Blog
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Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time
Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is one of my absolute favorite chamber works ever written. It’s beautiful, challenging, full of unexpected twists, turns, and textures, and viscerally sublime. I had the opportunity to perform this amazing piece in spring of 2021 — a dark time for many of us as the pandemic dragged…
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Clarinet Playing During the Postpartum Period: My Story
Note: If you are a clarinetist who has given birth, please help contribute to this important research by taking the “Clarinet Playing During Pregnancy and the Postpartum Period” survey here before January 31, 2019. After my first son was born in 2013, I didn’t have much trouble returning to playing after a month or so…
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Objective Language in Applied Music Instruction
The clicker What if your clarinet teacher used a clicker on you in your next lesson? Yes, a clicker, like for training a dog, clicking when you did something correctly. Do you think it would feel insulting? Distracting? Do you think it would help you learn? Orthopedic surgeon Martin Levy is pioneering an approach to…
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William O. Smith’s “Microtonal Ritual”
In 2010, I immersed myself in the world of William O. Smith in order to write a paper on his compositional style as part of my D.M.A. qualifying exam at the University of North Texas. I read and listened to everything I could get my hands on in the short two weeks I had to…
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Madera Wind Quintet Residency at Adams State University
I’m excited to travel to Colorado this November to perform and record with the Madera Wind Quintet. We’ll be giving numerous master classes and lessons to students at Adams State University in Alamosa, CO. We will record a newly commissioned work for quintet and band by David J. Pierce. The new work, titled El Ranchero, was…
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ClarinetFest 2016 in Lawrence, Kansas
At ClarinetFest last week, I had a great time performing, serving the ICA, meeting new people and enjoying time with old friends. I performed William O. Smith’s Solo for Clarinet with Delay System on a program called “Sonic Kaleidoscope” (review here).
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Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint
Last week I had the opportunity to perform Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint on an all-Reich program at On the Boards in Seattle, WA. The Reich has been a pet piece of mine for a while, having recorded all the backing tracks in 2007 and performed it at a variety of venues since – doctoral recital,…
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Video from 8/8/15 Odd Partials Performance
Here are some video cuts from the August 8 Odd Partials performance at the Good Shepherd Center in Seattle, WA, as part of the Wayward Music Series. Greg Dixon’s Fractures for clarinet and computer This work features the composer, Greg Dixon, performing on the laptop along with me on the clarinet. See Greg’s dissertation for…
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William O. Smith’s Solo for Clarinet and Delay System
(Note: I originally wrote this post at Signals for Images, the contemporary music blog to which I contribute.) Last weekend, my clarinet/electronics duo Odd Partials (with Greg Dixon) put on a concert together with Seattle-based composer Marcin Pączkowski as part of the Wayward Music Series. This experimental series is run by new music organization Nonsequitur, and presents…
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The Learning Scale
As a contemporary music specialist, I am no stranger to parts like this: This kind of part — with multiple layers of extended techniques, unique notation to decode, rarely encountered fingerings, and rhythmic complexities — can be quite overwhelming. It’s not sight-readable, even at a slow tempo. There’s often no recording available. Questions for the composer arise. Fingering charts need to…