Back in 2012 Tom Burritt asked me to arrange “Mara’s Lullaby” by Marc Mellits for the UT-Austin Percussion Ensemble to play at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention. It only took ten years, but we finally got the arrangement published on Marc’s website, thanks to a helpful nudge from Riley Warren, who brought it back to PASIC this past fall with his ensemble from Forney High School! Check out their beautiful performance below, and if you want to get your own copy of the piece you can do that HERE.

New piece alert!

Wrote this one during the last year to help students with navigating lots of changing meters and grooves while working around the drums, and I’m really happy with how it turned out! 

Big thanks to Nathan Daughtrey at C. Alan Publications for making this happen and getting it out into the world, and a massive shout out to my student, Connor Butler, for doing a fantastic job putting this performance together! 

You can purchase the piece from C. Alan at the link below! 

https://c-alanpublications.com/thunder-tumbler-digital/

It’s finally happening!!!

After watching this project develop over the past 5+ years, Jason Treuting’s Nine Numbers album is dropping on April 8th! Being a part of this adventure has been one of the most exciting and rewarding projects of my career, and the list of incredible artists on this album is truly inspiring! We recorded Nine Numbers 1 in New York in 2018 with Grammy-winning producer and engineer Jon Low, at the same time that the first five pieces were performed live at Roulette Intermedium. Now that all nine of the pieces have been written and recorded, it’s time to put them out into the world! A huge thanks to Jason for coming up with this wild idea and letting me be involved from the very beginning, and to Cantaloupe Records for believing in the project and helping to make it a reality!

The album is available for pre-order HERE, or look for it in early April!

I’m excited to announce that my piece for vibraphone (plus other percussion instruments) Metatation is now available from Bachovich Music Publications! I wrote this piece in 2014 as a sort of challenge to make some seemingly disparate compositional ideas and techniques work together, but it’s just now being released. Check out the video of the piece below, and then head HERE to purchase the score!

I’m super excited to share Alex Dowling’s new piece, “∞” for marimba and electronics! We started working on this during lockdown in the summer of 2020 as a follow up to Emma O’Halloran’s “How Sweet the Thought of You as Infinite,” and I know that this set of pieces is going to be in my repertoire for a very long time! I had been hoping that Alex would want to work on a percussion piece after seeing all of his incredible work with voice and electronics, and I’m beyond thrilled that he was willing to take the leap! 

“∞” picks up in the sound world that Emma’s piece journeys to, and spends time basking in the beautiful, other-worldly sounds of the electronics. So many pieces for marimba, and percussion in general, are over the top and all about flash and speed and technical prowess, but Alex’s piece subverts all of that and offers a refreshing take on the possibilities of the instrument. The electronics are integrated so seamlessly, and they respond organically to everything that the performer does. His piece is an opportunity for nuance, subtlety, and a completely different kind of virtuosity. I hope you enjoy it!

I’m really excited that two pieces I wrote have been published by C. Alan Publications! I started working on these short multiple percussion pieces a few years ago as a way to give my students some new repertoire when they were first starting out in this area of percussion. Each piece is short (not requiring them to take an entire semester to learn it) and focuses on one or two concepts or skills that are essential for student percussionists to master. They’ve been really helpful for the students that have worked on them, and I hope they can be of use to others! I’ve got more coming in the near future, but for now enjoy the video for “Rex” and be sure to check out the scores HERE!

I am incredibly excited about the release of the video of Emma O’Halloran’s piece, How Sweet the Thought of You as Infinite. We managed to get the recording done in early March, just before so much of the world went into quarantine. All of us are so thrilled with the final project, and how well it represents Emma’s amazing piece!

Special thanks to New Music USA for supporting our project financially, Four/Ten Media for being the best production team in the business, Rittenhouse Soundworks for a unique and inspiring space to record in, Pearl/Adams for their incredible instruments, Innovative Percussion for the sticks and mallets that help me sound my best, and, of course, Emma, for being the absolute best collaborator that I could imagine working with!

I hope you enjoy our video!

 

 

I’m so excited about starting this new project with these incredible people! You can learn more about it, and find out how to join, by visiting the dedicated page that I’ve created for it RIGHT HERE!

I feel so honored to have been awarded a Project Grant from New Music USA for this year! Emma O’Halloran and I submitted a proposal to record her brand new piece for marimba and electronics with the incredible gentlemen at Four/Ten Media, and despite the extremely competitive application and selection process, our project was chosen. We’ll be traveling to Philadelphia this coming Spring and making a great video to document Emma’s beautiful piece!

 

In the meantime… You can check out our project page on the New Music USA site, by clicking HERE!