With the premiere of my String Quartet, I realized that writing New Music keeps being a big priority for me. It is a great challenge to write music that is accesible, yet fresh, which is what I want to do. I just finished writing a 5 minute work for a group collaboration, the story of David, which will be presented in November at UCLA. The project is to tell the story of David through the eyes of about a dozen composers, each chapter told through a very different lens, as we have all sorts of composers in the group, including atonal writers, Jazz writers, songwriters, TV and movie composers, and people that write with extended harmonies, like me. After writing Moses, which is a modal piece, which would sound familiar to you but a bit odd in some places, it was a relief to write something not so constrained by the normal rules. I actually think that I can write effective, even beautiful, melodies that do not have a particular key, which was a great discovery for me. We will see how that piece is received in November. And hearing the quartet made me realize I abandoned an experimental path I liked very much about 10 years ago. I am now looking forward to writing new works by retaking that path, following some of the new forms I was working on and abandoning others which, after 10 years, do not seem as promising.
wrote the String Quartet, almost 10 years ago
