This posting is for my orchestra friends. You can now download audio files for the piece "Vignettes From the Life of John Brown" that you are helping me premiere on October 28th. There are two types of files: midi and .wav. Both types play the tunes. The midi files do not use correct instruments. The .wav files are more accurate (but still a bit computery). The midi files are much smaller than the .wav files, so pick whichever makes sense on your machine.

Let me know if this process works for you!

Here's the link the the folder where the files are.
Click here for audio files of Vignettes from the Life of John Brown

Happy practicing.

A New Trio for Flute Saxophone and Piano

       Thanks to the generosity of New Hampshire's chapter of Music Teacher's National Association, a piece of mine will be premiered on Saturday, October 6^th at 3:30 PM at Keene State College. I was selected as the commisioned composer of the year by NHMTA. I've written a trio for flute, saxophone and piano. Mike Sakash and Julia Hendrickson will be performing with me. We hope to record the piece and perform it in the Conway area sometime in the next year, so if you can't make it to Keene, you still may have a chance to hear it performed.

      The piece is largely tonal, but it employs some stealthy elements of bitonality. The result is much more consonant than Kodaly's duo for violin and viola, but much more spicy than Robert Schumann's chamber works (to whom the piece owes a lot of inspiration.). Germaine Tailleferre and Bohuslav Martinu, two composer's whose work I've studied over the last couple of years, also influenced this work.

There are four movements, a romantic adagio, a jolly romp through the statements and developments of three themes, a fugue based on computational trees, and a motile allegro with a lyrical melody. I think the work is quite listenable despite my indulgence of academic compositional techniques.