➤ Donate to abortion funds in every state.

Johannes Moser’s new album Alone Together is out, which includes my eight-cello piece Ogee along­side many other new and exciting works with multiple electric cellos.

UPDATE, 6/16/22: every­thing in the store should be up and running smoothly. As always, please let me know if you think some­thing is not as it should be. I may even reward you with a “bug bounty.”

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A quick word of advice for those of you here to purchase scores: the Andres & Sons Bakery shop is in the midst of a tran­si­tion to a new backend service, which should be completed in the next week. In the meantime, you may find that certain pieces are unavail­able; rest assured our crack team of webmas­ters is on the case. For urgent inquiries, please contact the bakery. Thank you for your patience.

The composer Ingram Marshall died last week at 80. Ingram was my teacher, mentor, friend, and needless to say, an enormous influ­ence on my music and life. I’m working on writing an appraisal of Ingram’s music, explain­ing why it meant so much to his small but passion­ate audience. In the meantime, here is a new film of his solo piano piece Authen­tic Presence from 2002.

When I performed the piece at Wigmore Hall in 2012, I wrote in the program note:

Authen­tic Presence is one of Ingram’s few purely acoustic pieces. The elec­tronic-music tools of delay, reverb, and sampling are integral to his compos­ing style, taking their place along­side 1970s Cali­for­nia mini­mal­ism, Balinese and Javanese harmonies, and early American hymns in his musical nature preserve. Hazy memories of the civil rights protest song “We Shall Overcome” cycle through the dramatic episodes of Authen­tic Presence; the piece has a pleas­antly un-rigorous formal logic to it, concerned perhaps with follow­ing a train of thought rather than any set musical program.

NPR has a beau­ti­fully-written obitu­rary by Lara Pellegrinelli.

Here’s a quick heads up: I’ll be doing a teaching resi­dency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida from February 13-March 5, 2022. If you’d like to come study with me, please apply! I should mention that everyone gets a full schol­ar­ship. Here’s my “resi­dency statement”: 

The music world is vast, and it’s impor­tant to remember that composers have a special set of skills with which to move through it. Yes, we can sit in our studios and be lone geniuses, but our expe­ri­ence and training are most useful in contact with the outside world. Studying compo­si­tion must mean studying how to be a complete musician: how to collab­o­rate, inter­pret, commu­ni­cate about music, and help others bring not only your ideas but their ideas to fruition. This isn’t just high-flown idealism; it is, in my expe­ri­ence, the surest way to make a life in music. 

This resi­dency is open to anyone working in music creation (not neces­sar­ily in “Clas­si­cal Music,” though that is my field), partic­u­larly those inter­ested in collab­o­rat­ing with perform­ers, writing for instru­men­tal­ists, and commu­ni­cat­ing with live audiences.

Now live on YouTube for on demand re-re-watching: House Work, performed by the Pogoss­ian family. Also please see: the “making of” mini-docu­men­tary.

Today’s new Youtube video is my set of Moving Études from 2017. The three études are pianis­tic studies not on specific tech­ni­cal chal­lenges, but on the idea of tempo, rhythm, and rubato as expres­sive tools.

photo, from a safe distance, by Calla Kessler for The New York Times.

I Face­timed with The New York Times’s Joshua Barone to talk about my recent YouTube foray and the current state of non-concertizing.

Some hard evidence that last month’s Proof show at Cincin­nati Symphony really, truly happened. Grateful for the contri­bu­tions of John Hegin­botham & dancers, Inbal Segev, André de Ridder, John Beale and the Cincin­nati Sacred Harp Singers. Photos by Mikki Schaffner, provided by Cincin­nati Symphony Orchestra.

I love eBay—the great thrift store in the sky—and have been pretty active on the site as both a buyer and seller since I was in grad school. Recently David Coggins, one of my favorite writers on “men’s issues” such as what clothes to wear, asked me to write about my eBay watch list for his new website, The Contender. For those unfa­mil­iar, the watch list is a kind of purga­tory for auctions you’ve got your eye on but either can’t ratio­nal­ize or can’t afford. It’s a real window to the soul, in other words.