New Piece: Music for Social Distancing (2020)

I wrote a piece from social distance, for social distance, for open instrumentation. In a lot of classical music social media, people have been wondering how to do live music remotely. The speed of light is (for the moment) an insurmountable limitation preventing us from having our rehearsals and concerts over Zoom, at least for most repertoire.

With that in mind, I wanted to write this piece that would work in this teleconference environment. Instead of finding workarounds for the network latency, I made it an important part of the piece. In some ways, it’s a piece about network latency. You’re right, that’s not a very good tagline. I’ll keep workshopping it.

Speaking of workshopping it, there is a lot about this piece that I can’t really know how it will work. There are a lot of network, software, and hardware variables that I know I didn’t account for, as much as I tried. Because of that, I’m posting the materials on my site as a “beta”. Anybody that wants can download the materials for free (“buy” it for $0); I just ask that if you decide to give it a performance or a reading that you let me know about it so I can learn how it goes and make the piece better.

Get the score here. Give it a shot, and let me know what you think.