The New Music Series at William Paterson University will present a concert of my music, including the world premiere of the revised version of Shadow Traffic, the U.S. premiere of True Encounters, and the Bergen County premiere of Continuance for cello and two-channel audio. The stellar lineup of performers includes Augustus Arnone, Nina Berman, Carl Patrick Bolleia, Marianne Gythfeldt, and Caroline Stinson. My thanks to Carl Patrick Bolleia for organizing this concert.

Mon, Apr 7, 2025
William Paterson University
300 Pompton Road, Wayne, NJ

Clarinettist Marianne Gythfeldt and pianist Augustus Arnone will play the newly revised version of Shadow Traffic on an excellent program by Collide-O-Scope Music that also features Elliott Carter‘s Quintet for Piano and Winds, Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord, Piano Sonata, and Esprit rude/Esprit doux, and the world premiere of Eleanor Sandresky‘s Presence for String and Wind Octet.

Sat May 3, 2025
Benziquin Hall at The DiMenna Center
450 W 37 St, New York, NY

My short song cycle True Encounters on poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay will be premiered by Veritas Musicae at Ilshin Hall in Seoul, South Korea on Thursday, November 14th, 2024 at 7pm. Thanks to Shinhee Park and to William Anderson and The Village Trip for organizing this project.

When I was asked to set the work of a Greenwich Village poet my reading led me to Edna St. Vincent Millay. A fixture of the Greenwich Village literary scene in the 1920s, Millay wrote witty and sharply intelligent poems that were much admired and widely read. The poems I chose for True Encounters – three short settings for soprano, clarinet, and cello – consider love and lust, aging, and mortality with a wise amalgam of seriousness and irony.

I was very pleased to come across this website with my essay “Back to the Future,” written in 2023 for the project Zukunftskonzert – Gedanken zur Musik für morgen (futureconcerts – Thoughts on our Music for Tomorrow), celebrating the 30th anniversary of Das Neue Ensemble. (It’s especially nice to be in the company of two wonderful writers: Paul Griffiths and Kenneth Baird.) The complete book of essays, edited by Stefan Fricke and Jan Ehlert, is available from Wallstein Verlag.

I'll be giving an artist talk and composition master class at the University of New Mexico on Friday, August 30th, 2024 as part of the Robb Symposium Series. My thanks to two wonderful composers and friends Karola Obermüller and Peter Gilbert for inviting me to be on this terrific series.

A wonderful performance by Daniel Lippel and Colleen Bernstein of my duet for guitar and vibraphone For Irving Lippel at the opening concert of The Walden School Creative Musicians Retreat, on Saturday, June 16th, 2024.

I'm delighted that the superb cellist Caroline Stinson will give the world premiere of Continuance for cello and two-channel audio (fixed media) on her recital Singing Bodies with pianist Ieva Jokubaviciute at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, on Sunday, March 3rd, 2024.

UPDATE: Here's the video (time stamped to Continuance, but be sure to check out the rest of the concert, with pieces by Daniel S. Godfrey, Steven Bryant, and Georges Enesco).

My book Elliott Carter’s Late Music is now available in paperback at a fraction of the price of the hardback edition. There's a page for it on the Cambridge University Press website, and you can order at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or your favorite bookseller.

Read an excerpt (.pdf)

I'll be giving a short talk on Elliott Carter’s Triple Duo to introduce the New York New Music Ensmeble's performance of the piece, conducted by Eduardo Leandro, at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, 87 Eldridge Street, on Monday, February 5th at 7:00pm.

I'll be giving a talk on Elliott Carter’s music and my own at NYU on Tuesday, November 14, at 12:30pm. Musical examples will range from the Carter Cello Sonata to War’s “Cisco Kid”(!)

I had a great time moderating a panel discussion with James Baker, Tyson Davis, and Louis Karchin at the Da Capo Chamber Players concert on October 15th, 2023 at the Tenri Cultural Institute in New York City. There were excellent performances of pieces by Tyson and Lou and three classics by Elliott Carter: Con Legerezza Pensosa, Enchanted Preludes, and Triple Duo. Kudos to Da Capo for fifty+ years of of inspiring performances and exemplary dedication to contemporary music.

Continuance is the third in a series of pieces for live instrument and two-channel audio (fixed media) in which the audio part is entirely composed of samples of the live instrumentalist’s playing. It is thus a dialog between a cellist and her recorded image, akin to the way we “overhear” and respond to our own fanciful or even overwhelming thoughts. The piece is a single movement in which a slow and expressive line for the cello – sometimes alone and sometimes interacting with the audio part – is repeatedly intercut with episodes of rhythmically varied pizzicato. The piece was written in memory of Richard Evans, with thanks to Melissa Dibble, and it is dedicated to the wonderful cellist Caroline Stinson, who commissioned it, and who generously played the cello samples. They were recorded by Ryan Streber at Oktaven audiO.

Baritone Christopher Dylan Herbert performed my setting of James Tate‘s poem “Goodtime Jesus,” as part of his his excellent, imaginative, and wide-ranging recital at William Paterson University in February.

Here's the video of just my piece:

And here's Chris's YouTube channel with links to many other pieces:

Christopher Herbert, baritone

My new book Elliott Carter’s Late Music is now available. There's a page for it on the Cambridge University Press website, and you can order at Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or your favorite bookseller.

Read an excerpt (.pdf).

My review of Elliott Carter Speaks: Unpublished Lectures, Edited and with an introduction by Laura Emmery (University of Illinois Press, 2021) is out in Music Theory Online 29, no. 1 (March 2023).

I'll be co-chairing a paper session – Carter, 10 Years On – at the joint AMS/SEM/SMT conference in New Orleans on Thursday, November 10, 2022. The session, organized with my colleagues Marguerite Boland and Guy Capuzzo, features three papers: “Narratology in the ‘Practice Session Model’ of Elliott Carter’s Fifth String Quartet” by Christian Carey, “Carter, Pedagogy, and the Undergraduate Theory Curriculum” by Peter Smucker, and “Carter the Romantic” by James Wierzbicki. Anne Shreffler will be the Discussant.

UPDATE: Unfortunately James Wierzbicki has had to withdraw from the panel, so I'll be taking his place with a paper on “The Publication of Elliott Carter’s Epigrams.“

Thanks to Boosey & Hawkes for publishing this interview about my new book Elliott Carter’s Late Music in their newsletter eQuarternotes.

Delighted to be a guest on The Music Show with Andrew Ford to talk about my new book Elliott Carter’s Late Music. The program features some classic Carter recordings as well as excerpts from some of the terrific interviews Andrew did with E.C. over the years.

It was a pleasure to talk with Dan Lippel about my compositions on New Focus Recordings. He did a great job of editing in excerpts of the pieces in a way that connects seamlessly with our conversation.

Thanks to Alejandro De Los Santos, Shanna Echeverry, John Ferrari, Kayleigh Morpeth, James Nelson, and Timothy Schneider for their terrific performance of my fantasia for six voice-over announcers But Wait... The Luxury Continues (with texts from print advertising) on the William Paterson University New Music Series, Monday, November 29th, 2021. Co-Directors Carl Patrick Bolleia and John Ferrari are doing a great job with the series and John coached the But Wait... rehearsals as well.

Great performance of Around the Bend by Flexible Music: Timothy Ruedeman (saxophones), Haruka Fujii (percussion), Daniel Lippel (guitar), and Eric Huebner (piano) from their New Focus Recordings release FM.

The amazing Daniel Lippel plays Like Minds, from his New Focus Recordings release Mirrored Spaces.

Baritone Andrew White premieres my setting of James Tate's poem “Goodtime Jesus,” streamed live on YouTube, Saturday, July 17, 2:00pm, EST (link below).

UPDATE: Here's the video of just my piece.

And here's the entire concert.

The wonderful Marianne Gythfeldt plays Only Human, from her New Focus Recordings release Only Human.

Great performance by Jeffrey Irving (vibraphone), and Daniel Lippel (guitar). From the New Focus Recordings release Sustenance by Daniel Lippel.

Volume 4 of Elliott Carter Studies Online is out, with contributions by Daniel Guberman, Andrew W. Mead, and Mark Sallmen, and three previously unpublished interviews with Elliott Carter. You can find it at studies.elliottcarter.org.

Topics include Elliott Carter, my own compositions, and (of course) coffee!

Pianist Mari Asakawa plays Desire Paths, written for her, on a program [pdf] with pieces by Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Jason Eckardt, and Hiroya Miura in Tokyo, Japan, on October 29, 2020.

Pianist Mari Asakawa gives the world premiere of my new piano piece Desire Paths, written for her and commissioned by the Yame Bösendorfer Music Festival Project, in Yame, Japan, on March 17, 2020.

Daniel Lippel's album Mirrored Spaces is out now on New Focus Recordings, with pieces by Christopher Bailey, Kyle Bartlett, Douglas Boyce, Sidney Corbett, Sergio Kafejian, Daniel Lippel, Ryan Streber, Orianna Webb, Karin Wetzel, Ethan Wickman, Dalia Raudonikyté With, and my piece Like Minds.

Available from bandcamp, Naxos Direct, Amazon, and Apple Music

Very pleased to announce that Tokyo-based pianist Mari Asakawa and I will be presenting a series of lecture recitals on Elliott Carter’s Night Fantasies in September, 2019. Subtitled "A Modernist Romantic Vision," the presentation covers the Romantic influences that inspired Night Fantasies, the intricacies of the piece’s harmonic and rhythmic language, and the issues of performance practice raised by a piece that the great pianist and critic Charles Rosen called “the most extraordinary large keyboard work written since the death of Ravel.” The presentation concludes with a complete performance of Night Fantasies by Ms. Asakawa. The events at Eastman, CUNY, and New England Conservatory are free and open to the public, but let me know if you'd like to attend one of the others and we'll invite you as a guest.

• Fri Sep 13, 3:30pm, Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY
• Thu Sep 19, Manhattan School of Music, New York, NY
• Fri Sep 20, 3:30pm, New York University, New York, NY
• Tue Sep 24, 12:30pm, The CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY
• Fri Sep 27, 10:00am, New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, MA

My article "Harmony in Elliott Carter’s Late Music" is out now in the new issue of Music Theory Online.

Seven Minutes is an anthology of six very short (one minute) pieces for two-channel audio, largely written for Rob Voisey’s 60x60 project over the past fifteen years. The outlier is a new piece, Eagles, which clocks in at a whopping 1:47.

Thursday, March 7, 2019, 12:30pm
William Paterson University Composer-in-residence Day
300 Pompton Road
Wayne, NJ

The wonderful Glen Velez and the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble, conducted by Payton MacDonald, will give the New Jersey premiere of Bonkers for solo frame drum and six percussionists:

Monday, February 4, 2019, 7:00pm
The New Music Series at William Paterson University
300 Pompton Road
Wayne, NJ

Marianne Gythfeldt's Only Human is out now on New Focus Recordings, with pieces by Elizabeth Hoffman, Mikel Kuehn, Eric Lyon, Robert Morris, David Taddie, and my piece Only Human.

Available from bandcamp, Naxos Direct, Amazon, and Apple Music

“Gythfeldt is setting a new standard for her instrument here.”
—Jeremy Shatan, Anearful, Best of 2018

“The technology never overshadows the essentially human rhythms underlying the music and the equally human urge to convey, though sound, an expressive message from one person to another.”
—Daniel Barbiero, Avant Music News