Spring Travels: Dr. Michael Boyd
This spring I was very excited to travel to several locations to present my artistic and scholarly work. In mid-January I drove to the Washington DC area to perform with the Bay Players Experimental Music Collective at American University. After the performance composer/audio engineer Stephen Lilly, composer/percussionist Michael Sparrow and I recorded my piece Bit of nostalgia… for one or two percussionists and live electronics performer for the Society of Composers, Inc. CD Series. The recording session went extremely well and ironically, we preferred the first of six takes. Look for the recording some time in the next year from Capstone/Navona Records; I will post when I have an update on the production schedule.
In April I presented a relatively new composition, Reconstruction for solo performer with found object and live electronics, at the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States National Conference, held at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. The conference was very well run (the sound was excellent thanks to speakers provided by Genelec), and I heard a lot of interesting music. My piece was presented as part of two headphone concerts, a unique method of dissemination where the audience listened through their own headphones while watching the performance. The conference as a whole as well as my work was informally reviewed by another participating composer.
Finally I presented a paper that discussed formal irregularities in the music of The Afghan Whigs at the American Musicological Society Allegheny Chapter Meeting. This conference did not require significant travel, as it was held at Carnegie Mellon University!