Last night I met with Summer's Twilight director Rose Ginsberg, and a potential scenic designer for the piece. In the short term we're hoping to develop some concept art to help promote and develop the work for the next phase. Of course, in the long term we're going to actually have to create a practical …
Video of the Summer’s Twilight Reading is up!
You know you've been waiting for it, and now it's here. We read Summer's Twilight on December Fifth, and the video of that workshop performance is ready to go! The musicians did fantastic work, and I can't wait to get the next version of the piece ready for its next step. Have a look: Summer's …
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Ongoing progress
January is turning out to be very busy indeed. At Meet The Composer we've got a lot going on, but it's a fun and productive month as well as a busy one. Compositionally it's quite different from the last few months. Instead of rehearsals and drafts and deadlines and program design, it's meetings planning the …
Scene 6 or Scene 1
I've been thinking about where to go next with Summer's Twilight. Since the reading I've been working on collecting the input of my collaborators and friends, including cast, crew and audience. I think I've captured a good amount of the valuable ideas for revisions from the workshop process, but now I've got a second question: …
Junior Bach
This Friday is the Junior Bach concert at Peabody. I haven't written about the program in a while, but getting Junior Bach up an running is one of my proudest accomplishments. This is a Peabody magazine article about the program, and this video celebrating Peabody's 150th anniversary describes the program as well. In it, Peabody …
Collaborative revision on Summer’s Twilight
It's startling how quickly certain ideas are emerging as obviously important in the revisions going forward, and more startling how quickly some solutions are becoming incredibly obvious. It's turning out that the reading did just what I wanted it to do, which was highlight the areas I needed to fix. One suggestion that's come up …
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Summer’s Twilight reading post-game
That went fantastically well. The performance was great, the audience gave very useful feedback on the piece and where to go next, and everything went incredibly smoothly. We had an audience of about thirty, which is pretty good for thirty minutes of opera in a library auditorium during the first winter storm of the year. …
Summer’s Twilight Reading – 12/5 Details
Summer’s Twilight is an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream. The piece tells the story of the four lovers, Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius and Helena, as their romantic troubles lead them out into the forest, where the fairy, Puck, and his king, Oberon, wait ready to meddle. Part opera, part play, and part music-theatre …
Summer's Twilight Reading December Fifth
Hello again infrequently updated blog..... Anyway. I'm putting together a reading of the first half of my opera, Summer's Twilight, on December 5th at 2 PM at the Brooklyn Heights Branch of the Brooklyn public library. I've just updated the calendar on my site with the necessary information and links. Needless to say, this reading …
More updates
Hello, infrequently updated blog. Hello, Kevin, how are you? Oh, doing fine, thanks. I've been thinking about posting. Good Idea, have a go. Okay, I will, thanks. So. My Midsummer Night's Dream adaptation, Summer's Twilight, is coming up for a workshop on December 5th. We'll have five scenes, running straight through Puck's line, "Lord what …
Return of Arabian Nights
So I might win the worst blogger ever award. I never call, I never write, I never send flowers. But here we are again: One of the key reasons I've been away is that March is government grant season, and as a grantwriter, that meant a solid month of working late, and a chunk of …
Music and Poetry
So, I've been thinking about what I want for my music. In part, I think that's a product of having less time to spend writing because of having a full time job. Do I want my music played by classical musicians and listened to on WNYC? Do I want teenagers to listen to it and …