Masterclass

Yesterday I gave a masterclass on contemporary music at the Performing Arts Center in Duxbury, MA. It was great working with students from Duxbury High School's Wind Ensemble, which I performed in 10 years ago! I talked about performance techniques, working with composers, using electronic processing, and improvisation. At the end, I answered questions on life as a musician.

The original plan was to present alongside Elisabeth, but she became sick at the last moment and couldn't make it. She is starting to feel better though!

Consider it kicked-off

Elisabeth and I performed in Plymouth, MA last Sunday. We had a great audience of friends, family (including my 93 year old grandmother), new acquaintances, my first sax teacher, and composer Jason Belcher. Many thanks to everyone for their support!

Duxbury Reporter Article

The Duxbury Reporter published an article about our project in preparation for our Massachusetts kick-off events! Read the article here.

Up and Running

After a late night getting everything ready, our Kickstarter page is live! We are raising $3,000 to cover the costs of commissions and recording/producing a CD. Help fund the project at: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zachherchen/emerging-voices-project-music-for-voice-and-sax.

From our Kickstarter page:

Elisabeth Halliday and I have created the Emerging Voices Project to commission, perform, and record music for voice and saxophone. We met while studying at The Peabody Conservatory and have performed together throughout the past 6 years. This is our first strictly duo project and we are excited to share it with you!

We were inspired to create this project by Lori Laitman's "I Never Saw Another Butterfly", a musical setting of poetry written by children who lived in the concentration camp Theresienstadt. We've performed this piece several times and enjoy playing as a duo so much that we want to create more music for voice and sax! Elisabeth and I have selected American composers Kathleen Bader, Adam Knauss, and George Lam to write pieces for us based on the themes of childhood and loss of innocence. In 2011 we will premiere these new works and release them on CD alongside "I Never Saw Another Butterfly".

This is a big project for us and we've spent months planning. We are now ready to start the project, but we need your support to make it happen. Your pledge will help fund the cost of commissioning the composers and recording/producing the CD. We have great awards lined up for you so please consider giving what you can and help spread the word!

Masterclass in Duxbury, MA

Elisabeth and I are excited to announce that we will be giving a masterclass for Duxbury High School students as part of our kick-off week! I graduated from DHS in 2002 and can't do enough to support their amazing music program. The event will take place at Duxbury's beautiful Performing Arts Center, across the street from the high school. We'll be working with their wind ensemble students on contemporary music performance, extended technique, and what it's like to be a professional musician. I'll be sure to post photos after the event!

Accepted by Kickstarter

We've officially had our project accepted by Kickstarter! The next step is to create a video about the project, finalize our pledge levels, and post everything on their page. We will "go live" Dec 15th and can't wait to get this project going!

Fundraiser Kickoff Concert

We are very excited to announce our fundraiser kickoff concert!

Sunday Dec. 19th @ 2pm (doors open at 1:30pm)
26 North Street, Plymouth, MA
Dr. Brian Whitfield's music salon, entrance through side door
suggested $10 donation

Program:
Lori Laitman: I Never Saw Another Butterfly, soprano and saxophone
Kevin Clark: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, for solo saxophone
Judith Weir: King Harald's Saga, for solo soprano
Jason Belcher: Continuous Cities 2 and Lavender and the Newt, soprano and saxophone

Dr. Whitfield was nice enough to offer us his beautiful music salon for our kickoff concert. We will be performing duo and solo pieces in what is sure to be a wonderful afternoon concert. Starting Dec 15th we will be fundraising through Kickstarter, the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world. There will unique rewards for pledges, so stay tuned!

Photo Shoot

A few weeks ago Elisabeth and I spent a Sunday afternoon in Central Park taking press photos for the project. It was great weather for October so there were plenty of people at the park. We drew a lot of attention (formal attire and a saxophone will do that) and it was funny have strangers taking our photo as we posed for our own photographer. At one point a little girl ran around a corner, saw us (or more precisely Elisabeth in her gown), stopped suddenly, and said "wwwoooooowwww". Haha.

Here's a few of my favorite photos from the day:

Emerging Voices Project

Hey everyone!

Elisabeth and I created this blog to share each step of our Emerging Voices Project. I thought I would kick things off with the story of how we got started:

I moved to NYC over a year ago and Elisabeth, who was already living here, asked me if I wanted to do more duo work with her. We had performed two pieces by Lori Laitman ("I Never Saw Another Butterfly" and "Living in the Body") while studying at the Peabody Conservatory and performing in our experimental chamber group No Signal. Elisabeth and I quickly decided to commission a few pieces, throw in one of Laitman's works, and make a CD.

After months of off and on planning we decided to get serious and set a deadline of Summer 2011. We needed to choose a theme to tie everything together and inspire the composers. Elisabeth really took lead here and suggested using Laitman's "I Never Saw Another Butterfly" as a starting off point. The texts (and title) used in this piece come from a collection of art and poetry under the same name, written by Jewish children who lived in the concentration camp Theresienstadt. We decided to ask the composers to write music based on the themes of loss of innocence and childhood.

Now we needed to pick out the composers to commission. We limited ourselves to 3 composers so that all of the music would fit on one CD and we'd have a reasonable budget. It was hard to narrow it down to just three (believe me there's plenty of composers we wanted to include, in fact if we raise more money I'd like to add on a few "bonus" composers). In the end we asked Kathleen Bader, George Lam, and Adam Knauss if they would write for us. They all said yes and we were starting to get really excited about the project!

Since then we have been getting ready to kickoff a fundraising drive for the project. We struggled with project names for a few weeks, including a few awful ideas, before settling on the Emerging Voices Project. We spent a Sunday afternoon in Central Park taking press photos. We booked a kickoff concert in Plymouth, MA on December 19th (full details in another post). We're planning a masterclass on contemporary music at Duxbury High School (my home town!). And we hope to get the project on Kickstarter in December.

Ok that's plenty for one post. If you read all the way through you get a special badge!