I've just returned from Amsterdam, where my chamber opera "Leaving Santa Monica" was a finalist for the 2008 Gaudeamus Prize! As part of this wonderful honor, the piece was performed in a (surprisingly well-attended) public concert at the beautiful Muziekgebouw aan't IJ by the incredible Asko|Schoenberg Ensemble. The ensemble's outstanding young conductor, Bas Wiegers, led an energetic and emotional performance of my work, and I was absolutely thrilled with their interpretation, which garnered a nice little blurb in the NRC:

"In the regular Gaudeamus program were more pieces that have a chance to win the Gaudeamus Prize: 'Leaving Santa Monica' by the American Jenny Olivia Johnson, an attractive mini-opera with minimalist whirls. She could have followed even more her inclination towards a more dirty, Michael Gordon-like sound."

I also met scores of exciting composers and performers, had many crazy conversations, and found myself completely inspired by a lot of what I heard and witnessed--especially Valerio De Bonis's haunting "Un cadeau pour...," a brief, unassuming, and sumptuously poetic work for video and electronic music, and Hikari Kiyama's "Luminous Orchestra," a deafeningly loud and wonderfully confusing morass of 16 orchestral players--all dressed in white shorts, T-shirts, and glow-in-the-dark facepaint--going, for lack of better words, *completely apeshit* for 10 solid minutes. Fantastic!

All in all, the "Week" was an amazing experience, and I'd like to thank everyone involved for putting on a provocative and fascinating event.

(By the way, you can continue to listen to the third tableau of "Leaving Santa Monica" on the Dutch radio station Radio Monalisa's website, but you'll have to download the Windows Media Player first. Please click here to visit the station's on-demand page; my piece can be found under the September 1 link. Thanks!)

It's been a beautiful summer in many ways; lots of work, lots of play, and lots of growing as an artist and scholar.

The most recent composition-related news I have to report is that Megan Schubert gave a stunning premiere of my new piece "Light Message" at The Stone on July 30. This is a piece I hope to evolve into an opera (tentatively titled "East River," which I started during my residency at The Banff Centre), but it also stands on its own as a multi-media reaction to some of the research I've been doing for my dissertation. I hope very much to have another performance of this piece in the coming months...stay tuned!

I'm now getting ready to go to Amsterdam for Gaudeamus New Music Week! Stay tuned for all kinds of updates about the performance, the other peeps I'm likely to meet and become fascinated by, and the scene in general. I'm so thrilled!

I also just found out that Radio Monalisa in Amsterdam will be broadcasting Tableau 3 from "Leaving Santa Monica" on September 1. The track will also be available on their website for two months after that. Check it out!

Welcome to the new design of my website! I hope you enjoy clicking around here and checking out the updated look.

In other news, Ensemble Robot, joined by soprano Megan Schubert, just premiered the Kyrie/Gloria of my new electroacoustic piece "Highway Mass" (2008), for soprano, robots, tape, and human performers, at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, CT, Sunday night, June 15. The concert, which was initially planned to take place outdoors, was moved inside to Yale's Woolsey Hall due to rain. This ended up being a blessing in disguise for my piece, whose liturgical overtones worked splendidly in this vast, echoic, cathedral-like space. It was a fantastic concert all around, and I'm thrilled to have been a part of it! It was also incredibly fun to write music for two of Christine Southworth's robots: The Heliphon, a double-helix-shaped glockenspiel, and The Whirlybot, a stacked series of plastic tubes whirling around to create different choir-sounding frequencies. It was the Whirlybot that inspired this piece to begin with; I listened to a soundclip of this robot performing something that sounded to me like an eerie, other-worldly version of a Bach chorale, and I knew immediately that some kind of eerie, other-worldly version of a liturgical piece would be necessary for this commission. For those of you who missed this performance, and/or want to hear a recording, stay tuned! Ensemble Robot plans to premiere the entire mass in April 2009, and possibly this fall as well!

Many thanks to Giles Hall, who took these wonderful pictures of the event:

Summer is now upon us, and after a whirlwind 6 months of travel, concerts, premieres, residencies, and other exciting events, I'm definitely ready to take a break and spend the next two months quietly writing the third and fourth chapters of my dissertation in Brooklyn.

Stay tuned for reports of my next few projects, which include Megan Schubert singing a brand new piece of mine at The Stone (Juy 30), and, of course, Gaudeamus New Music Week, where the Asko | Schoenberg Ensemble will be giving the European premiere of "Leaving Santa Monica" (2005) on September 3, 2008 at 20:30. I hope those you currently living across the pond can come and check it out!

I just finished my commission for Ensemble Robot, which--a bit unexpectedly--turned out to be a mass.

(What kind of mass? A liturgical mass? A religious ritual? A fundamental concept in physics? A cancerous growth? A tangle of undefinable wreckage from some horrible highway accident?)

Well, yes. In a way, the piece (entitled "Highway Mass") is all of these things. I could go on and on about the many entangled stories, images, sounds, and feelings that are responsible for the ways in which I built this piece, but instead, I'll leave you with some scattered fragments that either inspired me while composing or came up for me in the midst of the process:

1) That haunting desert scene in David Lynch's "Lost Highway," in which the two protagonists make love in luminous yellow sand in the middle of the night

2) The ceiling of St. Mary the Virgin in midtown Manhattan

3) A fictional cathedral in a rough neighborhood in the Bronx, where Jo Polniaczek's family might have attended mass in the mid-1980's

4) Any number of car accidents I've seen while driving endless miles on the freeways of America

5) Any number of unresolved situations I've had with people who've come and gone

It's important to point out that while this piece was inspired by the religious ritual of the mass, it actually uses very few of the standard textual references. This is a mass in spirit alone, a strange mixture of collective worship and personal strife, blended into something that feels like ritual even as it refers to decidedly non-mass-like subjects. When I began writing it, I was picturing a vast cathedral in the middle of a blown-out urban ghetto, and a mysterious, furtive, and yet incredibly loud religious ceremony taking place around 3:00 in the morning. The rusted organ was creaking, breaking, and groaning; the street sounds from the nearby highway were bleeding through the walls; the choir was made up of screeching ghosts. And the protagonist was angry about something, but we don't really know what. This is her story, tellable only as broken liturgy, as dirty echoes and screams from another reality.

Ensemble Robot (joined by soprano Megan Schubert) will be premiering the Kyrie of "Highway Mass" on June 15, 2008 at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, CT, and a premiere of the full mass will soon follow--stay tuned for details!

I'm also in the midst of finishing my piece for Ensemble Robot....stay tuned for more details on this one!

I have many exciting projects ahead...please check the Upcoming Events page for details! I'm very excited to announce that the briliant Australian flutist Janet McKay will be coming to New York on May 20 to give the US premiere of my flute work "beautiful//fragment" at the Flea Theatre! I'm also thrilled to be heading down to the Atlantic Center for the Arts in mid-April, where I'll be doing a short residency with David Lang, one of my favorite composers. It's shaping up to be a fantastic spring.

For the past two months I've been working on a new short opera, which continues to grow and evolve in unexpected ways, and--surprisingly enough--may end up returning me to the ongoing plight of one of my earliest characters, Jubilance, whose story I initially told in my 1997 experimental theater piece "Quattormeron." (Wow....so many memories...was college really that long ago??) No firm title yet...but I think it's going to contain 4 scenes, 5 singers (3 sopranos and 2 pop singers), video, small amplified ensemble, be about 45 minutes long, and include a prominent part for television set. I'm *really* hoping to make this one my first fully-staged opera...we'll see what happens.

I'm also halfway through a new piece for Ensemble Robot, tentatively titled "Show Me Something Real," which premieres in June with the amazing Megan Schubert on multitracked vox. Stay tuned for more details as these pieces continue to emerge...

And, finally, of course, the silent but omnipresent Dissertation continues to be written. Many thanks to NYU for awarding me their generous Dean's Dissertation Fellowship for 2008-09! I hope to have two new audiovisual "archives" up soon, for the two new chapters that have recently joined the current draft. Again, stay tuned....

I gotta give some shout-outs to ICE, Matt Cody, Amanda Crider, and Jennifer Kerber--my recording of their amazing performance of this piece in April 2005 is what enables me to share it with the world. I'm also grateful to New York City Opera for their equally stunning performance of it in May 2006.

The Banff Centre continues to blow my mind--not only is it an intensely spiritual place, but it's also populated with dozens of immensely talented and soulful musicians from all over the world. Wow. How did I ever get this lucky?

I've just been offered a commission to write music for Ensemble Robot in Boston! I can't wait. Robots are awesome. The piece will likely be premiered on June 15 in New Haven...stay tuned for more details!

PS: Thanks to everyone who came out to my NYU talk a few weeks ago. Your presence was greatly appreciated and tremendously helpful!

Location: 24 Waverly Place, Room 320

Directions: Take the W or R train to 8th Street, then walk south on Broadway to Waverly Place and make a right. 24 Waverly Place is two blocks west of Broadway, between Greene Street and University Place. You can also take the A/C/E/F/B to West 4th Street and walk east along Washington Square North, which turns into Waverly Place at the northeastern edge of Washington Square Park.

I'll be serving wine and snacks afterwards. Hope to see you there!

Other than that, things around here have been All Dissertation, All the Time. I just finished a chapter draft today, and await the astute comments of my advisor. My eyes are falling out of my head. Time for a beer.

Along with beautiful // fragment, the flute solo I just finished for Janet McKay (who will be premiering it in Sydney, Australia, on Tuesday, October 23--wish I could be there!!!), The Last Piece is non-vocal--a strange occurence for this composer. I think it was good for me to try my hand at some non-vocal stuff--it made me think differently, and come up with new solutions, even with some of my old-new ideas (such as video accompaniment). I'm actually getting to a point where I can't imagine doing pieces without video. It could be all the TV I've been watching since I was, oh, two years old (even as I type this, T. and I are checking out a sensationalist documentary on the National Geographic channel, exploring the possible existence of Bigfoot...)....but whatever the reason, I've stumbled upon something truly addictive here. It's kind of like amplification--I got the big sweet bursting taste of microphones and powered speakers with the premiere of "Lucy Songs" at Skirball in May 2004, and I just couldn't go back. [But here's the cool part about last night: somehow my orchestration, which I suppose was sorta crazy, was such that we didn't have to amplify it at all. And it was still loud! Oh yes, it was SO loud! I was so excited!!!]

I guess big tall galleries are ideal for that sort of thing.

Anyway, I should also say that I'm starting to see these two pieces as one set. I've been secretly calling them "The Backwards Pieces," as they're both inspired by the idea of events "un-happening"--beautifully and heartbreakingly described at the end of Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I finished this book on the subway last May, on my way to meet T. at Union Square to go couch-shopping. It was a sizzly yellow afternoon, highly nostalgic--all I can say is that the sky and the buildings were the colors of the beginning third movement of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms. Anyway, there I am on the N train, crouching in my seat (bad back times), drinking in these final pages: Foer's haunting, lyrical portrait of Oskar's fantasy about the WTC un-falling, his dad un-walking to work, the Worst Day un-happening. And then: the flip book at the end, with the man falling up. Man.

Man.

I hope I did it justice.

1) The Last Piece: a non-vocal chamber work with video, to be premiered by ICE on October 14, 2007 at Tenri Cultural Center in New York. This has been the most challenging piece I've worked on in quite a while, because I'm trying to construct a highly narrative work without using any vocals. Since my main compositional interest right now is multi-media opera, writing a piece without voice that still has the ability to tell a story is both tremendously difficult and, as I'm discovering, extremely rewarding. To put this kind of limitation on myself has truly opened up doors to possibilities I'd never considered before, and while I won't divulge the soultions I've come up with just yet, I do think I'm getting somewhere. Please come check it out if you can! I'll be sharing the bill with some amazing young composers, and as always, I'm honored to be working with ICE.

2) Beautiful Fragments: this is Janet MacKay's solo flute piece with video and electronics. It is nothing short of an emotional reaction to a dissertation chapter I'm writing about 1980's America, trauma aesthetics, hysteria culture, synaesthetic/acoustic memories, and the devastating explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, told specifically from the perspective of children who watched the doomed launch on live television in the classroom.

I'm feeling really thankful these days that I can turn to composing when the intensity of my academic research starts getting me down. What was once the largest source of stress and angst in my life has now become a space for healing, a place where I make the rules and call all the shots. It's becoming a way of life, rather than a life I'm struggling to sustain. I've done a lot of meditation on this lately. I guess having a chronic injury will do that to a person.

I also had the surreal honor of flipping through TimeOut New York last week and seeing this picture, taken last May at the VOX performance of Leaving Santa Monica! Here I am, one year ago, with the wonderful City Opera soprano Julianne Borg:

The full orchestra version of The Endings will be premiered by New York City Opera on May 12, just before John Zorn's short opera...and afterwards there will be much drinking and carrying on at a local bar (TBA). Come one, come all!