This coming Sunday, Feb. 27, my friend Marka Gustavsson and her accompanist Frank Corliss will premiere a new work of mine for viola and piano, Scene from a Marriage, at a 3:00 concert at Olin Auditorium at Bard. Other composers on the concert are all dead: Bach, Enesco, and Stravinsky (Duo concertante, a lovely and uncharacteristically lyrical work). Only I survived! Mwa-ha-ha-ha! (Sorry.) Scene from a Marriage is a rather light, lyrical work itself, and a touch humorous.
I’m sad to say I won’t be there. For Saturday I’m flying to San Francisco to be composer-in-residence at the 16th Other Minds festival. The first few days I’ll be at the Djerassi Foundation, and the festival itself is March 3-5 at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. My pieces Time Does Not Exist, Triskaidekaphonia, and Kierkegaard, Walking are being played by Sarah Cahill, Aron Kallay, and the Seattle Chamber Players, respectively. The other composers-in-residence are all alive: Louis Andriessen, Janice Giteck, Jason Moran, David A. Jaffe, I Wayan Balawan, Agata Zubel, and Hans Bennink. Hope to see some of my Bay Area readers there. There’s said to be a certain eclat to not being able to attend one’s own premiere, as though one is just too much in demand, but I do wish I could hear Marka and Frank too. On the other hand, I’m looking forward to getting out of the icy northeast for a week.