2016 has been a life changing year for me so far! At the beginning of the year, I had several world premiere performances – Music Box for guitar and piano, Palus for vocal trio, and Forest Songs: HD Songs. In April, my first child was born, and the adorable little guy has been keeping me very busy ever since! I’m finally getting around to posting some information about my latest pieces as well as audio and video of the performances.

Music Box for guitar and piano premiered on February 16 at Southeastern Louisiana University. The piece was written for a subset of Hypercube, Jay Sorce, guitar and Andrea Lodge, piano. The idea behind Music Box stemmed from a residency at Banff back in January, 2014. The Banff center owns the entire set of Stockhausen Tierkries music boxes!

While there, I was allowed to play with the entire collection of Stockhausen’s Tierkreis music boxes. I loved all the mechanical sounds these little boxes made – particularly the whirring of the gears, the noise of the winding mechanism and the gradually distorting, sinking, slowing sound of the music boxes as they gradually wound down. In this piece, the piano and guitar are used like gargantuan broken down, spastic music boxes, sometimes spitting out noise, sometimes warping chordal and spectral materials and occasionally spitting out fragments of the Virgo, Sagittarius and Taurus music boxes.

Here is a recording of the world premiere performance:

By the way, thanks to my husband, Philip Schuessler, I now have a Sagittarius box of my very own.