If you’re here looking for a voice recording of the whole poem in Anglo-Saxon, leave a comment or drop me an e-mail. If there are enough of you, I’ll see what I can do about getting one made. I love the poem, and having a recording of the original on the site would, I think, help place my version in context.

Let me know if you want that poem!

Pardon the quick post, the plane’s about to take off. But I had to post about this. I’ve been working on the Meet The Composer Studio all year, and while we can’t announce much yet, I can tell you we’ve got some great stuff up our sleeves.

Here’s the link: http://www.mtcstudio.org/

Greg Jukes made this new recording on my actual birthday last month – June 6. (By the way, that’s also D-day and the birthday of Tetris.) The piece, Crystal Tresses in the Sky is a short vibraphone solo he commissioned a couple years back. It’s something he can take on the road and perform in a lot of different settings. He’s done it in churches, children’s museums, and on proper recitals as well.

During the piece Greg has to switch from mallets to a bow and then cross hands and then switch back – I wish I had a video of it – it’s really fun to watch. This recording is live, so you can hear the audience move a bit, and it’s more raw than a nicely mixed studio recording would be. Greg has a full studio recording of this and other pieces in the works for the next couple of months, so you can look forward to that recording here as well. For now, have a listen to this one:
Crystal Tresses in the Sky

A lot more has been going on than just that, though. I’ve got a new title at Meet The Composer: Special Projects Manager. My work there has changed quite a lot from when I started. Instead of tag-teaming the development work with Ed Harsh and making sure the office runs I’m working on a new initiative involving a lot of cool stuff – web development, composers, ensembles, etc. – we’re not announcing much of it right now, but I’ll post more when I can. Well, in truth, I’ll post links to MTC’s announcment with lots of exclamation points, but you get the idea. It’s a great project and I’m really excited about it.

Last but not least, Thesia’s fundraiser for Passchendaele was last Thursday, and it was a fantastic success. The more I work with Thesia Arts, the happier I am to be producing with them. As artists, as producers, as people – they’re just a treat all around. The exact revenue is still being added up, but it’s just about what we’d hoped for in the budget, with maybe even a little extra. For a new fine arts production company in this economy, that’s fantastic news.

I came on late in the project, and so most of what I was doing leading up to the fundraiser was filling in the gaps to make what everyone else had planned run smoothly. That meant mostly doing some Twitter and Facebook marketing, prepping some food for the event, and spending the event itself in the kitchen pouring out the wine tasting. As a die-hard foodie, fairly serious cook, and all around organizational guy, the chance to actually work any kind of food service was really pretty fun. Everyone was sympathetic I didn’t get to enjoy the party, but I had a blast working out how many tiny pours of wine we could do per bottle, and plating trays of tiny tasting glasses and reminding assistant directors and actors pressed into service which wine this was and where it was from. Our stage manager, who’s worked in restaurants, swore I had actual experience doing this. That was probably more gratifying than I should really admit.

Among other nifty birthday presents: flexy metal skewers for grilling whatever you want, a well-reviewed slicing knife for making super thin slices of roasts and things, and tickets to next year’s Met in HD broadcasts at BAM! Awesome. Now, off to another lazy birthday brunch.

The show is a Harbor Opera recital at 2 PM at the Brooklyn Heights branch of the Brooklyn Public LIbrary. It’s a recital of American song featuring a bunch of great singers, with accompaniment by my colleague at Meet The Composer, Lorna Krier. Lorna’s a great pianist who works with a lot of composers and a synth-band, too. I always like it when musicians I know and care about – in this case Harbor Opera and Lorna – work together to make stuff happen.

Here’s the Profile!

LATE UPDATE: apparently Downtown Lunch thinks I’m a “composer extraordinaire” – maybe I should put that in my bio from now on?

I’ve been dreaming for a couple of years about putting together a flexible production company that can handle film, theater, concerts, web videos, and even visual art. My idea was, and is, to have a group of artists with strong organizational and leadership skills as well as talent, and all share the production work. Fundraising, budgeting, auditions, stage management, etc. – all of that we can run through one central production company.

We’d get institutional stability, project-by-project flexibility, and the chance to present ourselves as talented artists collaborating on a wide range of projects.

Then, when I submitted The Seafarer to Thesia for a preliminary screening at their first Screen On Me event, I saw that Thesia had had a very similar idea, and had started to make it a reality.

I’m very happy to be joining the company, and I’m looking forward to announcing some of our upcoming projects in this space in the coming weeks.