In this post, I wanted to share some of the student projects I’ve been involved in over the past year.
I know it’s been an extraordinarily difficult time to be a student, and I’ve as a result made a particular effort to be involved in as many virtual projects as I could. This was obviously also a great way for me to keep in shape, to discover some new young voices, and to make some music from home. And I think in a lot of ways this kind of virtual solo piece development can be really effective online.
In a lot of cases it meant that I had regular individual interactions with the students over an extended period – rather than what normally happens, where I only come in for the workshop after the pieces are already finished. This simulates much better what a professional collaboration might look like, and also means that I get to know the students and their music much better. In this case, that made interpreting their work a lot more effective – and fun. Maybe it also produced better work, but that’s obviously hard to prove!
I wanted to share four of the great pieces that came from these workshops, as I think we’ll be hearing more from these composers in the future.
First, from 2020 and 2021 workshops at the Guildhall, Eden Lonsdale’s Murky Windows and Cloudy Horizons, featuring 15 minutes of delicious multiphonics and electronics.
Also from theses sessions was Maya Caskie’s The Ruby Bird, which is available here alongside a video that includes her score, which is graphically notated with illustrations. It’s a beautiful piece with an equally beautiful visual accompaniment!
Ed Cooper’s “to notice autumn aromas, through…” was the product of some workshops that we did with composer Scott McLaughlin. Ed wrote a smaller piece which later turned into this longer work for overdubbed clarinets
And the last, Synthetic Ocean by Sally Hyun. Sally is a student at Peabody Conservatory – I had a great workshop with her and other students there in autumn 2020, but this piece was so ambitious and so unlike any work for clarinet and electronics I’ve heard or worked on before.