I finished up my “Electrified Percussion” project at the end of June, which was supported by a UWM Advancing Research and Creativity Grant. I gave a recital on May 1st of all six of the compositions involved in the project and then finished recording the remaining videos over the following month. The project was a wonderful opportunity to work with such great composers and on some really fantastic pieces and I look forward to continuing to perform the pieces for years to come! All six of the videos are on my YouTube channel and linked here on the website on the “Media” and “Compositions” pages if you wanted to check them out.
In terms of gigging, this was a pretty insane last 6 months! I had 10 performances with Fifth House Ensemble in 7 different cities over 3 months. I performed with Present Music for their programs in March and June, and the March program included a percussion concerto! I also started the year with a recording project with Present Music, and will have another recording session with them in mid-July for one of their recent commissions that we premiered in June. I played for the Broadway show “Aint Too Proud” in April while it stopped for a week in Milwaukee, and then again in June when it was in Madison, WI. That show was so much fun because it was the music of the Temptations, and it required us to go on stage to play at the end (pictured above)! I played for the Milwaukee Ballet’s “Beauty and the Beast” program in May. I also presented a collaborative concert centered on Michael Gordon’s “Timber” with my local percussion group, Cross//Hatch, in February. Needless to say, between all of these events and travels, and on top of my teaching load and the grant project I was finishing, it was a challenging half-year to navigate!
The semester started off really well with our first UWM World Percussion Night event at the end of February, which had a huge turnout and was a wild success. We partnered with local ensemble Samba da Vida to present a fun and lively evening of music from around the world. The UWM Steel PANthers Steel Band and student ensembles playing Brazilian Candomble as well as Guatemalan music on our new Guatemalan marimbas rounded out the program. We hope that event will become an annual tradition with some varied offerings from year to year! The rest of the semester seemed to fly by with all of my performance opportunities and academically we rounded out the semester with another percussion ensemble concert in April and a couple of steel band performances!