Above, the view from the music table during Illinois tech. The show opens Friday; things are sounding and looking stup­den­dous. It’s been a joy to spend time immersed in this music, with these people. If you missed your chance at tickets for this month’s run at Bard, never fear: future produc­tions are mate­ri­al­iz­ing, includ­ing one in Chicago this winter.

I’ve had to tear myself away for a few days for a long-post­poned jaunt to Britt Festival in Jack­sonville, OR. I’ll join Teddy Abrams and the Britt Festival Orches­tra for a perfor­mance of The Blind Banister on Thursday.

I’m very pleased to help trumpet the announce­ment of Sufjan Steven­s’s new album Reflec­tions, a two-piano ballet score that I recorded with Conor Hanick. The bril­liant video above, directed by Brian Paccione, is a perfor­mance of the first track, Ekstasis. The full album is out May 19.

In other Sufjan-related news, I’ve created new arrange­ments and orches­tra­tions for his 2005 album Illinois, which has been chore­o­graphed in its entirety by Justin Peck, premier­ing June 23 at Bard Summer­scape.

Happy new year. In an heroic act of procras­ti­na­tion from writing, I’ve made a new subsec­tion of this site listing the various things I’ve written about music over the years. Thanks to all the artists and record labels who have asked me to write about their record­ings; doing so always teaches me new ways to listen and think about music.

I’m very pleased to present my new work for natural horn quartet, Loud Ciphers. The piece is somewhat atypical in that it was composed, recorded, filmed, and released over the course of just a month—a rare instance of imme­di­ate grat­i­fi­ca­tion in the usually glacial world of commis­sion­ing new work.

The piece was commis­sioned and performed by the extra­or­di­nary young natural horn special­ist Isaac Shieh, who I was intro­duced to by Nico Muhly (thanks, Nico!). The above perfor­mance seems all the more remark­able with the knowl­edge that it was made during the past week’s intense European heat wave.

Here’s a bit more about the piece, and you can also purchase scores and parts.

I was honored to spend the past weekend remem­ber­ing Ingram Marshall in an appraisal for the New York Times.

With an unlikely fusion of loose, stream-of-conscious­ness forms and old-school contra­pun­tal tech­nique, he constructed mono­liths of sound, then obscured them. He wove elab­o­rate textures out of canons, inver­sions, elon­ga­tions and diminu­tions. His gamelan-inspired arpeg­gios undulate gently in and out of sun and shadow. Frequent quota­tions and refer­ences give the music a sense of porous­ness and muta­bil­ity. Every­thing coexists in what feels like a physical acoustic space — rich and rever­ber­ant, but also distant, held at a remove, seen through a dense fog. Above all, there is the emotional flavor of it. For him, music wasn’t just an abstrac­tion, an intel­lec­tual game of pitches and forms. It was also about express­ing some­thing sincerely.

Read the full piece here.