I am so excited to share that my oldest published piece of music, We Are Stars, is being transcribed for band and will get a premiere from the Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute Senior Symphonic Band, under the direction of Mr. Dan Austin. Dan has been a champion of my music for some time now, particularly Filum Vitae, my first published band piece. He’s shared performances … Continue reading “We Are Stars” for Band with GCVI
In a really wonderful turn of events, I won a competition this past month! My very first one! It was the 2015 Canadian Band Association Composition Competition (*whew!*) and my piece for concert band “The Meeting Place” took home the prize. I really like that tune, and so do a lot of my students – more than many of my other ones, actually. The funny … Continue reading Music Ed Monday – Keep on Keepin’ On
A few years ago, two of my very good friends made a New Year’s Resolution to say yes to anyone invited them out to something, hoping to embark on some new adventures and live a little more. “Want to go out for drinks?” Yes. “Want to go snowboarding next weekend?” Yes. “Want to come to the beach in fifteen minutes?” Yes. Yes. Yes. And so on, … Continue reading Music Ed Monday – The Year of No
The Winnipeg Wind Ensemble is premiering my new work, “Icelandic Folk Song Suite,” on May 3rd and 4th! Hope you can make it out! The May 3rd premiere takes place at Gimli High School in my hometown of Gimli, MB, Canada. They will be joined by the Gimli High School Senior Concert Band, which is really crazy because that’s the band I grew up in. … Continue reading Icelandic Folk Song Suite – PREMIERE!
Long live the emperor, Drop Assault is released for iOS today. You can pick it up here. Put together by the teams at Complex Games and Crooz, this Clash-of-Clans-style mobile game has been such a great experience for me. I’ve always wanted to work on a dark and gritty game with an epic orchestral score and I finally got to do it with this game. And … Continue reading Horus Heresy: Drop Assault Released!
Another big week on the sabbatical: Seeing as I got to the end of Movement IV of the Icelandic Folk Song Suite, I spent most of my work on this patching up holes in the music. I worked the transitions a lot and figured out how they’re going to work, patching up the last one just tonight (which is still a bit of a mess). I’m … Continue reading Sabbatical Week 2 Roundup!
Happy Easter! The day is here! Prairie Wedding is published and available for purchase! You can find it at the Daehn Publications website! (or your favourite local music dealer!) It feels like so long ago that I submitted it for the 2012 CBA Composition Competition and here we are, halfway through 2014 and it’s finally in print. I don’t mean that in a critical way … Continue reading Prairie Wedding is Available!
This past month, something that I always felt inside was confirmed: The world is craving emotional classical music about our place in the natural universe. We Are Stars is getting published, Filum Vitae is in submission (but has generally been well-received) and, perhaps most surprisingly, Cosmos has been shared by prominent astronomers, is being featured by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (Vancouver) and has … Continue reading Its song, so sweet, compels me…
24 days ago, I uploaded the “Cosmos” choral suite to Soundcloud, hoping that people would listen to it and feel a resonance between the music and themselves. The response has been more than I ever could have imagined. Today, the suite hit 10,000 views 🙂 Thank you. Thank you for giving it a shot. Thank you for writing about it, if you did. Thank you … Continue reading 10,000
On Friday, I had a really thought-provoking conversation with Winnipeg composer Matthew Patton. Matthew was the Artistic Associate with the New Music Festival that just happened a few weeks back. In other words, he’s the guy who got the headlining Icelandic composers to come to Winnipeg. That’s a great feat, but he’s no slouch as a composer himself. He studied Composition at Manhattan University and … Continue reading Coffee with Composers – Matthew Patton
