good gigs

Slowly, my teaching schedule is filling up, which makes me very happy. In September I'm starting to teach regularly at the Bloomingdale School of Music on the upper west side of Manhattan, and also at the Music School of Westchester in Mamaroneck, NY. Both are great community music schools with great students, and I'm very pleased to be joining their faculties.

Production work for the latest ICE disc is now officially finished, and we're moving into post-production. The last piece, which we recorded last weekend, is a great new work, premiered by ICE, for rock (electric) guitar and ensemble by Dai Fujikura, an amazing Japanese composer who has lived and studied in London for many years. A protege of Boulez and George Benjamin, he's really finding his voice, and I find his pieces harmonically fascinating.

I'm also event-managing many aspects of ICE's season opener at the Spiegeltent, which will feature our first commission from a major composer: Philippe Manoury's Cruel Spirals, a nine-movement song cycle written for Tony Arnold and ICE on texts by Jerome Rothenberg. It is a big piece which we're extremely excited about. A feature article in the NY Times will appear next Sunday on ICE and this event, and we're looking forward to all of it.