Charles B. Griffin
The Colorado State University Percussion Ensemble, directed by Eric Hollenbeck, accepted an invitation to perform at the 2010 Percussive Arts Society International Convention (PASIC) in Indianapolis, IN. A performance at PASIC is the highest award a collegiate percussion ensemble can achieve; CSU is slotted for the new music literature session which offers the longest playing time, and is the most attended concert at the conference with 1000 patrons expected.
To mark the event, CSU commissioned a new piece from me, scored for trumpet and percussion quartet, called Rub-a-dub-dub-DUB. The title references Dub, a sub-genre of (mostly) electronic music originally derived from Reggae. I spent a large portion of the piece exploring reggae rhythms and motives, but I also attempted to emulate with acoustic instruments some of the digital delay effects so common to Dub as a style.
They gave a preview concert on Sunday, November 7, 2010 at 3:00 PM at CSU’s Griffin Concert Hall, University Center for the Arts, in Fort Collins, Colorado. The PASIC performance will take place on Thursday, November 11 at 4:00 PM. PASIC’s New Percussion Literature Session is sponsored by Pearl and Innovative Percussion.
Following on the success of her Juan Rulfo project, pianist Ana Cervantes has put together another multi-composer themed commissioning project entitled Song of the Monarch: Women in Mexico. Nearly 20 composers from around the world were commissioned to respond to the theme, which conflates the varied historical roles played by women in Mexican history and the annual autumn migration of Monarch butterflies into Mexico. This new collection of solo piano music includes my …Like Water Dashed From Flowers…, a piece that borrows elements from the folkloric song La Zandunga and Nahuatl poetry. The piece is somewhat demanding and includes aspects of ritual and song, where the pianist is asked at times to recite text, sing, play a rattle, stomp her foot (wearing ankle bells), or utilize other extended techniques, often while playing the piano at the same time.
This concert will take place on Thursday, October 28th at 8 PM in Jonsson Performance Hall on the campus of the University of Texas at Dallas. The concert is co-sponsored by the UT Dallas Center for Translation Studies. The remaining nine pieces are by noted composers: Carlos Cruz de Castro (Spain), Jack Fortner (U.S.A.), Tomás Marco(Spain), Alba Potes (Colombia), Marcela Rodríguez (Mexico), Paul Barker (United Kingdom), Pilar Jurado (Spain) and Silvia Berg (Brazil).
Following on the success of her Juan Rulfo project, pianist Ana Cervantes has put together another multi-composer themed commissioning project entitled Song of the Monarch: Women in Mexico. Nearly 20 composers from around the world were commissioned to respond to the theme, which conflates the varied historical roles played by women in Mexican history and the annual autumn migration of Monarch butterflies into Mexico. This new collection of solo piano music includes my …Like Water Dashed From Flowers…, a piece that borrows elements from the folkloric song La Zandunga and Nahuatl poetry. The piece is somewhat demanding and includes aspects of ritual and song, where the pianist is asked at times to recite text, sing, play a rattle, stomp her foot (wearing ankle bells), or utilize other extended techniques, often while playing the piano at the same time.
The world premiere of ten works from Monarch will take place on 19 October in the Festival Internacional Cervantino, at 12:00 noon in the Salón del Consejo Universitario. The remaining nine pieces are by noted composers: Carlos Cruz de Castro (Spain), Jack Fortner (U.S.A.), Tomás Marco(Spain), Alba Potes (Colombia), Marcela Rodríguez (Mexico), Paul Barker (United Kingdom), Pilar Jurado (Spain) and Silvia Berg (Brazil).
I had to check out from making any posts here for a while, but for good reason. With about 4 weeks lead time, about 6 weeks ago I left Latvia to begin a new teaching position at Full Sail University, a school focussed primarily on digital media arts just outside Orlando, Florida. I’m the Course Director for Music Composition, a newly created position within the MPBS (Bachelor of Science in Music Production) program, itself a newly launched program within Full Sail’s online division. I had to pretty much hit the ground running, but after a month’s time to adapt, I can honestly say I’m having fun teaching again. In the meantime I’ve been trying to furnish my apartment (Overstock, Target, Office Depot, Ikea, Craig’s List… I’ve assembled more home furnishings in this month than my entire life) in anticipation of my family’s arrival from Latvia (Saturday!). Can’t say I’ve experienced much reverse culture-shock, though coming back to American grocery stores was a little strange. Too many choices, not to mention that in Latvia I didn’t have to deal with the notion that a chicken that was not also somehow a cannibal during its short life is here treated as a selling point worthy of an explosion-shaped sticker and a loud font. On the flip side, I’ll never miss Latvia’s the-customer-is-always-wrong mentality. Walking into a Target with a receipt and an item to return with the confidence of knowing there will be no argument is a blessing worth a moment of reflection by us all. Finding the time for creative work has been a bigger challenge at the moment, as I try and squeak in work on a commission from the Colorado State University Percussion Ensemble, also roughly due next week. Gulp. Getting there.
In case anyone experiences a similar unhappy morning coffee surprise:
I just upgraded my WordPress to version 3.0. I used Automatic Upgrade, and, as one should, I deactivated all plugins before enacting the upgrade. The upgrade was successful, and then I started reactivating the plugins. After activating WP Super Cache, I found myself with a blank Dashboard/Admin screen, something I haven’t experienced before. But at least I was confident about the culprit.
The solution: go into your FTP program and open up the wp-config.php file in the first WordPress folder with a text editor. Then “comment out” the line that defines WP Super Cache.
If you don’t know what that means, about 10 lines into the file’s code, you should find something that looks like this:
define(‘WP_CACHE’, true); //added by yourname on somedate
change it to this (add two hashmarks to the beginning of the line):
//define(‘WP_CACHE’, true); //added by yourname on somedate
and then save the file. That should restore your dashboard.
San Francisco Choral Artists are marking their 25th anniversary season with three concerts, featuring 25 works by 25 composers, directed by Magen Solomon. The program includes my Rekviem, a setting in Russian of a short but beautiful and moving text by Anna Akhmatova.
You can read Ken Bullock’s preview of the program in San Francisco Classical Voice, which describes my piece as “a beautiful requiem — dark, almost threatening.”
SAN FRANCISCO Sunday, June 13, 2010; 4 PM, St. Mark’s Lutheran, 1111 O’Farrell Street, San Francisco
PALO ALTO Saturday, June 19, 2010; 8 PM, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 600 Colorado Avenue, Palo Alto
OAKLAND Sunday, June 20, 2010; 4 PM, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 114 Montecito Avenue, Oakland
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.
As part of my exploration of the program Processing, I’ve been trying to work out the differences between Functions, Objects, and Arrays. In this first example, I made a car Function, where I can basically use one Function that describes the size of the rectangle to draw, and the relationship of the ‘wheels’ to the body of the car. I can make the color independent and here I call the car function three times, each with a different color. I can also offset the placement of the three cars, but since all three are tied to the same function, they move at the same speed, at the same distance from each other.
Rather than treating the car as a function, I can make a car object. This allows me to make as many cars as I like, all moving independently. I also decided to animate the yellow stripe on the road.
Adding an Array to the sketch, I can now cycle through a series of cars of each color that also decreases in size and opacity from the original, with the idea of adding a motion blur effect. I was too lazy to add the blur effect to the tires.
About 9 months ago, maybe more, I put up a couple of examples of early attempts to grapple with the graphics/animation program called Processing. I was originally trying to learn the program because I’m interested in the possibilities of marrying visual and (eventually) musical elements and interactivity, and I was hoping to learn the program to use it for a large multimedia project that was premiered here in Riga in May. I quickly realized that I couldn’t apprehend this code-based language fast enough to use it for the project, and in a mad dash threw myself into learning Adobe After Effects instead. Yet the allure of Processing, with its potential for creating a sort of guided generative art is powerful to me indeed. (Go to openprocessing.org to view hundreds of examples where you can also view the code used to make them).
Anyway, I’ve now fought my way through about eight and a half chapters of Daniel Shiffman’s book Learning Processing. Today was the first time I created something completely from scratch that I thought was interesting. I was exploring the distance function, or dist(), that calculates the distance between two points, most often (I guess) used to calculate the distance between the X and Y location of your mouse. So here is a drawing program. Roll your mouse over the screen. If you press a key on your keyboard, it should clear the screen. Have fun. I thought it was pretty meditative. The best results seem to happen if you take your time and move your mouse in a slow, controlled way.
The Cantala Women’s Choir of the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music will perform my El Paso de la Siguiriya, a flamenco-inflected setting for women’s voices of the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca. Conducted by Phillip A. Swan, the choir will perform in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin on May 28 at 8PM.
This is the second performance of one of my works by Cantala. Last May, they performed my The Moon of the Floating World. Click on the link to hear a live recording of that performance.
Instant Audio
Most pieces can be auditioned on their post pages. But you can sample some audio here.Quick Bio
Charles Griffin recently returned to the U.S. after spending 5 years living and working in Latvia. His compositions and arrangements have been performed at festivals and concert halls throughout the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Asia, Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Recent projects include commissions from pianist Ana Cervantes and the Colorado State University Percussion Ensemble.
Read more in the biography section.
On Facebook
