"Three Elegies" Premieres

My new piece, "Three Elegies" for soprano and percussion will be premiered at Mannes College of Music on Wednesday, December 6 at 8pm. Performing will be the duo, Aurora Borealis, comprised of Tiffany DuMouchelle (hot off her recent Alice Tully Hall debut) and percussionist Stephen Solook.

"Three Elegies" is a song cycle of three short pieces: "I Died for Beauty" (text by Emily Dickinson), "Tichborne's Elegy" (text by Chidiock Tichborne) and "Exile (After the Chinese)" (text by Hart Crane).

Other composers being performed are Keith Fitch, Jorge Sosa, Seth Rozanoff, and Raphael Fusco. Adam Berkowitz will play clarinet on several pieces, as well.

Mannes College's Concert Hall is on the second floor at 150 West 85th Street, New York City. This is a free concert!

But if you are unable to attend, this same piece, with the same performers, will be performed March 9, 2007 at 7:30pm at the Thalia at Symphony Space, Broadway at 95th Street, in a concert presented by the New York Composers Circle (www.nycomposerscircle.org). Suggested contribution for that concert is $15.

I hope to see you at one of these concerts!

Binding Solutions

One of the most frustrating aspects of printing your scores is: How to bind them?

First, if you are presenting your scores to musicians for performance, you probably already invest in a higher quality paper. A heavier weight paper, for instance. The issue of paper color is a matter of personal taste, I think. I use super-white paper (brightness at least 97), but there are those who prefer cream and buff colors. If you use an ink jet or a laser jet, that's a factor, too.

But how to bind your sheets into a score? Using combs is easy (although quality binders are quite expensive) but present problems. Turning pages is not always easy with binding combs. And they don't exactly go into the mail very easily. Finding the right size comb for oversized scores is a problem, too. For now, though, it's the best alternative I know.

What do you use for binding your scores? Are there any solutions you can share?