I am in new artistic territory this year, with the current political dystopia as an interesting and crooked companion to my work. I’m assembling a cornucopia of projects and residencies that will inform my personal thesis for 2017, “Worlds Within Music and Text”.

Text and music have inherent tensions and power struggles between them in performance. Their roles and meaning fluctuate, and I’m interested in discovering what’s possible in an equal partnership.

I’ll be posting more Journal entries as each project arrives. There’s so much to say about the process, and my collaborators – and I have a lot of research to do.

Writer Bonnie Kwong and I are creatrix/performers this Spring in her spoken-word event, “Signals & Intersections”, in San Francisco. I will be in Paris again all of May working with French composers Pascale Criton and Nicolas Vérin. In the early fall, I will be in New Zealand, working with composer Martin Lodge, co-creating new work around the theme of “The Narrative is the Score”.

On the home front, my duo Caballito Negro (with Terry Longshore) and Left Edge Percussion are reprising our show “Resist” in Oregon on February 9th, which we toured in Northern California in October 2016 – it has become thematically even more apropos.

Also, Terry and I are catching up with our newly commissioned work this year, and will develop a new concert program by the year’s end. We’re excited to be working with composers such as Mark Applebaum, as part of the Oregon Fringe Festival in early May.

 

I feel some parallels between my personal compositional process and the public questions that are growing around identity, power, and vision for the future. Who are we, and where are we going? Life and art are not polite, and the paradoxes we live with keep me up at night. Going to work now…