Music for these Distracted Times

Music for these Distracted Times was a January 23rd concert featuring recent works connected by their shared commentary on recent times. From the program notes: “At this point, it’s difficult to describe the last few years in anything but glib catchphrases: “unprecedented events,” “the new normal,” “shocking but not surprising,” and so on… It has felt maddeningly absurd, impossible to escape, never-ending: health crises, political deceit, violent extremism, racial animus. Typically, the music I write isn’t reactive. But like many composers, my recent work has been inspired (if that’s the word) by the upheaval around us. Tonight’s program contains compositions written mostly over the last few years, a product of these distracted times. The pieces have a variety of moods and characters, but they share a kind of tattered anxiety—a sentiment that has perhaps become the temperament of our time.”


The concert featured guest appearances by Matthew Roitstein, Natalie Lin Douglas, Ally Smither, Ben Roidl-Ward, Mei Rui, Jon Kimura Parker, Brian Connelly, and students of the Shepherd School of Music. The program included Songs from the Post Truth Era (written in 2018 for the Pushback Collective, who reprised the work), Pattern Preludes, Book 4, Ignoble Dances (written in 2020 for Mathew Roitstein, but here receiving its LIVE premiere), Loop Studies (the premiere of this work for violin and looper pedal, written in 2021 for Natalie Lin Douglas) and Lamentation on The Disasters of War (a string sextet from 2006).