With funding from Nordic Culture Point and the Swedish Music Information Centre, the first Baltic/Scandinavian incarnation of the New Music Incubator kicks off on June 8 at Jurnieka Ligdza (The Sailor’s Nest), a small, charming, family-run hotel just south of Liepaja, Latvia and a stone’s throw from the Baltic Sea.
17 musicians and composers and new media artists, coming from Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden and Denmark will come together for a week of creative experimentation where the lines between composition, improvisation and performance become blurred as new pieces are collaboratively created and premiered daily.
The idea for this particular incarnation of NMI arose from my meeting the Swedish composer Martin Q Larsson at a conference in Helsinki in 2008. He and Swedish guitarist/lutenist Patrik Karlsson have run several of these NMIs in Sweden and also in the UK. I went to last year’s NMI as a participant, and will join Martin and Patrik in managing the project this week.
The follow-up public concert from this past summer’s activities in the 
A native New Yorker currently living and working in Latvia, Charles Griffin’s compositions and arrangements have been performed at festivals and concert halls throughout the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Asia, Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.