some new terrain. The piece, I Am a Rock explores the ubiquity, timelessness and intersection of Simon and Garfunkel, their song I Am a Rock, and geology. We’ve all had experiences like standing in an elevator with granite floors and hearing gentle muzak versions of this song tinkling through the speakers above, hot stone massage while hearing a Chinese lute playing Sounds of Silence on a CD, or been at a house with fake rock speakers, Mrs. Robinson drifting over your conversations in the background...and now I'm combing all that together in a concert work. The orchestra will be playing found rocks, a few string soloists will play abstracted song fragments, and an electronic track of people being interviewed about this music blends these disparate elements together. Details here! It's Saturday, January 12th. Come see 40 people playing rocks.

In mid-November I traveled to Fairbanks, Alaska to hear the University of Alaska Fairbanks percussion ensemble - Ensemble 64.8 (yes, that's the latitude there) - play my percussion quintet Unrelated (have a listen to their excellent performance here). While there I worked with visiting professor Bonnie Whiting Smith on a new piece for solo percussionist with electronics. She'll be debuting this new work, The Narrow Aisle to the Deep North, at The Wulf on January 16th, and playing it again at UCSD on January 19th.

The Narrow Aisle to the Deep North is designed so that it can be played at different stations that the player moves to between movements, and this is noted throughout the score, though it is not a limiting factor if this is not an option. The title is derived in part from a travelogue by 17th century Zen hermit poet Basho, entitled The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Basho’s work is written in a style that combines haiku with standard prose, and explores the landscape, natural events, and people he meets along the way interacting with both. This solo percussion piece takes a similar path, but in the context of sound. Whereas haiku capture a moment and potentially juxtaposed ideas occurring in our everyday lives in Basho’s work, here there are a series of field recordings that capture the sounds of a trip I took from Seattle Washington to Fairbanks Alaska to hear some of my percussion music played and also work on this piece with percussionist Bonnie Whiting Smith. And, in place of prose, we have a series of stations of instruments creating a narrative sonic landscape that the performer interacts with and illuminates for the audience. The source of the music as alluded to before is drawn from a few days in Alaska discussing and exploring sounds and instruments, observing the changing of light at a northern latitude, stargazing, and watching the aurora borealis; as well as from everyday life for me here in Seattle. Being a sort of record of a period of time, a similar travelogue title seemed appropriate, and since paved roads, and cramped airline aisles are par for the course for anyone working in music, changing road to aisle seemed like a simple and final way to customize this travelogue format for our modern sonic context, as well as describe, if only casually, where this landscape of sound was drawn from.

I was invited to present something at the ONN/OF festival this year - it's a great festival that features a couple dozen artists who create installations and works based around light in a rented warehouse and runs for just two days. For the festival I am collaborating with Seattle composer John Teske to create a sound installation based on the aurora (aka the northern lights) entitled Space Weather Listening Booth. We're taking geomagnetic data from the earth, information about solar wind and other phenomenon (yes, space weather) and interpreting these things into music and sound. Our allotted installation space is small, so only one or two people at a time will be able to enter and listen. Just as the auroral band moves around the earth slowly, so will our sound shift and move over time, enveloping the listener. In addition to the immersive sound installation, for parts of the festival we'll have private one-minute performances in the booth for one listener at a time - one musician, one audience member. The festival is taking place on January 26th and 27th this year in the old Seattle BMW dealership between Boylston and Harvard on E Pine St.

Next week I'll be boarding an airplane to Fairbanks, Alaska to hear a performance of a percussion ensemble work I wrote a few years ago, Unrelated, at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. While hearing a work be revived again is always nice, I am particularly interested to hear this work again in a new context, as I specify in the score that one of the intentions of this work is to reflect, magnify and draw attention to the specific sounds inherent in different geographic locations. From the score:

The only time Unrelated has been performed live thus far is at Seattle Pacific University in 2009. At that performance the players collected rocks from around campus, and also constructed huge bundles of branches laurel cuttings to shake - laurels a ubiquitous towering hedge we see everywhere in Seattle. Fairbanks is already blanketed in snow, and the professor who has kindly organized this performance, percussionist Bonnie Whiting Smith, made sure that her players had gathered branches and carefully tucked them away by mid-September, and collected stones from the Chena river before it became too cold. So, I am curious to hear how it'll sound in this new context. The third movement of Unrelated has also had a bit of a life on its own outside of this concert work. I took this movement and re-worked it, then added some electronics. This re-worked new piece, Collective Resonance, was featured in the 2011 Music Issue of The Believer, and is available at all the usual digital retailers.

Besides working with the percussionists and hearing the performance of Unrelated, I'll also be working with Bonnie to review a bunch of material I've been writing for her that will ultimately end us as a rather long piece for solo percussionist. So far it's looking like this new piece will be incorporating a lot of things we're both interested in: the percussionist speaking, field recordings, natural objects...and snare drum. This is going to be a really fun trip, and hopefully I won't lose a toe due to frostbite: it's supposed to be -10° when I get in on Wednesday.

    After a year of planning with the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Butler University Composer's Orchestra, artist Erin Elyse Burns and others, my big site-specific music event Hungry Ghosts took place on September 20th. For the event, I had 20 musicians playing on shore around the lake at the IMA's sculpture park lake, and 10 musicians plus myself in canoes playing on the water. As the music and twilight came to a close, over 100 lanterns were released onto the water. To see some great pictures that the museum posted of the lantern-making workshop, the musical performance, and the release of the lanterns, have a look at the museum's Flickr page for the event. Click here if you'd like to have a look at the score, and you can also see some videos of the event below.

    Overall I feel like the response couldn't have been better. There were  news stories like this one in the Indy Star leading up to the event, and an interview on the local NPR station. Coupled with the perfect (and dry) weather, the turnout was absolutely immense - far larger than anyone expected. I had a radio with me in the canoe to communicate with museum staff, and halfway through the music I had to turn it off because there was so much chatter amongst the staff about people trying to park in strange places and traffic from people trying to get into the event spilling out onto the streets and snarling traffic. People of all walks of life came out for the event, which was reassuring, and I feel proves that if given the opportunity and are actually told about an event (in this case through extensive media coverage), they will choose things of substance and meaning.
    The musicians played extraordinarily well - I couldn't have been more pleased. The directors of the ensemble - Michael Schelle and Frank Felice did a fantastic job rehearsing them for an entire month before the event (what a luxury!), so they were all really well prepared. One hilarious thing was that after the event lots of people talked about the 'disruption' of other sounds - the jets flying overhead, crickets, fish jumping - and complained that the music needed to be louder. But to me, people noticing these sounds and events happening was perhaps the most notable sign of success: people were listening and living actively in the moment. How could I organize an outdoor concert on a lake surrounded by woods and not expect to have other sounds intermingling? In its sonic totality, the evening sounded exactly how I wanted it to.