a page from my sketch­book which became House Work.

This Sunday, August 30^th, my new clarinet quintet House Work will premiere on YouTube. I was lucky to be intro­duced to the Pogoss­ian family in Los Angeles (remotely, of course) by Jay and Helen Schlicht­ing, who suggested I write some­thing for them to learn and record during quar­an­tine, since all of our musical summer plans had been cancelled. The piece that resulted is a pocket theme-and-variations—lots of activity packed into a small space, befit­ting a family of five. We conducted rehearsals remotely over the past few weeks, then Jay (renais­sance man that he is) filmed and recorded it as part of an online concert along­side music by Coleridge-Taylor and Bartók. I’m thrilled with how the piece is sounding in the Pogoss­ian family’s capable hands, and excited to share it with you all come Sunday, August 30 at 10pm EDT / 7pm PDT.

I’ve loved Ann Southam’s Glass Houses ever since I heard pianist Sarah Cahill play one years ago. The music finds an ecstatic joy in severe, repeat­ing struc­tures, a quality it shares with much of my favorite mini­mal­ist art (as it turns out, the ‘Glass’ in the title was partly an homage to Philip’s music). One can also hear the influ­ence of East-coast fiddle music in the bright, nimble melodies arranged in strophic phrases. But the trick of the pieces lies in the way they are notated, with inde­pen­dent hands; the left hand repeats an unchang­ing pattern through­out, while the right cycles through the melodies, which are completely inde­pen­dent metri­cally, there­fore lining up a differ­ent way each time. To execute this requires a level of brain division I don’t think I’ve had to do before. I spent days doggedly stum­bling through no. 14 before I was able to play even the first couple of patterns without derail­ing myself.