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Monthly Archive: May 2011

Carved in Stone

Here are some reviews of my recent US performances:

North Wind was a Woman
Art of Elan Gives Local Premiere of David Bruce Song Cycle (SanDiego.com)

The Shadow of the blackbird
Music review: Jacobsen and Levingston at Library of Congress (Washington Post)

A Little Offbeat Humor in Cyclical Explorations (NY Times)

Songs in Wood
The Man Who Makes a Marimba Into a Strad (concertonet.com)

While I was in the states someone pointed out that it was the 10th anniversary of the death of Douglas Adams (of Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame). Someone else pointed me to this rather wonderful article Adams wrote on the internet and technology, which contains many pearls of wisdom, including this sage advice which applies as much to reviews as it does to anything else you read in a newspaper:

"Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can't easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence 'carved in stone.' What should concern us is not that we can't take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can't, it's just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no 'them' out there. It's just an awful lot of 'us'."




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Forthcoming premieres & performances

Unfortunately I won't be able to make an exciting event on May 3rd which is the West Coast premiere of The North Wind was a Woman, performed by the fantastic Art of Elan (who recently premiered The Eye of Night) with Susan Narucki singing.

I will however be in New York and Washington for the premieres of two new pieces, my new piano piece for Bruce Levingston, The Shadow of the Blackbird, which premieres in the Library of Congress on 6th May, with a repeat performance at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall on 12th May (tickets here).

The second premiere is a new piece for Choir and Marimba, featuring Cantori New York and Makoto Nakura (tickets here). The piece is called Songs in Wood and features texts by yours truly. It forms part of a trilogy of new commissions, the other two being by Jacob Bancks and Akemi Naito.



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