After three great years at Clark, I have made the decision not to renew my contract this fall. I will be returning to Ottawa for at least a year at the end of May to attend to personal responsibilities. I look forward to the musical and teaching opportunities available there over the next year.

We just got word that Melvin Backstrom (VAP at UC Santa Cruz; PhD, McGill) and I have been accepted to give an analytical presentation on the Grateful Dead’s “Blues for Allah” at the annual conference of the Society for Music Theory (held in conjunction with the American Musicological Society) in San Antonio from Nov 1-4.

Here is a video clip of Boston’s Hub New Music performing my Songs of Friction at Clark on Feb 4, 2018. The recording clips a couple of times but the musicians put commitment and enthusiasm into it:

Julian Boolean Bertino is an accomplished and dedicated guitarist who will be playing a whole programme of new Canadian works for 10-string classical guitar in his Master’s recital at University of Ottawa today, including a new piece of mine called Needing Space. It has been great to work closely with him on this.

Public Facebook page with all the information about the recital: https://www.facebook.com/events/191298208146461/

Some other pieces he will play:
John Armstrong – The Space Within:

Amy Brandon – Intermountainous:

His own Headspaces ii:

I just received word that I was accepted to give a mini-concert of solo guitar/laptop music at this year’s conference of MusCan (Canadian University Music Society) at MacEwan University in Edmonton at the end of May.

The CreatorSpace performance turned out to be a fun small gathering in a new space for electronic music in the Isabel Firestone library. They’ve got some nice synths, a MIDI-equipped Godin guitar, a Native Instruments Maschine, and a Theremin. I played a couple of new pieces Randomly and S(h)immer along with Broken Refraction with my guitar/laptop setup. Afterwards, they opened things up for people to jam with the gear, which turned into a straightforwardly rhythmic and energetic funk jam. I’m looking forward to playing these pieces again at Clark in a couple of weeks.

Photo by Ryan Hough:

Final projects from the fall’s MUSC141 (Introduction to Computers and Music) class are now available on the Clark Music Technology Soundcloud page.

I have dates for some spring concerts.

Songs of Friction (flute/clarinet/violin/cello) will be performed by Hub New Music at Clark on Feb 4 at the end of their residence. It’s a largely atonal work incorporating wind multiphonics and tempo modulation; mostly written in a Ryerson dorm during Congress 2017.

I will also give a solo lecture-recital, focusing on my interactive guitar/laptop music, at Clark on Mar 28 at 1:30. At least one new piece will be premiered, probably a couple, depending on how Christmas break goes.