Thrilled to be in Salt Lake City for the Utah Arts Festival and the premiere of Gramarye, which was commissioned for this year’s event. It’s been a pleasure working with Sinfonia Salt Lake and and conductor Rob Baldwin on this new work. We had a productive recording session today at the University of Utah, and tomorrow is the premiere at the Salt Lake City Library Auditorium.

I’ve enjoyed a productive and stimulating residency at the Hermitage Artist Retreat in Florida these past few weeks. It’s been a delight to get to know the work of my fellow residents and to swim in the ocean every day. I’m already looking forward to returning for another residency here in early 2020.

I’m looking forward to the premiere tonight of Bad Roads, my second play at Duke in 2019 as sound designer. It’s been a pleasure working with director Jody McAuliffe and a fantastic crew on making this production come to life. Bad Roads is a new play by documentary playwright Natal’ya Vorozhbit, the leading Ukrainian playwright of her generation. As Jody notes “This is a powerful play that explores what it’s like to be a woman in wartime, specifically in Ukraine, and the collateral damage suffered by women in war.” It’s certainly been a challenge confronting this material, but I particularly enjoyed dusting off my synthesizers for the incidental music. The show runs from April 4-14 and plays in the Sheafer Lab Theater in the Bryan Center on west campus.

I have been invited to the Tanglewood Music Center this summer as a Composition Fellow. I’m eagerly looking forward to the premiere of select movements of Red Wind, as well as to working with the prestigious faculty and guest composers. More information to follow as the festival draws near.

My time this year at the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music has been extremely fulfilling and productive. Tonight the Del Sol Quartet premieres my new string quartet Comb in San Francisco alongside new works by fellow Cycle 5 composers Aaron Garcia, Anjna Swaminathan, Antonio Celaya, Jonah Gallagher, and Erika Oba. I’m so thankful to work with such amazing musicians and I couldn’t be more excited for this concert.

I’m delighted to have won the 2019 Utah Arts Festival Chamber Commission competition. The prize is a new piece for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion to be premiered by Sinfonia Salt Lake at the Festival in June. I’m looking forward to heading out to Utah for the first time to work with these great players.

I’m thrilled to be in Memphis this fall doing a residency at Crosstown Arts. It’s exciting to be in the thick of it with other musicians, artists, filmmakers, and poets. Today I had the pleasure of presenting my music at the University of Memphis, where I met professors Kamran Ince and John Baur along with many talented student composers. Here’s a link to my artist talk at Crosstown that I did in September: Crosstown Artist Talk.

I’m honored to have been awarded the Hermitage Prize from the Aspen Music Festival and School. I’ll be heading to The Hermitage Artist Retreat in Sarasota for a 6-week residency sometime this coming year and I couldn’t be more excited for it. What’s more, this morning Joshua Hong led the Aspen Conducting Academy Orchestra in the second reading this summer of my new orchestra piece Door to the River. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to workshop this piece here in Aspen with Josh and such amazing musicians!

I’m pleased to be in Aspen, Colorado, for the summer attending the Aspen Music Festival and School as a Schumann composition fellow. Looking forward to working with composers Stephen Hartke and Christopher Theofanidis, and to the premiere of Tarot Teller for Pierrot ensemble, which will be premiered by the Aspen Chamber Players. A new, short work for orchestra, Door to the River, will be read in conjunction with the Aspen Conducting Academy later in the summer.

This morning I successfully defended my dissertation “Red Wind for Soprano, Narrator, and Chamber Ensemble, Bass Cathedral for Clarinet and Wind Ensemble, Red Wind (Desert Remix) for Generative Software, and Form and Exhaustion in Pascal Dusapin’s Quad – In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze” at Duke University. My committee was co-chaired by John Supko and Stephen Jaffe, who were joined by Scott Lindroth and Bill Seaman. Huge thanks to them and to everyone who has supported me on my musical journey.