Smorgasbord

Today I finished a new work for solo flute/piccolo. The piece is made up of 4 short movements:

I. Crunchy - Aggressive and punchy attacks on the extreme registers of the flute give this movement the characteristics of the title.

II. Gelatinous - Jazz influenced, like a lot of my music I suppose, but with a bit of humor. The thick and slow moving quality is credited to the use of quarter-sometimes half tone slides.

III. Carbonated - I use the pizzacato technique quite a bit in my writing for flute. I love exploring the different techniques at the flute's disposal. Unlike other instruments, we don't get to use mutes or other devices to change our sound. Its all in the face :) This movement exercises the flexibility of a player to not only play straight up pizzacato, but to use other syllables to produces different types of sounds. End is result is a poppy, fun, and incredibly humorous piece. Sometimes, music is taken to seriously. It can be fun without being ridiculous.

IV. Fluffy - I took a chance and gave this movement to the piccolo. I don't play the piccolo enough and it has a certain tone quality that a flute just can't produced. My gripe with most composers is that they tend to think of the piccolo as an extension of the flute's register. But there's so much more to this tiny wooded beast. It has its only personality, and in this movement I explore it's toy march persona.

I am looking forward to performing this piece in November. I rather have someone else play my music, so I can relax and hear what I've written with some distance. But I feel I actually wrote within my capabilities with a little bit of challenge. It should go pretty well, its short and sweet and to the point. Hopefully it will add some contrast to the program in November.

duoATL Concert

On Sunday, October 25 at 3pm at MacLean Auditorium in Presser Hall at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, GA I will be performing with Dr. Brian Luckett in concert. We will be performing a new program. All works are by composers who's lifetime overlapped ours:

Lost Hollow Road by Brian Chamberlain (That's right the hubby)
Sonatina Mexicana by Carlo Domeniconi
New Castle Parade by Brian Luckett
Acrobats by David Leisner
Serenata al Alba del Dia by Joaquin Rodrigo
Six Pieces for Flute and Guitar by Annette Kruisbrink
Suite Buenos Aires by Maximo Deigo Pujol

We took off my work "Mangosteen". We've played it about 3 times for Agnes Scott College related events, I thought it was just time to swap it out for something else at least for this concert.

We found some new pieces and this seems to be a less intense concert than the ones we've done in the past. Hopefully I won't be completely exhausted at the end of this concert. That is if I make an appropriate shoe choice.

I was glad to make a new connection with Annette Kruisbrink via Brian Luckett's love of her guitar duet. We actually adapted her guitar duet for ourselves, but wanted to find a piece she had written specifically for flute and guitar. Low and behold she had written two. I dropped her an email and she was kind enough to send us the scores to read. Wouldn't you know it? The first two movements of "Six Pieces" was from the guitar duet we had adapted. So we just had to put it in our program.

Hope you all can come. Admission is free. Be sure to visit our new website for more concerts and information: http://www.duoatl.com