How did two months pass by so quickly? Oh, right, I am in grad school now. I forgot how busy “school” makes a person. High­lights: working with Alma and Miki on the Ligeti horn trio, chilling (in the truest sense of the word) with Ingram Marshall, getting to know my new composer colleagues, 8:20 AM “Hearing” with Panetti (respeck, Joan), getting intimate with the gamba, Diya’s and my birth­days (cele­brated in typi­cally glam­orous fashion by seeing LCD Soundsys­tem and Arcade Fire), the Free New Radio­head (on my birthday, no less), harvest at the Yale Organic Garden, learning the ins and outs of the Fred Plaut Record­ing Studio, taking Intro Typog­ra­phy (this blog is begin­ning to hurt my eyes), this sudden Fall weather.

And compos­ing. My new piano piece for Richard Dyer, Sorbet, is compleat, as is Play it by Ear, the nonet for Hindemith Ensemble. Right now I’m working on a piece for Marie Dalby’s trio, Flying Forms (gamba, baroque violin, and harp­si­chord). It’s inter­est­ing trying to adapt my gestural language to unfa­mil­iar instru­ments and a completely differ­ent style of playing. My goal is a synthe­sis of Baroque idioms and my own harmonic language, so that if you started listen­ing at any random point, there’d be a few seconds of total confu­sion when you wonder what century you’re in.

Next up—a piece for the superb cellist Hannah Collins. Expect very few (if any) premières this Fall, and then a string of them in the Spring.