Reciting the Versus

On Sunday May 1, I presented my DMA Composition Recital at the Butler School of Music, University of Texas at Austin. The recording is still forthcoming, but one of the pieces was an electroacoustic work that I have uploaded here. The program for the recital is also available.

There are few professional or academic joys that rival the experience of working on my music with talented performers. These individuals willingly sacrifice their time for practice, rehearsal, and performance. Moreover, they offer their considerable skills and abilities to the task of bringing music to life which has no authority or validation but that I, clearly a biased party, intimate that it has some worth.

It is hard to objectively judge the success or failure of an evening’s performance of one’s own music, in part because the breadth of expectations and concerns is so broad. Moreover, as the only person who knows what every moment is supposed to sound like, a composer has the unique position of being able to aurally identify errors to which the audience is likely to be oblivious. There were very few of these, and none that I believe anyone else noticed, which is quite a testament to the performers as my music has a tendency to be, if not intrinsically difficult, challenging to put together in an ensemble.

So, I will be glad for the friends and colleagues who came, and forever indebted to the players who brought the music to life. It truly moved me, and I sincerely hope that as the audio becomes accessible, it might come to mean something to you, too.