Great Moments in Orchestral History
Equal parts educational, curious, and humorous, the YouTube channel Great Moments in Orchestral History
is a video series where I pair musical examples with insights into the cultural phenomena that led certain compositions to become monuments to our shared histories. A do-it-yourself enterprise, the series is hosted, curated, and produced by me.
I've been a performing member of Ensemble Dal Niente since 2007. Dal Niente is a "superb contemporary-music collective" (The New York Times) based in Chicago that presents and performs new music in ways that redefine the listening experience and advance the art form. The programming, brought to life by a flexible repertoire-based instrumentation, seeks to challenge convention and create engaging, inspiring, and immersive experiences which connect audiences with the music of today.
Charles Ives - Three Places in New England
(Version 4's 2nd edition - Ives' original orchestration for large orchestra)
The Housatonic River at Stockbridge
The completion of a DMA in Orchestral Conducting has corresponded with my thesis now published by ProQuest, Charles Ives' "Three Places in New England: an Interpretation and a Conducting Guide" (Link to Full Text). My preparations and analysis have been based upon the 2008 revised edition of the work, edited by James Sinclair and published by Theodore Presser Company.
The video at right is the corresponding performance, recorded with students at Northwestern University on January 17, 2018 in Pick-Staiger Concert Hall (Evanston, lL)
The Chicago-based project Après L'Histoire takes Igor Stravinsky's 1918 composition "The Soldier's Tale" (with words by C.F. Ramuz) as its point of initiation, championing the life of its words and music with dramatic interpretations and by commissioning new works for the same performers. Recent and upcoming performances have been presented by The Poetry Foundation (October, 2017), The Arts Club of Chicago (May, 2017), and Northwestern University (May, 2017). The project's first commission was composer Eliza Brown's Thirteen Trees collaboration with poet Stephen Collis, which was performed alongside an arrangement of William Shakespeare and Felix Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Most recently, the project's "Centennial Commissioning Project" resulted in new works by composers Sarah Westwood and Manel Ribera Torres that were premiered on Constellation Chicago's Frequency Series in 2019.