Holiday doldrums: SOLVED

I will be tooling around the city with Jean-Yves doing press for the NY Philharmonic gala and the film score he’s the soloist on, but if you’re home and bored and in avoid-the-family mode, allow me to direct your attention to two of my artists’ competitions.

The first is David Lang’s piano competition. David has posted the sheet music to one of his pieces, “wed”, for free download on his publisher’s site. Pianists are meant to learn the music and film themselves playing the piece. They then post videos of themselves playing the work on YouTube with the tag “david lang piano competition 2011”. After January 1–which is just around the corner, friends–all of the submissions will be judged by an all-star pianist panel consisting of Vicky Chow, Jeremy Denk, Lisa Moore, Andrew Zolinsky, and, of course, David Lang on a Can himself. The winner will be flown out to New York, and, most awesomely, David will compose a new work for four hands to be played by him/her and pianist Andrew Zolinsky at (le) poisson rouge on May 6, 2012. The winner will also perform his/her rendition of “wed” at (le) poisson rouge. The full rules can be found here, and here is David explaining everything:

Here is a playlist of the submissions.

Once you’ve done that and you realize you still have to find an excuse to not watch Cars with your 8-year-old second cousin, you can start composing an encore for Hilary Hahn. Having commissioned 26 encores to tour and record over the next two seasons, Hilary realized that she couldn’t possible know of every composer in the world, so she decided to open up the 27th spot to anyone. Here she is explaining herself:

Hilary will pick the 27th encore blindly; that is, she won’t know anything about the applicant and will just listen to the music. Full rules and submission info can be found here.

I don’t know how many people have entered so far, but I have a Dinosaur BBQ dinner bet with her manager about it, so I hope I’m guessing right.

Go forth and create ART!