orchestra | Eris DeJarnett

It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year: My Commissions Are Open

Hi again, everyone. Thank you all so, so much for the love and support you’ve given me over the past few days. I’m extraordinarily lucky to be in community with so many who respond to a new name with joy and affirmation. A bunch of you also extended that enthusiasm toward my release of The Dead Scar, and I’m excited to continue sharing the From the Ashes pieces with you in 2022. As we approach the end of 2021, I’m looking forward to what’s ahead, and though this is later than I’d normally announce (because I didn’t want to put out feelers pre-name change), I’m pleased to formally let everyone know I’m now accepting commissions for 2022 and 2023.

I have general information on what to expect available on my Commission Information and Consortium Information pages, but because it’s been awhile, I’d like to give y’all some specifics on projects I know I’d love to work on this year. If your idea doesn’t match what I’ve listed here, that’s totally fine, and I’d still love to talk to you about it! The ideas I’ve listed below are by no means exhaustive. They’re just areas of strong interest that I’d love to adapt into creative output. (If you already have an idea or know you want to work with me, scroll down to the bottom and fill out the form. I’ll send you a scheduling link after I look through your submission!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5VJrMvM2aw

The Men at IWBC

After my first trip to IWBC last year, I wrote a little round-up of my experiences there. I kept it pretty top-level, sticking mostly to safe topics and general stories. The plan was always to dive back into certain things in more depth, but I decided I wanted to wait and make sure I still felt the way I did some time later. The post kept getting delayed, and now it’s been a year. On the upside, I do feel identically now to how I felt last May, so while we’re all still stuck inside, we might as well talk about it.

I love IWBC because it is an opportunity to connect with my sisters (though, now that I’m out as queer, I’ll have to reexamine my place in it all), but the first thing I noticed after arriving was “wow, look at all the (cis) men.” Sure, there were a shit ton of women, but the gender binary that first day was balanced shockingly close to 50/50. I recognized a nontrivial amount of them: friends, colleagues, classmates, respected teachers. The night of the opening festivities, I made the rounds, checking in with old friends and making new ones.

By day three of the conference, almost all of those men were gone. Because what happened first? The mock audition.

Ownvoices versus Intentional Programming: A Primer

In the last year, I’ve sat down several times to break down problematic and offensive programming and publishing decisions by major music institutions. Sometimes it’s started on Twitter, sometimes on my blog, but I’ve found myself circling back to many of the same issues again and again and again. In certain cases, it’s been harder to spot, because the Phantom Regiment snafu and resulting fallout look different on the surface than, say, the Larry Clark/Keiko Yamada moment or my thoughts and hesitations about Fire in my mouth. Each of these points to different, interconnected issues within our communities and the ways in which we talk about marginalized composers and their work. However, they also point to different ways in which our current mainstream discussions of these issues aren’t specific enough to make the right arguments for folks who may not be as plugged in as we are.

Because while these instances and others (looking at you, St. Louis Symphony’s History/Her Story programming) all fall under the umbrella category of Things Concerning Marginalized Composers, they don’t all deal with the same issues. In fact, they concern themselves with two distinctly different things: intentional programming and ownvoices representation.

Fire in my mouth And Pushing For Ownvoices Rep

[The following is a transcript of a thread I did on Twitter this evening. I’ve kept things as intact as possible, besides some minor punctuation changes to make it make sense when it’s not delivered 280 characters at a time. Additional thoughts added for this version are in brackets.]

So I’m listening to Julia Wolfe’s Fire in my mouth, and first of all, the writing is very good and the recording is very good, but second of all, I have thoughts. Apparently I’m threading these on Twitter again, so buckle up, folks. A couple things: one, this is my first listen, so there is undoubtedly stuff I’m missing. Two, my thoughts on this are shaped especially by what’s going on in publishing right now.

First, the text setting is good. Nothing revolutionary (though I’m not to the end yet), but good. I get that it’s an oratorio and there’s formal guidelines being followed. I’m more of a scary-noises-and-extended-techniques person, but given the sound palette, it all makes sense. The string writing is probably my favorite part of the composing itself. It’s compelling. The percussion choices are good ones, too. Honestly, though, that’s probably all I’ve got to say about the composing part of this, because the circumstances around the work catch me. [I was running out of characters, but what I meant here is that the circumstances are the thing that piques my interest.]

Category: orchestra