Year in Review

Today is graduation and another year comes to a close(academic year, that is). I thought that I would use today's post to look back over the past year and catch everyone up on the highlights.

Last summer I travelled down to Tallahassee to record Vertical River with my good friend John Parks. John had commissioned the piece from me as a part of his CD project. The recording session was a blast and the CD turned out great. I have gotten an incredible response to the work from people all over the world. It's hard to believe how many people have contacted me about the piece. Some have heard it on John's CD Dusk, others have downloaded it from my website, and still others have heard it because the Music City Mystique used it in their WGI show this year. I have to once again give a great big THANK YOU to John for the commission and for the beautiful marimba playing on the recording.

I also posted a recording of an earlier work for oboe and vibraphone on my website. I am happy to report that I have received many emails and calls about it as well.

In October Liana and I premiered Black Borders, a new work for flute, percussion and electronic sounds. It was written for us by Nathaniel Bartlett. It's a great piece and we hope to record it soon. There is a live recording of our premiere performance that appartently runs quite often on Channel 6. We run into people at the store all the time that say, "Hey, I just saw you on TV". No cable here at the Tyson residence, so we just have to take their word for it.

In other premiere news, Liana and I travelled to Ohio in March to perform Halim El-Dabh's Intimacy for flute and marimba. Technically, we premiered it last March, but Halim revised the piece quite a bit before the second performance. I guess you could call it Intimacy 2.0.

And, I premiered Variations on a Theme of Paganini for marimba and orchestra by Paul Dickinson. It is a great piece and also quite difficult. As with most new works, we didn't have as much rehearsal time as we would have liked. I want to thank all of the members of the Conway Symphony Orchestra for their hard work and great playing. I was happy with it for a first performance, but I do hope to have a few more performances in the near future.

Two days before the Variations performance I did the Gillingham Concertino for 4 percussion and wind ensemble with some of my students. Christy, Josh and Brandon all did an incredible job on that one.

In addition to all that, I perfromed at a few percussion festivals/days of percussion including Let's Get Togehter and Hit Stuff in El Paso. That was a lot of fun. I got to work with Jim Casella for the first time. He was great and played a pretty mean drumset solo on Bonham. I did Anubis with the ensemble and got to hang out with some of my former students like Jeff Ausdemore, Eric Rangel, and the host of the event Jesse Parker.

I hosted the UCA Percussion Festival a few weeks ago with Gregg Bissonette, Thom Hasenpflug, and Ben Finley. We had a great crowd and a great time.

Okay, this post is getting a little long, so I'll sum it up. The usual recitals and concerts went on as usual. Things were good and next year things are looking even better. I will be doing more performances with a new group that I'm in called The Payton MacDonald Ensemble, I'll be playing some of Halim El-Dabh's music for solo derabucca at PASIC, and I got a grant to bring in So Percussion to do a complete performance of Reich's Drumming at UCA.

More later,
Blake