Ian Richter is just such a one. I’ve crossed his path before, but the first time I got to know him properly we were sharing a car ride to New Haven where I spent most of the time talking about economics (don’t ask – it’s not a great way to keep everyone going during a road trip).

Gary Louie, the saxophone professor at Peabody, he of the sweet tone and dramatic arm movements, has taken to giving his students a crack at my setting of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. So at the end of the trip to New Haven for New Morse Code‘s premiere concert (it was great) I got this recording as well. Even better.

He’s still in school. But that hasn’t stopped him producing his own live recording, which for this piece requires a lot of re-balancing of the spoken and the played portions as well as all the usual mucking about with reverb and the rest of it. How many recordings feature the engineer performing, anyways? Neat, huh?

Zach and Elisabeth have done a tremendous job raising money and interest in their commissioning and recording project, and since they’ve just broken $3,500 they’ve added another composer to the project, Amy Beth Kirsten. I’ve known Amy since she, George Lam and I wrote operas together in 2005 for Peabody’s Opera Etudes program, and I really love her music. Some Ado was the best thing I’d ever done up until that point and then Amy just blew it off the stage with Ophelia Forever. One of my fondest hopes for Summer’s Twilight is to produce it alongside Amy’s Ophelia Forever as a double bill of Shakespeare music/theater experimentation.

You’re also in for a treat tomorrow at the Gershwin with Elisabeth’s performance of King Harald’s Saga by Judith Weir. King Harald is one of my favorite pieces ever, and I try to get people to perform it more basically so I can go and listen to them.

If you have any unwanted cash, by the way, at the time of this writing you still have 57 hours to give Zach and Elisabeth all your disposable income. Keep $10 for tomorrow’s ticket, but just give them the rest right now:

These Peabody Kickstarter projects involve a lot of us: Me, Zach Herchen, Sean-David Cunningham, Elisabeth Halliday, Adam Knauss, George Lam, David Smooke, Ruby Fulton, Robert Maril, Bonnie Lander and Michael Straus – who’s in Amsterdam hanging out with robots at the moment.

I’m backing all of these projects, and I hope you do too.

Cucumbers and Gin: Inside a Studio Recording

This is my project, and we’ve beaten our funding goal with over a week to spare. But obviously the more we raise the better the film can be, so give us a final push and we’ll beat $1000!

Emerging Voices Project – music for voice and sax

Zach and Elisabeth are commissioning, premiering, and recording three new works for soprano and saxophone. They project just launched, and they’re kicking off with a fundraiser concert next Sunday in Plymouth, MA. Zach’s going to play my Prufrock setting, and Elisabeth’s singing King Harald’s Saga. Don’t miss it!

Rhymes With Opera: Criminal Intent

Rhymes With Opera does an annual tour bringing unusual theatrical works to unusual spaces. This year they’re touring new pieces by George Lam and David Smooke (who’s doing a great job with his column on newmusicbox). Help them out, and maybe they won’t have to sleep on my couches this year!

MARIE: a virtuosic band of robots made by and for musicians

This one needs very little explanation. Michael Straus is a beast of a new music saxophonist, and now he’s going to be touring with robots. Let’s hope he remembers Asimov’s Laws.

They’re launching their project with a fundraiser concert next month, featuring my piece, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, as well a personal favorite of mine, Judith Weir’s Kind Harald’s Saga. I’m not sure whether I’ll be in Plymouth for the concert, but if you can, don’t miss it – Elisabeth’s King Harald is phenomenal and Zach does an incredible job with his piece whenever he plays it.

Zach and Elisabeth are great musicians as well as wonderful friends and collaborators, and there’s no piece I’d rather have programmed with my music than King Harald’s Saga.

Sunday Dec. 19th @ 2pm (doors open at 1:30pm)
26 North Street, Plymouth, MA
Dr. Brian Whitfield’s music salon, entrance through side door
suggested $10 donation

Lori Laitman: I Never Saw Another Butterfly
Kevin Clark: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, for solo saxophone
Judith Weir: King Harald’s Saga, for solo soprano
Jason Belcher: Continuous Cities 2 and Lavender and the Newt

We’ve still got to finish up sound design and color correction, as well as some syncing issues going between Final Cut and Pro Tools, but the film is nearly finished. (By the way, if you have any insights on how to deal with a .03% delay issue going between these two systems, let me know in comments – it’s a really irritating problem.) The Seafarer as a film has been a long time coming, as it’s become the “when I have time” project for everyone working on it, with no firm deadlines and more pressing projects constantly coming up. That’s both good and bad, as it means people aren’t doing hurried work on it, but also that it’s taking a long time. It was really good to get the film up in whatever version in front of an audience, and hear what they thought, and how effective even something weird like this can be.

Last Wednesday, I went to my first Meet The Composer board meeting to make a presentation about a new initiative I’ve been working on. Hopefully as we get more of the details settled I can blog a bit about it here – it’s a very exciting project. The presentation went well, up at the ASCAP board room, and then I headed way downtown to the Stone.

I was wearing a suit for the board meeting, and the Stone is on Avenue C at Houston, so I looked a bit out of place. MTC’s board members even gave me grief about being the first guy ever to go to the Stone in a suit. Then my brother showed up in a similar pinstripe suit he was wearing for a work event, though, so there were two of us.

Zach Herchen opened his show at the stone with my solo piece, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I wrote it for him initially almost five years ago, and revised it last year for his masters recital. He was fantastic. As a saxophone player he’s changed so much in the time we’ve been working together, and has really become a phenomenal musician. The piece requires him to take the horn out of his mouth and act, and though that’s uncomfortable for him, he’s very good at it, and the intensity and stagecraft he brings to his saxophone playing take over. I’ve never seen as rich and nuanced a reading as he did at the Stone. The character he created was so vivid – it wasn’t just the ‘text’ part of a chamber work, I wanted to know more about that character.

He also did works of John Crouch, David Witmer, Ying-Chen Kao and Paul Leary, and was joined by a good range of other talented musicians. It was a great show from top to bottom, including shouting into the piano, live electronics and coded radio transmissions from World War II. The Stone is a strange venue and far away, but if there are more shows there like Zach’s, I’m heading back in a hurry.

Now that that week is finished I can take what little time I have and get back to Summer’s Twilight, helping Alan Jeffries with his film cues, producing that documentary about Thornton Willis, and doing the usual round of program applications that the spring brings. You know, time off.

Among them is the piece I wrote for Zach, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which sets the poem of the same name. He’s going to recite some of the poem, and play the rest on the saxophone. There’s also a flashy introductory movement, Groove, to give you the feel for T.S. Eliot as a wunderkind rockstar poet, who then writes this giant poem that maps out a whole life.

For the real music dorks out there, whenever a chromatic solfege syllable appears in the text of the poem, that’s the pitch it is (I’ll let you figure out if it’s written or transposed). For example, the word “time” whenever it appears, is set as a grace note B-natural (ti) rising to Eb (me, which is flattened mi). The word ‘time’ appears a lot in the poem, and becomes a kind of motive, though a very strange kind. Maybe 10% of the notes in the poem were determined this way, and it was definitely a challenge to write with those notes already chosen, but it also made sure this very strange, and very beautiful poem had, when translated into music, a sound all it’s own.

Come check it out next Wednesday!