Just wanted to briefly plug a cool show I’m excited to be a part of, coming up this Saturday. My friend Doug Fisk has brought together a group of nine composer/pianists, each of whom will perform one of their own pieces. This show is at Fire­house 12 in New Haven, and we’re gearing up for another one at Miller Theater Merkin Hall in NYC this spring. More info over at the calendar page (along with some new events).

Here’s the poster I designed for the event, which reveals my contin­u­ing obses­sion with the work of Josef Müller-Brock­mann (click for larger):

Instead of your tradi­tional puff piece on voters’ states of mind today, NYTimes.com has a puff multi­me­dia widget. I like this trend. (I also like Helvetica.) 

For the record, I am feeling both excited and distracted. Connecti­cut isn’t exactly the most thrilling place to be today, and I voted absentee weeks ago in my hometown. But for some reason it still feels like a holiday. I have a new piece called Some Connecti­cut Gospel, which I wrote over the last couple of months. It’s partly about Ives, and how his music and inim­itable person­al­ity have become a legend for composers, and also about these strange feelings (hope? patri­o­tism?) that have been welling up inside me recently (see my Oct. 10 post).

This is not some­thing I’m partic­u­larly used to. Connecti­cut is unlike some other states, whose resi­dents seem to have a strong sense of group identity and even pride. I never feel “Connecti­cut­ian”; I tend to think of myself as a misplaced Cali­forn­ian, even though I only spent the first five years of my life in the Bay Area. Why is that? Did Connecti­cut used to have more of a person­al­ity? Before the facto­ries shut down, before every city became a depressed corpse, before Route 7 became a parade of strip-malls and the south­west corner a spec-house paradise, the state must have had some real charm. Some Connecti­cut Gospel is a song of praise to this imagined place— Ives’s Connecti­cut. It will be premièred in Miami (of all places) on January 30^th by members of the New World Symphony, and likely reprised up here in New Haven in February.