Print scores sold through this site this week will also come with a special surprise!

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 In fact, I usually avoid those that require an unperformed, unpublished piece because I have so few of those. And as a self-published composer, I honestly can’t say that I have any unpublished pieces.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!

It’s all I have to bring, for voice and piano
To a Western Boy, for voice and piano
and
Letter from a Young Poet, for cello and piano

Grab ‘em while you can!

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

In order to meet this goal, of course, I need to have a plan. The plan, in a nutshell, is this: Over the next few months, I’ll be rolling out a new segment of the site devoted to commissioning new works, as well as making a marketing push for the NewMusicShelf, and a separate push for my own music. Beyond that, I’m researching some recording projects to help get my music out there.

So far, I’ve written songs for my friends Danny Stone and Joel Conarroe (the latter of whom is having a big birthday bash tonight on the East Side), who turned, respectively, 30 and 75. For Danny, I wrote the 1&12frac; minute “Twilight”, on the short poem of the same name by Walt Whitman. And for Joel’s one-minute song, I used another short Whitman poem, “To a Western Boy”.

Six more to go!

On the one hand, at least no one tried to purchase anything in that time, so no one was inconvenienced (I receive emails of all purchases, and would have been able to have fixed it immediately, so it would only have been a minor inconvenience). On the other hand, nobody even tried to purchase anything during that time! Which left me a) without any idea that there even was a problem, and b) having managed not to have sold a single score in five months!

So now that everything’s working again, buy! buy! buy! Or just donate on the Links page because you love me so much.

The engraved Sibelius file has been sitting on my hard drive for some time, now (over two years!), and sitting with my laptop on a rainy day in Montauk seemed to be the perfect time to post this little musical offering. I made a cover page and a very few minor revisions to the score, and here it is!

Here’s what my diary has to say about the writing of the song: “Ran back to Astoria in the morning and wrote Neri’s song. Decided on an Emily Dickinson poem – ‘It’s all I have to bring to-day’ – and wrote the song in around a half hour. Seventeen bars. It’s catchy and pretty!” There’s something about the pieces that you shake out of your sleeve – they have the real spark of life, and an easy grace that can’t be faked.

Enjoy!