I got news this morning from the MAP Fund that the organization needs to have their 501(c)3 status at the time of the application, and must have had it for at least two years prior. So, I won’t be applying with ISU for that particular grant. Which means that I have to get back in good standing with The Field – I’m sure we never filled out our funds usage report at the end of last year. When the Tobenski-Algera Concert Series folded, Jeff canceled our domain name, which means that I lost the only email contact I had with The Field, as well as ALL of my T-A related correspondence, which is annoying. I’ve contacted them to find out what paperwork I still owe them.

In other news, I’ve started reading David Cutler’s The Savvy Musician, which is clearly going to exacerbate my entrepreneurial tendencies, and really light a fire under my ass when it comes to marketing this piece. I’m going to be trying to get some media attention soon, now that I’ve officially announced the commission in my August newsletter (which you can sign up to receive here). I originally didn’t plan to announce the commission until I had the contract in-hand, but the Letter of Commitment, and the School’s enthusiasm about the project, make me confident enough to announce it finally. Next comes the official blog post on my website. AND I can stop typing this blog into Google Docs, and actually publish it and backdate all of the previous entries.

The title, Growl, was inspired by an item in a list of bizarre subject lines from spam emails collected by Esther Landau, a flautist/music administrator I met at the American Music Center’s annual meeting last month.

The premiere performance, on July 19 at 7:00pm, will be a part of Concert Artist Guild’s new series The Upright Pianos Brigade at Barbés (376 9th St., Park Slope, Brooklyn).

I’m really looking forward to having the piece performed. I’ve wanted to arrange one of my cycles for years, and I’m anxious to hear it finally done!

I don’t have the full performance details yet, so stay tuned!

And this morning, my friend Marc Peloquin asked for a short solo piano work to be premiered on July 19 at Barbes in Brooklyn.

So I’ve gotta get writin’, and write fast!

More details as they come.

So after a little walk in this beautiful warm weather, I dove into the arrangement and am already at the halfway mark. I should be able to finish the arrangement Wednesday evening, which makes me incredibly happy. It’s nice to add a new piece to my catalog, and to do it so quickly!

I’d have it done tomorrow, except that I’m meeting with Jeff Algera to make the final arrangements for the Tobenski-Algera Concert Series, which is effectively finished. However, part of our meeting is to deal with the funds leftover from our semi-season last year so that I can start a new series in the coming months very much like the T-A Concerts. The reason for the dissolution of the Series is that Jeff and his wife are moving to California next month, which will make continuing the Concerts in their current form very difficult. Obviously, Copland and Sessions managed to do it via post in the early ’30s while the latter lived in Paris, and it’s infinitely easier to communicate via Skype, but it’s time to change things up a bit, and Jeff’s life will certainly be taken up for quite a while with setting up his new life and web business on the West Coast.

I don’t normally write pieces specifically for competitions. In fact, I usually avoid those that require an unperformed, unpublished piece because I have so few of those. And as a self-published composer, I honestly can’t say that I have any unpublished pieces. As soon as I finish something, I slap the Tobenski Music Press logo on it, and throw it on my site and the NewMusicShelf. Everything I write is immediately considered to be published. But it’s not published by a “legacy publisher” (a nice term I came across to describe traditional publishers), which is certainly what is meant by the “no publication” rule. No danger of that ever happening – I don’t want a “legacy publisher”! (More on that some other time.) My other point of “meh”-ness is that the piece can’t be performed in the meantime, or submitted anywhere else. So, until August when the award winners are announced, this arrangement, which I’m so far very happy with, has to sit on my hard drive and twiddle its thumbs. But I guarantee that even though I can’t do anything with it in the meantime, it will be ready to go for the instant that the announcements are made. Of course, I’m certainly hoping that it has to sit on the shelf for another few months because it’s won the award and needs to be premiered by this organization!

Fingers crossed!

meditation, which clocks in at 1 minute, is my latest collaboration with poet Mark Statman. I came across this short, slightly dirty poem while leafing through Mark’s manuscripts in his studio at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2007. This concert, by the way, is celebrating composers who have been in residence at the VCCA, so I felt it appropriate to work with Mark again since that’s where we met.

I’ve been dying to set this poem, and it’s been bouncing around in my head for two years – never quite settling into something that I was happy with. Now I’ve finally found an excuse to make it happen!

In December, Gilda Lyons, the Artistic Director of The Phoenix Concerts, asked me to write a short song for their March concert titled “Music from Mt. San Angelo: a celebration of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts”, and thus was born meditation.

Music from Mt. San Angelo
a celebration of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts
Friday, March 18, 2011 at 8:00PM
Church of Saint Matthew and Saint Timothy
26 West 84th Street, NYC