I think that the blog here is in its nearly-final form. It echoes the bulk of the site nicely, now. For anyone wondering, I modified the wonderful theme “veryplaintxt”, which took some doing, but turned out nicely, I think.
This, along with some other work soon to be unveiled, opens the door for a lot of the impending changes to take place rapidly. The reworked Works will be unveiled as soon as the data entry is finished (there’s a lot of information for only having written 27 works!).
Another thing to look forward to is the relaunch of the Tobenski-Algera Concert Series. We took a short hiatus, and will be relaunching in December 2008 with a program of art song by young and emerging composers. We recently put out a call for scores, which we’ll also put on the website. We may have a special treat on the concert, so stay tuned for more details here and at www.tobenskialgera.com.
Kaity Volpe and I had another photo session on Thursday afternoon during my weekly composition lesson with David Del Tredici. She was the fly on the wall while David and I went through “To You”. My lessons have been particularly kinetic of late, and Thursday was no exception. Since I’m working on songs at the moment, we structure the lessons so that I sing while David plays. This format gives us both a very clear sense of the piece. In non-vocal music, I may hack through the piece myself at the piano (a rare occurrence since I’m not a very great pianist), or David may play through it (a much more common possibility), or with some works, we listen to the Sibelius MIDI playback. With the singing/playing format, though, David sits at one piano (his office at CCNY has two baby grands) while I stand at the other to plunk out notes every so often to make sure I’m right. (As Ned Rorem would point out here, just because I wrote a piece doesn’t mean that I’m qualified to perform it. Nor does it mean that I remember how it goes.) We went through the song a few times, making minor editions along the way (“You keep slowing down here – you should add another tempo marking there.” “You should inject the augmented sixth from the A section into the recap to make it a clearer echo.”), and Kaity got some really spectacular shots. The lighting was ideal – the sun was just right, and made for some beautiful lighting effects. Each session makes more and more excited about the project!
