I’m going to post a couple of flyers for a couple of upcoming performances. The first is going to be in Winston-Salem, NC on June 24th. Forecast Music will be performing Shifting Landscape.
The other performance will be on June 2nd. My not-so-rock band Liminal Space Contemporary Music Ensemble will be premiering works by Houston composer friend Mark Buller and Texas composer Eric Martin.
Liminal Space made it to Sequenza21, for our concert of David Lang’s music. The article was written by a fellow composer and artist in the Houston area: Chris Becker.
Here is the page for Forecast Music announcing their performance of Shifting Landscape.
http://forecastmusic.com/call-for-scores/
I have a few announcements to make:
1) My group, Liminal Space Contemporary Music Ensemble, is performing a concert of David Lang‘s music on Sunday, March 24th, at 7:30pm, at 14 Pews. Anyone who has known me or my music for even a little while should already know how excited I am to present this music. Luke Hubley and I will be joined by cellist Daniel Saenz, composer/pianist Mark Buller, keyboardist Jeremy Nuncio, and composer/guitarist Chapman Welch. Works include: how to pray, lend/lease, string of pearls, warmth, and arrangements of selections from memory pieces.
2) My piece Shifting Landscape has been getting a little bit of buzz recently. SOLI Chamber Ensemble will be performing it on back-to-back nights in San Antonio, Tx. The first will be at Gallery Nord on Monday, March 25, 2013 at 7:30PM. The second will be at Ruth Taylor Recital Hall at Trinity University on Tuesday, March 26, 2013 at 7:30PM. If you are in town, please drop by and check out one (OR BOTH) of these performances. I’m especially excited about this group of performances, as I am sharing the program with some great names: Thomas Adès, Tania Leon, David Stocks, Marcus Rubio, and Rob Smith (one my former teachers at UH). After quite a few email conversations back and forth, I have come to the conclusion that all composers need fantastic performers for WAY more than just performing and promoting our music; crazy good performers can have such a crazy good eye for notational detail. I sent SOLI what I thought was a very well-edited piece, only to be sent an unnamed number of (minor and tiny) mistakes and oversights on my part. I couldn’t be more pleased that a group of musicians as great as these guys are combing through my piece.
3) In addition to the SOLI performance, Shifting Landscape recently won the Forecast Music call-for-scores. It will be included on a program for their concert on May 24th in Winston-Salem, NC. There aren’t many details as of yet, but I’ll keep everyone posted for sure.
4) Lastly, I was asked to be a member of FrenetiCore‘s inaugural artist board. The details are still a little limited as of yet, but I know that this will be a fun venture. As usual, I’ll keep you posted!
Composers Circle is a really cool website that features a one new composer for just one day, everyday. Today, I am the featured composer. Check out the site, not just for me, but for the awesome archive of past composers. The feature itself is pretty cool, but if you are here on my site, then you already know I exist. In fact, georgeheathcomusic.com is not just a single page, but AN ENTIRE WEBSITE devoted to me.
Hey folks, 2013 is fast approaching and I have a couple of cool items to note. For starters, my new year will be kicked off with myself hunched over some staff paper as I continue work on the music for Ornery Theatre‘s puppet play Cthulhu: A Puppet Play. Opening night is on Valentine’s Day, and what better way to say “I love you” than taking your date to a show about an Apocalyptic, people eating monster? Chocolates and roses are so 2012. I’m doubly excited about this play, not just because the story is great and I get to write for puppet theater, but also because I’m writing the music for Luke Hubley and myself (you may have heard of us…we sometimes go by LIMINAL SPACE!). The show is going to run until the 17th at 14 Pews in Houston. Check it out when it comes, it’ll be a blast for sure!
The news and info is just starting to make its way to me on this, but in March, San Antonio’s SOLI Chamber Ensemble will be performing my trio piece Shifting Landscape. I’m beyond excited about this one. SOLI gave the first read of another piece of mine called Tendril back in 2011, as part of a short group of master classes at the University of Houston. I was honored then and am now completely floored that they are playing my music. Considering some of the pieces that they have programmed, I am humbled to have this opportunity. The performances will be on March 25th and 26th. Do expect more information about this!
Also in the works, I am completing (at a stupidly slow pace) a song cycle for Soprano Misha Penton. I started this thing way back in the Spring of 2012. It is scored for Soprano, electric guitar, and cello. Misha wrote the text, which is a short series of five poems loosely based on images and moments from fairy tales. Her writing is incredibly colorful, filled with vivid imagery, and flows very naturally into musical settings. When I finish the damn thing I’ll write more about it. Hell, maybe one day it’ll be performed and recorded!
My compositional activities have slowed a bit over the past six months. This wasn’t so much on purpose as it was out of necessity for some other cool life things. As it turns out, forming your own new-music ensemble is a bit more time consuming than I had originally expected. Liminal Space is getting off the ground and we’ve had two really successful programs already, the last of which actually received a favorable review! Continuing in 2013, we are putting together plans for a concert in late March of music by David Lang. Also, we are looking at one final concert in May featuring some brand new music written for us by some excellent composer friends! As per usual, stay tuned for more on that.
Happy New Year, folks! Let’s all make it a good one!
P.S. I have uploaded selections from ReGifting Lions. You can hear it on this site, here, or on my soundcloud page.
Hey guys, the group that percussionist Luke Hubley and I started, Liminal Space, is presenting a concert on Wednesday, December 12th at 7:30pm at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art. We’ll be performing To the Earth, Les Moutons de Panurge, Coming Together, and Attica. We’ll be joined by vocalist Misha Penton, clarinetist Jennifer Dennison, and saxophonist Dan Gelok. The concert is free, and should prove to be quite the little concert. If you haven’t heard this music, then I highly recommend looking into it; it’s some powerful stuff.
Hey guys, I’ve been super busy teaching, writing, and working on a bunch of cool upcoming projects. At some point during the coming week, I should have some time to sit down and write out a thorough and solid post. But for now, here is a cool video of a project that Misha Penton put together. I put together a rather barebones guitar soundscape, to which she used as the aural backdrop for a vocal improvisation. The performance was inside of an old, 19th Century military bunker in Fort Worden State Park, WA.
A section of ReGifting Lions will be performed at Barnevelder on Saturday June 2nd at 8pm and Sunday the 3rd at 7pm. The performances are part of the 10th annual Big Range Festival.
Admittedly, I haven’t been very present at rehearsals, and have mainly seen only rehearsal videos of the piece, so I’m excited as Hell to see this thing live. I’m rather proud of the music. Scored for two electric guitars, marimba, and piano, it thoroughly seals the deal that I have spent a better part of the past decade as a closet minimalist.
The piece that will be used for this performance is a reworked version of the final moments of a much larger piece I originally wrote for ReGifting Lions. As I tend to do, I threw myself head first into this project, worked fastidiously for two months, and surprised the whole crew by just how far I can get ahead of myself. As things turned out, presenting half of the show’s worth of music to the choreographers months before having the show even figured out wasn’t the smoothest of ideas. A lot of the music is more than salvageable, so I’m happy. Let’s face it, I’ve done dopier things. Note to other eager, young composers: COMMUNICATE.
Follow the hotlink to the ReGifting Lions website.
In other awesome news, it looks like I will be composing and performing some music for a puppet theater piece based on the short stories of H.P. Lovecraft. The performances won’t be until early 2013. I’ll update more about this as it all unfolds. Here’s another hotlink, this time for The Ornery Theatre.
