I have been busy recently writing some new music for different ensembles which has been nice as it is what I tell people I do.  A special one has been writing a piece to celebrate and feature the great Perth saxophonist/educator/band leader Roger Garrood.  It features him with the WAYJO Swing Band, which he led for many years before retiring last year.  The WAYJO Swing Band will be premiering this new piece called “Roger the Dodger” on September 9^th at The Ellington.

I just finished a piece for a new Australian percussion duo made up of Leah Scholes (Melbourne) and Louise Devenish (Perth) called “All Things Hushed”.  The project they came up with is called “The 180 Project“, which calls on composers to create a new work for them in no more than 180 minutes.  Great idea!  My piece is called “The Long and The Short Of It” and is a series of lines, dashes and dots and calls for the musicians to interpret the length of the marking as duration of notes.  There are some extra rules and guidelines but that is basically it.  I am looking forward to hearing how they interpret with score for tuned and un-tuned percussion.

Currently I am working on a piece called “Duet for Cimbalom & Stairwell” which is part of my PhD research and will be performed as part of research week at ECU in late Sept.  The piece incorporated the massive reverberation of a stairwell in a building at ECU along with a traditional Hungarian instrument called the Cimbalom.  Josh Webster will be playing the Cimbalom and I will be playing sounds in the stairwell using the stairwell – drum mallets and bowing the hand railings.  It is an amazing space with the hand railings producing different pitches with complex overtones and harmonics.  This has been a lot of fun to get together and something very new for me.