Upcoming Performances by SoundProof Ensemble

The performance ensemble SoundProof (Patricia Strange, violin; Stephen Ruppenthal, trumpet; Brian Belet, viola and electronics) will include my new one-minute composition Impervious, written specifically for the ensemble, on the "15 Minutes of Fame" portion of their Fall 2012 Midwest Tour. The competition was hosted by Vox Novus.
I crammed a lot of music into my one minute. Impervious is the single climactic arc of an obsessive, asymmetrical rhythmic idea. Electronics were based on my voice and processed using Pure Data and SoundHack, plus analog synthesis. The trumpet is featured in half-valve, growl, and wah-wah effects, while the violin and viola use whispering sul ponticello technique.

Definiens plays my Tangle in L.A.

Kudos and gratitude to the Definiens Project in Los Angeles for their July 1 premiere of my Tangle: An Off-Kilter Tango for flute, English horn, violin and cello. I have to say I'm thrilled with the results; they really played it beautifully! The performance was at Hope UMC in Torrance, CA. You can see the video here. 
The Definiens Project have been great friends and allies, promoting and repeatedly performing my Blugue for reed trio and now giving the premiere of this newest of my chamber pieces.

Early album preview!

Here's a very early preview of the Fairy Tale album, courtesy of SoundCloud.

You can listen to a brief excerpt of the very end of the chamber piece (rough mix), plus two very fun remixes, all here!

Fairy Tale session's best takes

Since composing the chamber piece Fairy Tale a few years ago, I've dreamed of making it the centerpiece of an album, to be framed by remixes of the various movements.

On January 22 I took a big step toward making it a reality. That was the date of a recording session with a dream line-up of players: flutist Marissa LaBant, guitarist Mark Edwards, percussionist Patrick Roulet, and cellist Caleb Vaughn-Jones, engineered and co-produced by Ed Tetreault at The Peabody Conservatory.

Now that spring semester is ending, I am selecting the best takes from that session, and having a blast as I begin to create remixes. More news soon.

Why are we doing this?

There was not a hint of dissatisfaction in the question. I suppose we were an unusual little group, seven musicians aged 18 to 80 with experience ranging from school music student to community orchestra member to professional concert artist. And I suppose it was an unusual thing for all of us to be spending our Saturday on: seven generous people scheduled three hours on a recent Saturday to read through my Sinfonietta for Strings so that I could record the reading, since it was impossible for me to record the performances a few months ago.
The original idea was to put together a recording I can send to other community and youth programs to promote future performances of the piece, and a recording the Carroll County String Project may also use for promotion. We still plan to do that, and that was my reply whenever the question came up. Perhaps I will post some bits of that recording here at marklackey.net sometime soon.
After a while, though, I started to realize that it did not really answer the question. Ultimately, we were doing this for the satisfaction of doing it. For me it was a chance to follow my composition into rehearsal and see it in a new way. It was an excuse to make the two-and-a-half hour round-trip to a neighboring county to be a peripheral part of a rehearsal in a church basement. And I would like to think the players were there for the satisfaction of getting to know their new piece, a composition written for their community string program, understanding how it all fit together. We were all there for the pleasure of creating something new.