This week’s Time Out New York magazine features an interview with Mike about next week’s NYC premiere of “Through A Glass, Darkly” by the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus.
Chorus sings about addiction
“High” is a meth-themed concert.
Time Out New York / Issue 769 : Jun 24–30, 2010
By Beth Greenfield
This concert is one night only – Wednesday June 30 at 8pm. Tickets are still available through the Skirball Center website.
Previously:
The New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, under the direction of Dr. Charles Beale, will be premiering Through A Glass, Darkly on June 30, 2010 at 8pm, at the NYU Skirball Center on the corner of Laguardia Place and Washington Square South (W 4th St) in Greenwich Village, NYC.
Tickets are on sale now. One performance only. Hope you can make it!
Mike and I have written and produced the arrangements for “Rock Band Live”, the first-ever live entertainment adaptation of the hugely popular MTV Games video game. Culminating the end of a two-week workshop rehearsal period, three private performances begin today thru Friday at 42nd Street Studios in New York.
The show was written by our long-time pal Joey Wartnerchaney and produced by RWS & Associates Entertainment, Inc., in conjunction with Cedar Fair Entertainment Company and MTV Games.
Featured songs are mashups of “We Got The Beat / We Will Rock You / Blitzkrieg Bop” and “Any Way You Want It / Hit Me With Your Best Shot” as well as interactive live gameplay with audience members.
Read more here:
This March, the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus will premiere my newest choral work, “Trilogy” — comprised of three settings of texts by Tony Kushner. The last of the three movements, “I Want More Life“, was premiered April 2009 by the TC-GMC in conjunction with the Guthrie Theatre’s Tony Kushner Festival launch.
The first movement of “Trilogy” is “It Is Very Simple” (text from Homebody/Kabul) and the second is “There Is A Little House In Heaven” (text from Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Browne). This commission was graciously underwritten by TC-GMC Board Chair Jeffrey Bores and his partner, Michael Hawkins.
Performances are March 26-27, 2010 at Ted Mann Concert Hall in Minneapolis. I will be attending both concerts and participating in post-concert question and answer sessions with TC-GMC Artistic Director Dr. Stan Hill.
Please visit the TC-GMC site for tickets to this concert, “LifeSongs: The Music of Living”.
Related:
We lost our Piggy last night. She was 15 years old and a very good girl.
Below is a video from Fire Island in 1998 of her younger (sight-filled) days. Roscoe was only 4 and Charlie was 18 months, swimming and romping with their friend Ethel. We miss them all.
Download (ctrl-click to Save As...)
Alot of research, planning, and work culminates this week with some exciting things. We’re changing notation programs, installing acoustics improvements in the studio, and completing vocal tracking of Mike’s demo with a visit from a Tony-winning Broadway star.
I’ve had misgivings about Finale’s seriousness toward the Mac ever since Sibelius released their Mac OS X native app 18 months before Finale. Some of Finale’s OS X implementation (i.e. printing parts as PDF) is still broken even 5 paid upgrades later. Finale’s yearly upgrades are $100, the file formats are not backwards compatible so upgrades are essentially mandatory, yet serious bugs remain unfixed and new features are rarely worth the cost (either pandering to the education market or playing catchup to Sibelius). In addition, I couldn’t even launch Finale 2008 (a “MOTU bug“, they said), but it mysteriously fixed itself in Finale 2009.
We’ve demoed Sibelius 6, tested MusicXML file transfers out of Finale, and had our friend and professional music copyist Alden Terry give us a quick walkthru of Sibelius. The tipping point was Sibelius’ support for ReWire — a potentially exponential timesaver letting us sync vocal arrangements in real-time to our DP projects. We’re convinced, and today we start our transition.
Most of the Sibelius vs. Finale posts I came across were horribly outdated, so I will be live-blogging our transition — warts and all. Look here for my series of blog posts about switching from Finale to Sibelius.
Last fall, we reconfigured our studio (featuring a snazzy custom desk from KK Audio). This new layout made the acoustic imperfections in our room even more troublesome, but theme park season and general lack of acoustic theory kept me from addressing it.
I saw a college friend’s studio pictures on facebook, and he pointed me in the direction of RealTraps. Mike and I had been reluctant to just ignorantly plaster our walls with (honestly, ugly) acoustic foam, so the panel design already appealed to us. I’ve been corresponding with RealTraps’ on-hand acoustics expert “JWL” who looked at photos of our room and was really helpful in identifying what configuration would give us the most improvements.
I’ve measured our room’s frequency response in its current state, and I’ll do the same afterward. Look here for the results!
Mixing is progressing nicely on the 3-song demo for the new Kevin Del Aguila/Michael Shaieb musical, “The Protagonists”. The last vocalist is now confirmed, as Mike wrote earlier.
This Thursday, we’re happy to have Alice Ripley (Next To Normal, The Rocky Horror Show) joining us in the studio singing the part of “Eagle Woman”.
(Fans of Go-Go Beach will also know her from demo track #14: “The Love That Cannot Be”.)
Alice recently won a Tony award for the role of “Diana” in the Broadway musical Next To Normal, and we’re thrilled to have her back again.
Ms. Alice Ripley is joining our cast of superheroes as Eagle Woman this week in our recording studio for our demo of The Protagonists.
Kevin and I are really excited to have her. Although she will not be sporting her wings and feathers, she will be bringing that incredible voice with her. We are happy to report that the Eagle Woman has Landed!
