The Missa Charles Darwin is now available as a digital EP prerelease from a forthcoming album of choral and vocal works on Navona.

You can download the tracks from iTunes, Amazon, and other online music sources.

   • iTunes

   • Amazon

[post-concert photo of me with New York Polyphony & Sarah Darwin]

I spent a week in Germany last month, touring with New York Polyphony and Lizzie Ball. There were three concerts on the tour, the middle show featured my Missa Charles Darwin, introduced by Sarah Darwin.

[photo gallery]

The concert took place in the Dinosaur Hall at the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, which houses the world’s largest mounted dinosaur (Giraffatitan brancai) and the “Berlin” archaeopteryx.

Here is a highlight reel from the show, featuring the entire introduction by Sarah Darwin.

[Kyrie eleison by Hilton Abbott]

Here is a short clip of my Cyclopean Harp which I installed in the lobby and had running before the show and during intermission. I’ll be adding a proper page to the site at some point with more explanation, insight, higher quality video/audio.

The TEDx Global Music Project has chosen my presentation with New York Polyphony at TEDxWoodsHole from October 2011 for their website. For the time being our presentation is at the top of their cover page. We are honored to be selected by the site, which “compile[s] and share[s] the best musical performances from the over 1,700 TEDx events around the world.”

[ direct link ]

I had a wonderful recording session on my Missa Charles Darwin with New York Polyphony last week. Oktaven Audio did the recording and George Steel served as producer. It had been a dream of mine to get a studio-quality recording of this piece for some time and I was nervous and excited the whole day. The venue (American Academy of Arts and Letters) seemed a little odd at first, but the acoustic proved ideal for the music. The first edits of the audio are now done. We had some cameras set up to catch whatever video we could, and I’ve edited together the bits and pieces of the Kyrie (see below).

The attached scripts are barely even scripts, totaling barely 150 lines between the two of them — but they proved useful and allowed me to come up with a pretty flexible and robust (if slow to refresh…) system. Limitations are processor speed, refresh rate, sample rate, network slowness, etc. Play around. If you have a programming background you can probably figure it out.

The audio is from a piece that I wrote in 2006 (Subduction) and which will be on a concert later this month. I wanted to add some video to it and see if it enhanced the listening experience. It is intended as 8 channels, usually mixed to 4, here mixed to 2.

files:     simpleFakeVGA.zip

requires ChucK and Processing

[ please let me know if you have issues with the files ]

The second clip is a short recording of the electromagnetically prepared piano that appeared on NEPR’s Morning Edition with Jill Kaufman.

[ Vibrabalneoäves ]
 

Grumo Festival Website

Looking forward to the July 6 premiere in Italy!