Baltimore Composers Forum Fall Concert

Last Monday, I performed my piece, "shut up and listen," in the Baltimore Composers Forum's fall concert. The piece is scored for electric guitar, amplified cello, and laptop. I played with an excellent cellist, Amy Cavanaugh. You can hear a "studio" recording of the piece on my myspace.com page.

I think the performance went fairly well... no screw-ups that would have been noticeable to anyone else. I pressed a wrong button and looped some guitar material that wasn't supposed to be routed to the looping system, but that didn't really cause a problem. The laptop is functioning basically like a collection of delay pedals. The signal processing patch that the piece calls for is pretty simple. Funny that I still messed it up a little bit in performance.

Amy did a great job. She's a good match for the piece, and for my work, in general. She's classically trained, but like me, didn't finish her masters degree and went on to play in bands and other non-classical ensembles. I hope we'll be able to continue developing duo material, but she moved to Baltimore last summer, so it's a long trip for rehearsals. We'll see what happens... She's currently playing in a group called Yeveto, they're performing a live soundtrack to an old silent movie called "The Golem" at the lovely AFI Silver in Silver Spring on October 29 and 30.

The other pieces on the program were an eclectic mix. I particularly liked Kendall Kennison's solo cello piece, and James Brody's serial work based on DNA structures.