Hi friends,

Hope you all have been able to stay cool for this scorcher of a summer! I was lucky enough to make a quick trip to Finland for a performance of my new Endless Landscape at Avanti's Summer Sounds festival, followed by a short visit to MASS MoCA for a stellar performance of An Economy of Means by Doug Perkins at the Bang on a Can Loud weekend, and finally an amazing week in Del Mar, California, teaching at the Del Mar International Composers Symposium. As we head into the fall, I'm excited to give you a season preview and share some new music, upcoming performances and albums in the works.

If you've been following my Facebook Page or Twitter, you'll know that my score for The Real Charlie Chaplin was honored with a News & Documentary Emmy Nomination for Outstanding Music Composition! It continues to be a fun adventure and hope to be able to share more news about the soundtrack soon.

No Exit New Music will premiere a new work of mine for soprano and chamber ensemble in April, and you can check out the ever-expanding season calendar here.

For all the saxophonists and sax/perc. duos out there, Echolocate for alto/soprano sax and marimba is now available for purchase. More info here.

Lastly, an album featuring my An Index of Possibility, Down Down Baby, and Lost and Found, will be released in the spring, with superb performances by TIGUE, New Morse Code, and Michael Compitello. More info coming soon.

Other News

• Check out new score follow videos of Olmsted and Arctic, and subscribe to my YouTube channel for new releases.

• Other Sheet Music Releases: Evergreen for two percussionists and Endless Landscape for eleven instruments are both now available in PDF and Print Formats.

• Alysa Pires's choreography to Conduit: II. Pulse will be programmed by the Alberta Ballet in the Fall. Tickets here.

thanks for tuning in,
Robert

Enjoy the press images from the ballet Skyward by Alyssa Pires, which featured Conduit: II. Pulse. It ran for seven performances from March 9-13, 2022.

Hannah Galway, Tirion Law and Noah Parets in Skyward. Photo by Karolina Kuras, courtesy of The National Ballet of Canada.

Brendan Saye in Skyward. Photo by Karolina Kuras, courtesy of The National Ballet of Canada.

Artists of the Ballet in Skyward. Photo by Karolina Kuras, courtesy of The National Ballet of Canada.

Review of the ballet:

The company were at their best. The first ballet on the program the joy-filled sky-reaching Skyward, a world premiere created for the company by choreographic associate Alysa Pires.

The costumes by Dana Osborne had the suggestion of feathers for both men and women highlighting the feeling of flight in much of the choreography

Pires has a particularly fluid physical language that is yet full of variation to fit the different physical qualities and personalities of the dancers it was set on. Particularly glorious was the third movement danced tonight by the always luminous Heather Ogden and and astonishingly powerful Brendan Saye. What has happened to Saye during the pandemic? I have never seen in his dancing such authority, charisma and power. Combined with the luminous richness of Ogden’s presence the two of them in this particular choreography irresistibly made me thing of the leading characters Matthew and Diana in Deborah Harkness’ best selling trilogy of novels, and the television series it inspired, A Discovery of Witches: a coming together of two strong contrasting personalities meeting and establishing an unbreakable bond of partnership.

Skyward as a whole is full of a sense of joy and release reflecting, as Pires told me when I met her in the lobby, the feeling they had all had in the studio working on the company‘s very first new work after the lockdowns.

- Jennifer Parr, The Whole Note

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