Compositionally, the past year has been a good one for me, providing time for consolidating some older ideas and experimenting with new ones. I'm particularly pleased with a book of music for mixed consort (flute, clarinet, guitar & percussion) called Neglected Topiary, a gentle, but still rather hard-line quartet for melodicas, The Long March* and two pieces for woodwind ensemble based on Gray Codes: Came & Went for trio and A Beckett-Gray Code for quintet. The Beckett-Gray Codes, which I use to control scoring patterns, have become something of an obsession, and the piece I'm working on now, for the L'Histoire instrumentation, with the percussion treated as soloist, tentatively called Six or Seven, Whatever it Takes, continues this line of work. There have been the usual number of bagatelles (recorder, keyboard, chorus), occasional pieces (including a set of five-fingered birthday pieces for Walter Zimmermann, Some Handywork), and the usual arrangements and other work-for-hire along the line, and outlines of projects for next year are emerging (including some incidental music, a collection called Six Simple Machines, and two longish solo pieces (Meander Scar and Pareidolia) as well as a brief operatic project concerning two sisters, the favored one of whom has the habit of secretly sucking out all the water in the despised sister's fish tank with a long straw, so that, all-in-all, this year is rather seamlessly flowing into the next.
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* a pseudo 1950's serial bebop piece for solo melodica should also be mentioned.**
** or maybe not.
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