Concert Review: Anne LaBerge and Tom Baker at the Chapel

Wow, it's been too long since I wrote. I have plenty of excuses: new dayjobs that take up time, sick family that needed my care, a broken toe that subsequently got infected and was almost amputated...but that shouldn't stop the SEMR!

So in that vein, it's been almost two months since I saw two wonderful people put on a concert of wonderful music. On March 24, 2014, I sat with a small audience in the wonderful Wallingford space with pretty high expectations. These are two powerhouse world-class improvisers who have a relatively short history of playing together. They have evolved a pretty cool duo and it's very exciting to hear them play together.

Most of us Seattleites are familiar with Tom Baker. He's one of the big anchors in the Seattle new music scene. The founder of the Seattle Composer's Salon, the Seattle EXperimental Opera, Seattle Creative Orchestra, the Present Sounds record label....Tom may be, more than any other individual, the central figure to new music in Seattle. (EDIT: Tom brought to my attention that he wasn't a founder of the seattle Creative Orchestra, just a commissioned composer. Also, he isn't the founder of the other organizations, but a co-founder. Apologies for the error) Tom blends his musical voice in two worlds: composition and performance. As a composer, Tom has a voice built out of an academic tradition. With a doctorate in music composition, Tom has a skill with composition that is not easily matched. As a performer, Tom is a fantastic guitarist (standard as well as fretless guitar) with an experimental and jazz background. Though it's realistically impossible to completely separate these musical voices, Tom is one individual whose performance sounds very different than his composition. I'll make it clear: I love both voices that come from Tom. His compositions are almost understated and pastoral. His improvisations on guitar are sometimes bombastic and always unpredictable. I think we very much miss his quartet appearing more often (with Jesse Canterbury living in San Francisco, it's hard to know when they'll play), and Triptet also has a member who is not local. So the opportunity to see Tom improvise in a new setting is very exciting.

What can I say about Anne LaBerge? She was my mentor. She is my absolute favorite flutist alive today. I spent three years living in Amsterdam studying with her, and the experience was so incredible, I haven't fully recovered from it almost seven years later. Anne is the only flutist I'm aware of who has a very strong background in traditional flute performance who has been able to completely remove herself from it while she improvises in order to create art. When Anne plays the flute, she plays more like a drummer. Her rhythmic playing and use of percussive techniques transcends experimental flute playing, and it surpasses the new proliferation of beatbox flute playing (something Anne has been doing probably thirty years before its popularity). Anne, more than any other musician or teacher has made me the musician I am today. I hope soon I can surpass my current state and really make her proud.

For this performance, both Anne and Tom were playing with live electronics. Tom was playing his electric fretless guitar, a processed theramin, and his laptop running Reason. Anne had her flute, alto flute, and piccolo as well as her laptop running Max/MSP and a Kyma signal processor. The two players decided to position the speakers on the floor behind them, and this had the effect of blending their sounds much more than if the speakers had been on stands facing the audience. This has made me think of how I will present my own electronic music. With the speakers on the floor, it was like having a garage band with amps sitting on the floor. It felt much more informal and raw.

Anne has been incorporating text in her music for a number of years, and she has always had a strong feminist voice. In one of my first lessons with her, she related many of the struggles women have being composers in Europe. Even though Europe, and the Netherlands in particular, is a bastion of progressive politics, they seem to have a very long way to go in cultural gender equality. The prejudice is that men are on the vangard of art and music. Women don't really have a place as composers or jazz musicians or experimental improvisers. Obviously, this prejudice is awful, and it sickens me to think that this world where my own daughter was born still clings to archaeic and sexist thoughts.

The textual material Anne used was about two groups of women that are nowadays almost forgotten: The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and the World War II Soviet Union pilots named the Nachthexen. The stories were wondeful recounting the very talented baseball players and pilots that were shattering glass ceilings during the same decade. Baseball was linked to the overall performance through a Max/MSP patch that had the two players play a musical baseball game.

One thing that I have almost never seen happen with a performance by Anne LaBerge is an awkward interaction with her technology. She inspired me to become a computer musician, and even though I constantly stumbled over my equipment and technology, I was always impressed by her perfection. Strangely, this night seemed to have an element that may have confused her. Using a snowball mouse, Anne pushed buttons and made gestures to trigger audio files. The expression on her face relayed a playful confusion that I couldn't tell if it was intentional or not. Strangely, I found this refreshing since I have never experienced a performance by her that wasn't perfect.

Overall, this was an absolutely stellar performance by two very creative and fantastic musicians. Anyone who ever has a chance to see either of these two play should really make sure they head out and see it.

Concert Review: Seattle Chamber Players and On The Boards Present: Icebreaker VII: Open Source Day Two

After getting drenched by rain the previous night, and because I had other errands to run, I drove to On The Boards this night (February 17, 2014). On a day with beautiful weather, I made sure I would spend the least amount of time enjoying it as possible.

The Icebreaker VII: Open Source concert number two featured three compositions: open source by Michael Beil, Karaoke Etudes by Yannis Kyriakides, and Up-close by Michel van der Aa. This whole festival featured work exclusively by European composers.

This concert even more than the previous night reminded me of times in Amsterdam. This may be because two of the three composers have deeply lived in the Dutch new music scene for a long time, and the third (Michael Beil) is very close by in Germany. I find that while the Dutch new music scene is unique and exciting, because it's such a small country it often becomes conglomerated by Germany and its vast scene pretty easily.

I have to vent a little at Mikhail Shmidt. He gave an introduction to the concert, but he committed a microphone crime by blowing into the mic in order to make sure it was working. We see people do this a lot and I think people believe it's a benign issue and that I am over reacting. However, this can damage microphones beyond repair, and a musician should be aware and never do this. From my vantage point, the microphone was a Sennheiser G3 series wireless microphone with probably an 845 head on it (I do know a bit about this stuff). This microphone is a rugged dynamic microphone, so in all likelihood it can handle some tapping or blowing. Tapping is not good for mics (if you have a nice ribbon mic, you can render it useless with a simple tap), but blowing can be catastrophic because you will actually hit the element that moves to capture the sound. The movement of this element can easily make it break, or the moisture from your breath can actually stick to the element and cause corrosion to the microphone. Again, as an A/V technician, I almost expect this sort of thing to happen from a layperson, but a musician should really know not to do this.

Sorry for the criticism Mikhail...I do think you're quite a wonderful violinist! On to the review!

The first piece of this concert was also the theme for the festival, open source. The open source culture is where I find myself deeply involved. I believe the future of our technological progress is (and very much should be) within the realm of open source software (and hardware!). I personally use exclusively free and open source software (my computer runs Linux, I do my typesetting now in LilyPond, my musical performance is with Supercollider, and my recording/mixing is with Ardour). It really thrills me to see more and more individuals embracing the culture of open source (which is a culture of freedom) and applying it to the creation of original art and music. One could write a great deal on just the merits and difficulties of open source, but this blog is more concerned with the music that is presented.

open source is originally a piece for flute, violin, viola, and cello. Maybe because of the title, which implies the freedom to modify the original material, the Seattle Chamber Players replaced the viola section with the very capable Laura DeLuca on clarinet instead. This piece is billed as a flute solo and Paul Taub again expertly succeeds in his role. This is the first and only piece in the festival that features just the Seattle Chamber Players for the performance with Paul Taub as the flute soloist, Mikhail schmidt on violin, Laura DeLuca on clarinet, and David Sabee on cello. One thing I think an audience will inevitably hear while listening to a performance of the Seattle Chamber Players is a great deal of precision. No exception here as the SCP expertly handled the very interesting Michael Beil score.

This piece opens with an image of three elderly men sitting on a bench rocking back and forth. The three players (violin, clarinet, and cello) mirror this motion on one side of the stage while the flutist stands at the other side. While the flute is featured more than the other instruments, the piece is really a fully encompassing work with electronic sounds playing just as important of a role as acoustic instruments. Throughout the piece, warped distortions of Offenbach's famous barcarolle are heard. My understanding is that this composition (and specifically performances from youtube) makes up the entirety of the electronic sound. I do hope that open source software (supercollider, pd, or csound perhaps) was utilized to create the computer track. At some point during the video, a woman appears and “sings”. The singing that she does is more warped versions of the barcarolle, but it's synced nicely so it looks like these strange sounds are coming from the woman’s mouth. Quite often, the flute is in a microtonally distanced unison from the melody. The continuous pileup of multiple sources of the same material also creates a cool microtonal texture.

This piece was a highlight of the festival to me. The video was humorous and fit in quite well with the music. This time it was a rear projection video, and I still wish for a brighter image and higher color quality. This evening, I was sitting several rows back, so I had probably a better placement in relation to the speaker setup. However, I was still a bit disappointed. I think overall, this performance might have been better at the Chapel in Wallingford, but that venue would not have been able to hold as many people.

Second on the concert was Yannis Kyriakides' composition, Karaoke Etudes. This piece WAS the highlight of the entire festival to me. Even more exciting than Romitelli's An Index of Metals the previous night, I found Karaoke Etudes to be the most interesting and exciting of all music in the festival.

Karaoke Etudes featured the entire Seattle Chamber Players members with the addition of both Cristina Valdez on piano and I think it was Robert Tucker playing vibraphone (percussionist was not listed in the program). The structure of this piece has five movements with a different soloist each movement. The soloist plays a complex written solo that Yannis instructs may be interpreted in a variety of ways. While the soloist is playing, the rest of the ensemble takes cues based on the video projected which gives pitch and timing cues based on note names and colors. Each movement has a familiar pop song as the fundamental compositional force, but as the piece moves on, the original pop tune gets harder and harder to comprehend.

The first movement featured Laura DeLuca on bass clarinet as she played along with Marvin Gaye's I Heard it Through the Grapevine. As the entire audience understood the background for this piece, I think it forced DeLuca to throw a lot of crazy into the solo as she fought for attention while we tried to hear as much of the familiar song as we could. The bass clarinet was wonderful, and it put me right back to an earlier review where I listened to two other bass clarinet players (Jesse Canterbury and Greg Sinibaldi) play some great music. Laura DeLuca is not a performer I typically associate with improvisation, and indeed she may have completely read her part, but her playing was outstanding and certainly worthy of the highest praise whether or not it was improvised. DeLuca’s performance felt confident and off-the-cuff, and I think  it fit the nature of the piece tremendously.

The second movement featured Paul Taub on the bass flute. The underground song for this was Bob Marley's Sun is Shining. Already it became more difficult to determine which song was being played. Paul executed some great noisy flute techniques (my favorite) and the ensemble did some great listening and supportive performance.

Movement three had Mikhail Schmidt playing violin and I think some percussion solo during Gil Scott Heron's Fast Lane. The playing in this movement was great, but it didn't stand out to me quite as much as the other movements.

The fourth movement featured David Sabee on cello while Leonard Cohen's Everybody Knows was behind him. This movement was very dark and brooding (much like Leonard Cohen's personality I suppose). The cello and ensemble got some great textural sound as they were grinding in the lower frequencies and being influenced by dubstep perhaps. This particular movement makes me think that Yannis, who is a great electronic music improviser, was exploring his own methods of electronic music improvisation with acoustic instruments that don't typically improvise in the same fashion. This movement in particular was reminiscent of the Dutch improvisation scene, and Sabee did a wonderful job pushing the sound to the limits.

Finally, the final movement featured Cristina Valdez on piano with Nina Simone's Sinnerman. Cristina was forced to play a perpetual motion piano piece that was relentless. The rhythmic drive and percussive precision required for this movement would require a great deal of concentration. The very nature of this piano part was so exposed and precise that any mistake would have been very clear. Cristina, of course, made no mistakes. Her power and precision behind the piano is unmatched, and it is always exciting to listen to her play. I was certainly not alone in this thought as Cristina received more applause than any other soloist for this piece.

The video material for Karaoke Etudes was the most original looking material in the entire festival. The video was crisp and clean, and it was easy to figure out what was going to happen musically based on the visuals. Each movement had a unique video representation of the music, and it was still reminiscent of the strange scenic images that are present in a typical karaoke bar's screen. I was enamored with this piece and so excited when it was over that I couldn't help congratulating Yannis (someone I worked with while living in Amsterdam) via Facebook. This was a performance that had the Seattle Chamber Players at their very best.

The final performance of the evening and the two day festival was Up-close by Michel van der Aa. Up-close is a cello concerto/live-action film. I've worked briefly with Michel van der Aa, and I assume he doesn't remember me, but this composition is pretty representative of his work in general. He comes from the tradition of Dutch composers who studied with Louis Andriessen (side note, Yannis Kyriakides is a Greek Cypriot, but he also studied with Andriessen and could probably be considered a young Dutch composer). Van der Aa is probably the most recognized and esteemed of the young composers in the Dutch scene.

Up-close was clearly supposed to be a highlight of the festival. It featured a highly polished video featuring an older woman alternating between a stage, forest, and house. The scenery looked incredibly Dutch to me. The woman acting was expressive and displayed a great range of emotion without ever speaking. The cello soloist, Julie Albers, was involved throughout in a dramatic way. There are many moments in which the cellist interacts with the video projection duplicating the movements of the actress on screen. Throughout the piece, Albers would stand with dramatic flair, move across the stage, carry a lamp, and show drama with her facial expressions.

I'm not convinced with the effectiveness of using a concerto soloist in the capacity utilized for this piece. I felt that the live moments of dramatization were infrequent and merely served as distraction and break up the musical performance into segments. These dramatic moments weren't bad, but I didn't feel particularly moved by them. Overall, everything that happened on the stage (and screen) was inferior to the music presented. I know this might be tempted to be another showing of gesamtkunstwerk, but it seemed clear to me that music was the most integral portion and most concentrated upon art form for this piece. This is certainly not a bad thing, because the music is why we were there. I believe all the video work was intended to enhance the music, but was not necessarily integral to the performance. Karaoke Etudes video was probably the most important as instructions to performers were included in the video. An Index of Metals had a video that enhanced the overall experience, but didn't necessarily need to be included for the experience to be what it was. open source had an entertaining video that was a great addition to the performance. The video for Spam! was the only one that really detracted from my experience. Close-up had video that was probably supposed to be the most important of all, but it really fell far from that experience.

The cello work of Julie Albers was certainly polished and exquisite. Her delicate appearance did nothing to portray the ferocity with which she approached van der Aa’s music. Her moments of movement did betray a lack of theatrical performance, but her musical skills were astounding. With cello music reminiscent of the Kodaly sonata or the Shostakovich concerti, Albers played with conviction and without struggle. Her performance was very fantastic, and it was really enjoyable to hear her play.

The string ensemble, again led by Alastair Willis, accompanied the soloist and video nicely. Their playing was certainly up to the challenge of the music, and they nicely fit in during moments of accompaniment and background. Most of the time, the string section was of tertiary importance, but the experience was dependent on a solid string orchestra.

Michel van der Aa is certainly a good composer. He knows structure, form, and all the important compositional tools as well as any other famous living composer. However, his music has never really struck me with excitement. If I were to rank my favorite compositions of the festival, Up-close would be second to last. I didn’t really feel much excitement listening to this piece. It’s not a composition of experimental nature like open source. It doesn’t have the creativity and musical variety of Karaoke Etudes. And it was lacking in the intensity and power of An Index of Metals. Though I understand the desire to place van der Aa in the position of festival closer, I found it more of a wind down experience than an exciting one. The first night, I left the program more excited to be a new music performer/composer than I have in a long time. This night, I was just happy to head home.

Do we have fans of the Dutch composer scene? It’s certainly a cool scene. Did I offend your thoughts on Michel van der Aa? I’d love to hear about it!

Album review: Ascendant by Greg Sinibaldi and Jesse Canterbury

I intended this review to be published days earlier. However, an illness that really left me out of it delayed me.



Greg Sinibaldi is the first experimental musician from Seattle I ever met. We were both artists in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts about seven years ago. At the time, I was living in Amsterdam. At the ACA, we joined several other musicians and worked with the flute master, Robert Dick. There were also painters and poets working with other masters of their crafts. I made some great friends at this place, and when I moved to Seattle, Greg was the first person I made contact with in order to get into the music scene. In my time living in Seattle, I've really come to see that Greg is my favorite saxophone player in town, and probably one of my favorite alive. In Ascendant, Greg alternates between playing bass clarinet and tenor saxophone.



I actually met Jesse Canterbury in Ellensburg, Washington while I happened to be passing through in the early days of moving to the state after being in Europe. He was playing with the Tom Baker Quartet, and that was a show I found to be quite inspiring. I've seen Jesse play many times since then, and we've had the chance to play together on occasion before he moved to the San Francisco area. He's a very fine clarinetist with a great ear and feel for improvisation as well as written music. In Ascendant, Jesse alternates between bass clarinet and clarinet..



Ascendant was recorded in the Dan Harpole cistern at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, Washington. The cistern was used while Fort Worden was an active military base and drained sometime in the 1950's. Since then it has regularly been used to record music because it has a unique architecture and a forty-five second reverb.



Reverb is in essence, an echo. The actual physics and nature of reverb is more complex, but a succinct way to say it is that reverberation is created as sound bounces off a surface and travels back to your ears. With large spaces and a variety of surfaces, the resulting reverberation can vary greatly. Musicians have been taking advantage of their performance space and natural reverb since the beginnings of music. Cathedrals, large buildings, caves...these places all can have very interesting architectural characteristics and varying reverb times. Computer musicians often artificially emulate these sorts of spaces in order to create their synthesized reverbs. There are also hardware built devices that create reverb. These are commonly used by rock bands and in recording studios. Reverb is so vital that many recording studios keep their recording space acoustically devoid of reverb so it can be created and added to each new album that is to be recorded.



For this album review, I will give a brief review track by track and conclude with an overall review of the album.
Wade
This track has a simple melody and counterpoint that really transforms because of the space. Two bass clarinets play a melody that might not be so memorable when played in a regular concert venue, but the added reverb makes it much more interesting. I actually find the melody to be reminiscent of Percy Grainger. I'm not certain, but I assume both Greg and Jesse are familiar with his music and have played it in many concert bands. Grainger's music is also intended to be played in concert halls with a nice reverberating space. The way this melody builds and the way the counterpoint compliments it is exquisite. With a lot of widely spaced open harmonies, this slow melody is soothing and pastoral.
Second Thoughts
Opening with a series of trills that create a wash of sound, Greg's tenor sax seems to come out of nowhere. The saxophone tone is extraordinary. Starting lower in the register and moving higher, Greg's instrument captures a full range of sound possibilities in this space. By playing in a style somewhere in between a classical saxophonist and a jazz saxophonist, Greg's saxophone tone is unique and interesting. This is a fresh sound to my ears that are more familiar with hearing the saxophone in a jazz combo situation. Greg is always looking for different ways to incorporate his saxophone, and I actually don't think I've ever heard him play in a traditional jazz setting.
Two or Three Back and Around
A powerful opening that can only be Jesse Canterbury and his clarinet(s). By playing two clarinets simultaneously, Jesse creates great dissonances and harmonies with himself. Harsh strong attacks with strikingly loud dynamics permeate through this track. This more than any other track sounds like a duet (trio?) between Jesse and the cistern. The use of two clarinets throughout this piece thrills me. Because they are both being played by the same player, blend and intonation is flawless between the two. The harmonies and dissonances that Jesse creates sound more like very clear multiphonics from a single instrument. With a soft ending akin to a continuous drone, this track ends leaving me with a desire for more.
Beside Ourselves
Back to duets, this time with tenor saxophone and bass clarinet. This is the first piece on the album that has a real strong sense of rhythmic drive, the two instruments compliment each other well. Both Greg and Jesse have an uncanny knack for blend so their ensemble playing is like listening to an organ with many different stops open. This track more than any other is played as a jazz standard. The driving melody is played together, and then one player plays an accompaniment part while the other plays what I assume is an improvised solo. The strong bass notes that recur really fill the recording and the space.
Ugly Beauty
Again, Greg's sax tone is spectacular as the opening for this track. When I listen to Greg play, I hear George Garzone (one of his mentors) of course, but I also hear a strong mix of John Coltrane and Stan Getz. Of course Greg isn't the only tenor player to be influenced by these giants of the instrument, but the effortless way he can call up their sound and influence is fascinating. This track is one that would play well in a concert hall, and it is also reminiscent of what one might hear a saxophone busker playing on the street. The reverb, which does add some nice color isn't particularly necessary in this piece.
If You Look too Close
With an almost jolting contrast to the previous track, Greg plays a tune that reminds me more of the Berio flute sequenza than a Stan Getz inspired saxophone solo. I can picture someone playing this in a concert hall with a computer generated reverb and creating a lot of excitement from the audience. The fact that this is performed inside of a water tower only enhances the experience. Computer programmers and engineers work hard at creating reverb effects that sound this good with a live performer.
Not Forever, Just for Now
This track is a bit infamous to me. When I originally downloaded the album from Bandcamp, I ended up with a track that cut off about a minute early. After contacting Paul Kikuchi, the owner of Prefecture Music, everything got squared away and I got the complete track.
Anyway, the two bass clarinets are haunting in this piece. Greg and Jesse have a great feel for each other's playing. In this track, some of the melodic material does seem a bit stagnant. There's a motif of quickly running notes that gets repeated, but it feels out of place with the slower and more deliberate material. I think if these motifs would have been played more along the tempo of the other material, it wouldn't have jumped out at me so much and drawn me out of the moment.
Web of Lies
This piece really shows off Jesse's dynamic control. As woodwind players, it's much easier to play loudly than it is to play softly. So Jesse's capability to come in at a whisper and keep his dynamics low for so long before bringing up the volume highlights incredible restraint and confidence. At about the halfway mark, he really takes off and plays a cluster of loud repeated notes with the occasional accented note outside of the cluster. The high frequencies really resonate in this space and the amount of sound bouncing from the high register of the clarinet really pleases my ear.
Hold This
The open chordal sound is very Americana. Again, Jesse is playing solo clarinet and using the space and its reverb to create widely spaced and beautiful chords. This reminds me of composers like Aaron Copland (Americana), Benjamin Britten (widely spaced chords), or Erik Satie (ambient). As easy as it would be to make this album one of ambient atmospheric sound, I find it rather astounding that this is the only piece that I could even consider labeling as ambient. It's refreshing to hear long beautiful tone as the penultimate piece on this album. If Jesse is anything like me, I think this would have been the hardest piece on the album to play because of the sparse and open nature of the composition.
Dreaming in Two Million

Finishing the track is a bass clarinet duo. Beginning in the low register of the instrument, the two clarinets really rumble in the cistern. With a very linear motion and strict one to one counterpoint, a high point is reached and the two clarinets branch out to more individual lines in the high register. The pitch material in the high register is nice, but the bass clarinet doesn't resonate as well in this register as the clarinet or tenor saxophone do. Perhaps it's because the contrast with the low register bass clarinet is too great. As the track and album end in the low register, the resonance comes back, but I would have liked to hear that rumble that was at the beginning of the track one more time.

Overall, this album is one of my new favorites. I have always been very impressed with Greg and Jesse and their musicianship. With such a prominent space and sound, it really should be labeled as a trio for the two woodwind players and the cistern. Greg and Jesse took this space, and instead of doing something easy like creating an album of ambient sustained sound, they really pushed the limits of sound production in the space. Certain times in the album, this experimentation isn't particularly succesful. The bass clarinet doesn't resonate through this space as it gets higher. Sometimes the material is unnecessary for a 45 second reverb. But with this experimentation, the listener will get a really great sense of what the capabilities of this space and some great wind players can do. The high range of the clarinet is thrilling. The tenor saxophone is astonishing and unique. The rumble that the low bass clarinets create will excite you.

In the end, I can't recommend this album enough. If you have a turntable, you should get it on vinyl (I wish I had a turntable!). If not, you should head to bandcamp and name your own price (!) and download this album today.

As always, feel free to give me your input in the comments section.

Links:

Bandcamp - https://sinibaldi-canterbury.bandcamp.com/

Greg Sinibaldi - http://www.gregsinibaldi.com/

Jesse Canterbury - http://www.jessecanterbury.net/

Prefecture Music - http://prefecturemusic.org/

Dan Harpole Cistern - http://centrum.org/dan-harpole-cistern-at-fort-worden-state-park/

First Post

Welcome to The Seattle Experimental Music Review. This is a blog that's starting because of a post I saw on Facebook by local composer/sound artist, Steve Peters. With a simple question, Steve pointed out a significant lack of writing about the experimental music scene that's happening in Seattle. It's not too difficult to find reviews about Seattle music in the realms of pop/rock, hip hop, jazz, or classical music. The goal is for this blog to feature quality writing about live music happening in Seattle and reviews of recordings released by Seattle experimental musicians.

So who am I and what qualifies me to undertake this project?

My name is Clifford Kimbrel-Dunn, and I'm a flutist/composer/electronic musician who lives in Seattle and plays exclusively experimental and avant-garde music. I've premiered over a hundred new compositions that incorporate the flute, and I've spent the majority of my adult life dedicated to exploring the extended capabilities of flute technique. I have a bachelor's degree in flute performance, master's in music composition, and a second master's degree in music and technology.

I'm only recently becoming active in the scene again. Having lived in Seattle for a little over six years, I'm putting down thicker roots. I have a daughter who is almost a year old, and I'm hoping to buy a condo in the city this year. When I'm not working on music, I'm either working as an audio/visual technician at the Seattle Public Library, or spending time with my wife and daughter, Kayla and Aria. Please comment and contact me with any information for great shows and music.

Thanks for coming.