Danny Clay to Premiere New Collaborative Work

This seems to be a good month for composer Danny Clay. This past Tuesday saw the live-streamed premiere of a new interpretation of his Music for Hard Times, based on an indeterminate score of eight “calming exercises.” The performance was presented by the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center and the University of Maryland (UMD) School of Music and involved conductor Michael Votta working with the UMD Wind Orchestra, Clay, and The Living Earth Show duo of percussionist Andy Meyerson and guitarist Travis Andrews. A week from this Saturday Volti will present a premiere performance of its second commission for Clay, whose title has not yet been announced.

One of the images from Danny Clay’s Sounds in Motion (from the Facebook Web page for this event)

This afternoon there will be yet another premiere performance available as a video stream. This one is the culminating event of Clay’s 2019 McKnight Visiting Composer Residency with MPLS (imPulse) and ComMUSICation, both choral groups based in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. The title of the new work is Sounds in Motion, and it involves a collaborative musical dialogue between the professional vocalists and the youth community chorus program, in which both groups used graphic notation to invent their own sonic language and compose a series of pieces for the other ensemble to perform. The resulting collection of lovingly crafted squiggles, wiggles, blobs and doodles will be premiered as an animated score with accompanying footage of the creative process.

The live stream will begin at 2 p.m. this afternoon, Thursday, December 10. CommMUSICation has created a YouTube Web page through which the performance will be streamed. This will be a video document of the first performance; and the captured video and audio have been edited and compiled by Clay.