Two years ago, I had the privilege of performing Three Aviaries for Oboe, English Horn, Narrator, and String Quartet alongside now trusted friends and collaborators Stephanie Carlson, Susan Miranda, and the Carpe Diem String Quartet at the 51st Annual International Double Reed Society Conference in Boulder, CO, USA. At that conference, it was announced that the 53rd IDRS Conference would be at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona in 2024. I remember picking up the brochure showing those panoramic windows of Kitt School of Music and saying “ What a weird place to have an international conference.”
Stephanie Carlson asked me if I was going to have anything performed at the 2024 IDRS Conference. I think I said, “ We’ll see.” But then I started planning and plotting, having just met a number of people I looked up to and new friends and collaborators I did not know would shape my life for the next two years.
In Boulder, I had a spontaneous sushi dinner with Gina Moore, Ryan Morris, and Mark Lauer. I met Jennet Ingle in passing in an elevator of the dilapidated host hotel we were all told would be knocked down two weeks after we left. After my first three tequila shots at an LGBTQ+ mixer organized by Ari Cohen Mann, I encountered the gloriously nerdy Stephanie Patterson. And, most memorably, I caught Victoria Lee taking a selfie in frog hat she swiped from that year’s performance of the legendary and iconic Contra Band.
And meeting all these people is how IDRS 2024 became what I have framed my entire creative life around for at least the last 18 months. Let me explain.
blue sky
When I was writing The List last summer, the project I undertook during a composition hiatus to refocus what I do and how I do it, I wrote about what I refer to as the Blue Sky phase of planning a project. I’ll summarize it here, but you can read the original text at your leisure.
Blue Sky is a term that I have borrowed from the themed experience design space. It’s the phase of the project when any ideas are valid and totally possible, and you don’t reject any ideas because of logistical reasons. It’s purest brainstorming possible, and you get the opportunity to imagine what could be… before someone inevitably starts talking about money.
It’s really important to me that Blue Sky conversations happen. If we can’t have a Blue Sky conversation without discussing the actual financial scaffolding of a project, we actually probably aren’t going to be able to collaborate very well. There’s a time and place for the money conversation and I certainly appreciate and enjoy being compensated for my work, but it is not during principal brainstorming. My brain wants to throw some ideas on the wall, see what sticks, see what ideas have that familiar Kincaid ring to them, figure out the perfect ecosystem in which our idea could grow, then pause for the money conversation.
All of the people who centered performing my music at IDRS were able to do Blue Sky with me, then have a conversation about money later.
I don’t expect to get paid for Blue Sky. It’s fun. I like doing it.
And for anyone wondering when I’m starting Blue Sky for IDRS 2025: now. There is no time to delay for 2025’s conference. Email me. Do not wait.
new works for idrs 2024
I was deeply surprised that I had 10 works across 8 recitals accepted for IDRS 2024, nine of which would be premieres. Most of the 10 projects I originally green-lit for IDRS are bespoke double reed works. One of them had already been composed and performed, funded by a consortium in 2020, with a revised 2024 version. Two of them were works originally composed for clarinets that were rapidly gathering dust, having never been performed live. The other seven were works specifically designed with double reeds in mind.
By the time IDRS 2024 actually happened, I only had six works at the conference, all of which were world premieres. Two works I cancelled due to a car accident that I was involved in earlier this year, and two works were not performed at IDRS for personal reasons on the part of other performers.
the merriment of outlaws
In planning for IDRS 2024, I had opted to expand the instrumentation of The Merriment of Outlaws to English horn octet, which was originally for English horn quartet. Once I started principal composition on Sandbox Mode and it became apparent that it was going to be a 15-minute long English horn epic, The Merriment of Outlaws very quickly became a quartet again. I shelved the project. It is available to anyone who wants to take it on.
single rider
I also cancelled a work for six bassoons, narrator, and two contrabassoons entitled Single Rider. I had hoped that Single Rider would continue a deliberate lineage of works with narrator that I began with Three Aviaries, but I knew how complicated it was to produce the score and parts for Three Aviaries, and it was not going to be viable in the immediate aftermath of the accident. I shelved the project. It is available to anyone who wants to take it on.
wishful thinking
Wishful Thinking was originally composed in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, funded by a consortium of English hornists of which Jenna Sehmann was part. Throughout the last year, I have working in consultation with Carolyn Hove, the principal English hornist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, on a revised version of Wishful Thinking that makes it more possible and less exhausting to play. Carolyn performed that version at a series of masterclass recitals in June, and Jenna was scheduled to perform the new version of Wishful Thinking in July at IDRS. Jenna complimented me enormously by pairing Wishful Thinking with a work of Stacy Garrop, and I was very much looking forward to her work as much as my own. Unfortunately, Jenna suffered an injury in June that made travel to Flagstaff impossible, and the new version of Wishful Thinking was not performed at IDRS 2024. I wish Jenna a speedy recovery.
While not the most recent version, Jenna’s fabulous recording of the original version of Wishful Thinking is what I currently use for the reference recording.
The original version of Wishful Thinking is currently available at Trevco. The 2024 version will be made available soon.
breakthrough
Laura Bennett Cameron and I met at a Dallas Winds concert in April 2023. We had discussed creating an intermediate work for bassoon and piano entirely in tenor clef as an introduction to playing in the tenor range of the instrument. Breakthrough is a love letter to Owl City using the harmonic language of Adam Young to encourage players to test their limits and inspire a sense of nostalgic wonder in its audience. Due to personal reasons, Laura was unable to premiere Breakthrough alongside works of Pierette Mari, Amber Ferenz, and Harrison J. Collins.
For those of you interested in a preview of Breakthrough, here is the MIDI realization.
Breakthrough will be available at Trevco sometime in August. While Laura plans on creating a video premiere of the work, anyone is welcome to play or program the work.
six premieres at idrs 2024
Six premieres in one week is a lot.
It’s a lot in ways that I did not anticipate. I often like to describe composition as carrying additional weight. When an idea goes from being just taking up space in one’s head to being a tangible work product, a physical thing that is more that just pencil on paper or hours spent in notation software, there is a sense of weight added to it. The life of a musical work before it is premiered is kind of like a bubble expanding until it bursts. There is tension in the act of waiting. There is exhaustion in the relief from the weight of it.
That exhaustion, combined with the fact that IDRS is a marathon, not a sprint, is more taxing than I anticipated.
There’s a few ways of mitigating this. First my recommendation for my own mental health and the future of my involvement with IDRS is going to be that premieres are facilitated before the event so that the emotional envelope of the premiere does not coincide with the emotional envelope of the conference marathon. It is impractical to do this with every work, especially things like concerti, which require an orchestra, or works that rely on people meeting at the conference in pick-up ensembles like Sandbox Mode or Bridges of Light, but for most works, one could do a world premiere and an IDRS premiere separately. This will help composers like me attending the conference a lot.
The second thing that I will do at IDRS 2025 is a lot more self-care before and after the conference. I am publishing this post having just gotten a well-needed massage, having finally given my body the chance to relax as much as I have allowed my mind to do so over the last few days since returning from Flagstaff. Tomorrow, I leave for the Happiest Place on Earth (I’ve actually earned it this time). But I could have done way more before IDRS to mitigate stress I felt during IDRS.
IDRS 2024 was poorly timed for me in a way that will not impact IDRS 2025. San Diego Pride is always in July, and IDRS started on the Sunday of San Diego Pride’s weekend, which forced us to travel on the Saturday of Pride. This was not ideal. Forcing LGBTQ+ composers to travel for IDRS during their hometown’s Pride weekend is a hate crime almost as bad as hosting an LGBTQ+ affinity mixer during the day without alcohol.
Next time it should be a pool party. In fact, given the option, I will plan the 2025 IDRS LGBTQ+ Pool Party.
And it won’t be during San Diego Pride.
Sunday
I have already written about my first interaction at IDRS 2024 and the emotional whirlwind that it began, separately from this retrospective. It was an ominous portent of what was to come that day, mercifully thwarted by the success of two excellent premieres.
Cabinet of Curiosities
My first premiere of IDRS 2024 was Cabinet of Curiosities, a very difficult five movement work for bassoon quartet that was originally a ten movement work composed for clarinet quartet between 2021 and 2023. With permission from the clarinet commissioner, I selected the five movements that would work best on bassoon and repackaged them from the elaborate tasting menu that inspired the clarinet quartet version to a collection of objects that an 18-century traveler may have accumulated for their curio cabinet.
Cabinet of Curiosities was premiered at IDRS 2024 by ASU bassoonists Ben Kearns, Joe Florence, Cooper Taylor, and Michelle Fletcher. Knowing how challenging the work was, I was pleasantly surprised by some of ingenious artistic decisions made by the quartet.
Sunday’s performances were the first time I had heard professional musicians perform my music in more than a year, and I had forgotten how nice is when players read between the lines of a music you write and introduce an interpretation you would have never thought of to the performance practice of one’s music. I’m not the kind of composer who wants a perfect performance, and I am not interested in micromanaging the people performing my music (there are, of course, many composers who are like this, but I’m not one of them).
For anyone who would like to explore the sound worlds of Cabinet of Curiosities and make different artistic choices than the ones made by the premiering ensemble, you can purchase the score and parts at Trevco.
I find it deeply complimentary to have my music interpreted in a way that would have never occurred to me, and I believe it adds a dimension to my music only attainable through collaboration with live performers. There is perhaps no better example of this having been done that that the next premiere I was honored to experience at IDRS 2024
epiphanies
This one is a long story, but I hope you’ll indulge me. If you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably down.
After meeting Jennet Ingle very briefly in passing in an elevator at IDRS 2022 in Boulder, I reached out to her and asked if we could have a Zoom session. I had met a number of her students in Boulder, and everyone who I had asked said nothing but good things, so I guess I felt she was always going to be a safe person to work with, and I needed someone like that who could help me focus my energy in the aftermath of the dizzying experience I had at IDRS 2022.
We set up a Zoom, not to discuss anything in particular, but just to get to know each other. There are a lot of people in the IDRS orbit who are willing to give time like this, and Jennet is emblematic of the kind of person who believes in this kind of serendipity. About two thirds of the way through the conversation, as she was telling me about the way she had conceptualized teaching adult oboists through her annual Oboe FLOW program, I spitballed an idea for a set of concert etudes inspired by each member of her studio centered around a single theme.
Jennet took this idea back to her studio, and, unanimously, they agreed. They would fund the commission for the work that would become Epiphanies together.
The first thing I did with Epiphanies is come to one of their sessions, in which interviewed each member of the 2022-2023 cohort in quick succession, listening to their stories and helping them explore an aha! moment that they had experienced, either at the oboe or away from it. Jennet’s students trusted the process, and they told me that they never knew work with a composer could include them so much.
They trusted Blue Sky. Epiphanies was the reward for that trust.
I sat with their stories and thoughts, and between November 2022 and January 2023, I completed 11 of the 12 concert etudes.
A few months later, it occurred to me that I need to write one more concert etude that synthesized all the materials from each of the preceding works. In May of 2023, I completed the final etude of Epiphanies, dedicated to Jennet Ingle, the conduit that made this project possible.
Jennet and I have worked over the past year to perfect the set of intermediate concert etudes into not only carefully-crafted individual pieces of introspective and enjoyable music, and not only a modular work that could be performed in any number of sets of internal movements, but a progressive set of pedagogical etudes that fills a gap left for intermediate concert etudes for the solo oboist. Epiphanies is a set of fond letters to people who want to learn the oboe not because they want to be the best oboist in the world, but because they want to keep learning and become the best oboist they can be.
One of the things that sets IDRS apart from other conferences is how aggressively the double reed community encourages amateur participation. From reading sessions to the work of artist-clinicians like Jennet Ingle, we as a community value including oboists and bassoonists of all levels as long as they are passionate about what we do and interested in creating music. Obviously IDRS also platforms spectacular performances by the artists at the forefront of our field, but we as a community actively include and encourage performances by people who are learning, which is hugely compelling for the double reed community and completely absent in other woodwind communities of similar size.
It was an honor and a privilege to work with Jennet and her cohort of oboists on Epiphanies. Two of Jennet’s students attending the IDRS conference, Barbara Timmerman and Anne Sneller, came to every single on of my premieres at IDRS 2024. I want them to know that it didn’t go unnoticed, and that I adored having familiar faces in the audience every single time.
Jennet Ingle is a pillar of our community. There are few people as giving and patient and wonderful as she is. She is doing the work to inspire and encourage a community within our community that matters and who unconditionally support what we do. We all owe Jennet thanks for that. Working with Jennet is a joy and an absolute treat. Epiphanies is the first fruit of our musical partnership, and it will be available from Trevco in early August.
I hope you all find someone with whom you love working as much as I love working with Jennet Ingle.
monday
Monday was my easy day, due to the cancellation of the performance of the 2024 version of Wishful Thinking. I decided to head to the exhibit hall just to check it out.
I immediately bought two English horn reeds and a reed case and started trying English horn, which I had never played before. I’d written for it, fairly extensively (as I will demonstrate shortly), but I’d never actually played it. I thought I knew how much I liked English horn. I was wrong.
I fell absolutely in love with it.
It’s such a fun instrument to play. The fingering system kind of sucks, and realizing that oboists actually do slide their pinky between C, C#/Db, and D#/Eb all the time is a super rude awakening, but that doesn’t take very much away from how fun it is to play. It just informs me on what to avoid to write better for the instrument.
As a recovering clarinetist, I had a pretty specific idea of what certain intervals felt like. A perfect fifth on English horn feels like an octave on clarinet. And I love that, because clarinet feels to me like less expenditure of energy creates more variables to finesse where English horn feels much more of an equal energy expenditure calculation. In other words, I feel more in direct control of English horn than I ever have playing clarinet.
If anyone would like to purchase two Leblanc Opus clarinets (Bb and A), I’m having them overhauled in October with the intention of selling them.
tuesday
On the Tuesday of IDRS 2024, which is the third day of the conference (this screwed all of us up, please never start a conference on Sunday morning again), I originally had two premieres: Marine Layer and Breakthrough. With Breakthrough cancelled for reasons listed above, Marine Layer became my only premiere at the conference on this day.
Marine Layer
Marine Layer was the result of a very productive lunch at a Mazemen restaurant in Costa Mesa, CA, between myself, Kevin, and Victoria Lee in August 2023. At that time, we discussed the possibility of performing at IDRS, and Kevin had just had the premiere of his work Riversong for reed quintet and piano at the 2023 Imani Winds Chamber Music Festival at Juilliard.
It had been several years since I had last composed for reed quintet. I composed a work for the instrumentation in 2019 that was never performed because of the pandemic. Prior to that, I had written five works for reed quintet between 2014 and 2016, all of which were performed at my senior recital in my undergrad (and all of which are now available through Trevco). I was thrilled at the potential of returning to the ensemble as a much more mature composer, and the added dimension of piano with reed quintet was a very interesting sound world to explore.
And I already had Kevin’s work to which I could musically respond. It would be the first time our music would be paired together. I couldn’t resist that.
I don’t think Victoria will mind me saying that we met in a boba shop in October in Anaheim GardenWalk (three guesses why I asked if we could meet there) and rewrote the entire application for Syrinx and Kevin Day for IDRS 2024. We imagined the two pieces as two visions of water in California: Kevin, who enjoys the mountains and who had already associated Riversong with the lush woodland rivers of Northern California, and me, who loves the ocean and refuses to move too far from its proximity, proposing Marine Layer as a reflection on the way its waves unpredictably crash against the iconic rock formations of La Jolla.
It was the perfect Blue Sky. My mind raced. I couldn’t help but write.
Named for the frequent weather phenomenon when relatively dry and warm California air moving atop a body of cooler water, Marine Layer is, currently, my most representative work. It combines my contrapuntal aesthetic sensibilities with gestural, wandering melodies, pounding rhythms, and musical motifs that beg you to close your eyes and picture the Pacific crashing upon California shorelines. I love it dearly because writing it excited me in ways I have not been excited ina very long time.
And Syrinx Quintet and Kevin Day performed the crap out of it.
Marine Layer is coming soon to Trevco.
Expect more reed quintet and piano collaborations from Syrinx and Kevin Day. We all really work well together, and we want to expand the what is out there for reed quintet and piano (it’s literally just us and a piece by Ton ter Doest that I have to email Calefax about) and we loved making music with them. To Syrinx: thank you so much for showing me and Kevin the kindness and attention to detail our music deserves.
Marine Layer would have never happened without you.
wednesday
The worst IDRS 2024 hangover.
Yes, I am the party. Yes, my cocktails are strong. Yes, I bring Cards Against Humanity to everything. And, yes, you’re invited. Literally just ask.
Bonus Round
Some projects take you longer to connect with than others.
When Mark Lauer approached me to write an intermediate-advanced work for bassoon and piano about navigating life with ADHD, I was initially hesitant. Though I also have ADHD and have centered my mental health in music before, I often find myself struggling with works that are abstract, and the prompt of “ struggling with ADHD” flummoxed me.
Sometimes a project goes through a number of thematic iterations before you find the right one. I have started projects before completing Blue Sky for them. Bonus Round was one of those projects, and Mark and I met again to discuss the trajectory for the project, and I suggested that a metaphor for ADHD would help me reframe the work better.
Mark suggested pinball. And it was perfect. It was easy. It felt right.
Bonus Round was premiered by Mark Lauer and Aimee Fincher at spectacular effect at IDRS 2024. At the end of the performance Mark invited me on stage, at which I present him with a token I like to give all my commissioners: the brainstorming document for their commission that I write by hand, essentially, the urtext of the score, framed.
Sometimes it is easy to forget that one’s music has the power to change lives. It can be easy to get lost in the minutia of formatting and placing articulations and listening to the work as if one has not just written it and forget that the music we as composers create has the capacity to become a vehicle for processing emotion. When I presented Mark with the framed urtext of his commission and he broke down in my arms, having just given the work a spectacular premiere, I understood that power and felt its full weight in his friendly embrace.
Bonus Round is one of my proud music achievements, not because I think it’s my best work, but because I didn’t realize how much it meant and how much of myself I poured into it. By the time Mark and I agreed on a piece about pinball being a metaphor for having ADHD, I’d like to think I knew how much I would connect with the material. I didn’t expect the same from him. That reciprocation is everything.
You can purchase the score for Bonus Round at Trevco Music Publishing.
Sandbox Mode
For those of you who do not know the oboist Stephanie Patterson, you should, because she is marvelous. And, it just so happens, we have all the same special interests: double reed music, roller coasters, video games, and RuPaul’s Drag Race. When I suggested that I combine all those things (except Drag Race, that’s IDRS 2025’s English Horn-apolooza! lol) into an English horn octet centering Roller Coaster Tycoon, she vociferously approved and encouraged me to write the work.
I was kind of joking about this. She wasn’t. Everyone kind of just took me seriously this whole time about this.
Don’t do that unless you want me to actually make it happen.
At my request, the extraordinary Aaron Hill stepped in to do the organizing and coordinating the application. At the time, I thought there was literally NO CHANCE an English horn octet would ever be included on the program for any IDRS conference. It was just too silly to imagine that this would happen. But we had the players, and we submitted the applications, and then…
It took me a very long time to figure out what do with eight English horns. The English horn range is exceptionally limited (a little over two octaves total), and it’s a lot of one timbre that doesn’t have a whole lot of clarity and tends to sound muddy in multiples. But, from the limited brainstorming I did on The Merriment of Outlaws, I knew that a quartet of English horns worked, and, after attending a presentation by James Bohn on the musical structure of It’s A Small World at the All Ears: Music and Sound in Disney Theme Parks and Beyond Conference earlier this summer, I finally figured it out.
No, seriously, I am this nerdy.
I am not alone.
Sandbox Mode became a theme and variations, with each variation representing a different theme present in both Roller Coaster Tycoon and Disneyland. This is because the reality is that, without Disneyland, there would have been no Roller Coaster Tycoon. For me, however, it gave me an opportunity to something I always wanted to do: write music about Disneyland… in Disneyland.
Sandbox Mode is a love letter, full of easter eggs and surprise twists for the keen theme park listener. Each variation of the theme begins with a cadenza, giving each player in the octet an opportunity to shine. Not all player perform each movement, which gives English hornists time to rest before playing, but the person with the next cadenza plays at least the last 4 to 8 measures of the previous movement to make sure that their is, in fact, still a working reed.
Sandbox Mode was premiered by English hornists Aaron Hill, Mika Brunson, Taylor Crawford, Matthew Covington, Stephanie Patterson, JD Uchal, Victoria Lee, and Sara Renner. So much of the performance of this work was made special by the people who performed it, from the incredible reality of English horn jazz improvisation made possible by Aaron Hill to wearing the truly fantastic costumes, from tuning on everyone’s favorite note to Sara Renner’s almighty YEEHAW. Thank you all for making my weird meme application to this conference an even weirder reality.
Sandbox Mode will be available from Trevco in August. If you would like to play Sandbox Mode but do not have eight English horns readily available (that’s most of y’all), you can perform it as written with eight of basically any instrument that reads in treble clef.
Saxophonists, I now speak directly to you: knock yourselves out.
thursday
Bridges of Light
It is very interesting to me that my IDRS 2024 six-premiere marathon should be bookended by two works originally for clarinets.
Bridges of Light was originally commissioned by Stefanie Gardner for the Glendale Community College Bass Clarinet Choir, and virtually premiered at the 2021 Virtual ClarinetFest. The work has never been premiered live in its original bass clarinet version, but the exclusivity period expired and I chose to create a version that I believe is infinitely more applicable to more ensembles for six bassoons and two contrabassoons.
When I was in my graduate degree at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, I became a Themed Entertainment Association NextGen member. For a brief time, I worked with a group of designers on a Disney Imaginations entry. Disney Imaginations is the contest that Disney uses to in part recruit new Imagineers to their company. Before we disbanded our team due to personal work relationship reasons, we were working on a Disney Imaginations project inspired by the aurora borealis in which I began to develop the musical material that would become Bridges of Light. I kept the musical material and recycled it for this work.
The bassoon octet version of Bridges of Light was premiered by Alex Meaux, Gina Moore, Ryan Morris, Ariel Detwiler, Ashley Mania, Haley Houk, Chris Werner, and Shawn Karson, with Kevin Day conducting, alongside another work by Kevin Day entitled Harbinger and an arrangement of Joseph Bologne's Symphony No. 1 by Alex Meaux.
You can purchase the score and parts for the bassoon octet version of Bridges of Light from Trevco.
back at sea level
I have a few key takeaways from IDRS 2024.
First, and this is to my fellow composers: double reed players are down for just about anything. One of my favorite questions for double reed players is to ask what is missing from their repertoires. The reality is that it’s not only that there’s giant holes in instrumental pedagogies and entire new music aesthetic missing from both bassoon and oboe literature, it’s also that there seems to be overall a lack of variety in materials available to oboists and bassoonists. They crave what we composers have freely given the flutists and the clarinetists and the saxophonists only to watch those same flutists and clarinetists and saxophonists perform our music once and say, “ I’d rather perform Lowell Liebermann, Jonathan Russell, or Jacob TV instead.” I’ve watched oboists and bassoonists buy music in the sheer hope that it might be something new for themselves and their students, and I’ve watched the other woodwind communities become insular to the point of cliquish and downright mean. There is a reason I adapted two works to bassoon ensembles over clarinet ensembles and got them performed immediately, and it’s not entirely blatant nepotism. Bassoonists and oboists are the most welcoming, most kind, most patient, and most willing collaborators in new music and y’all are missing out.
Double reed players believe in Blue Sky. They believe in making magic simply because it is there to be made. I am so lucky to have found what I have in them.
To the double reed players who have chosen to center me and champion my music at IDRS 2024 and beyond: I cannot tell you how profoundly thankful I am for you. You have given me back the confidence that my music matters, that it means something, and that I should absolutely continue making it. And to Ben Kearns, Joe Florence, Cooper Taylor, Michelle Fletcher, Jenna Sehmann, Laura Bennett Cameron, Jennet Ingle, Mark Lauer, Victoria Lee, Micah Wright, Patrick Olmos, Mathieu Girardet, Alex Rosales Garcia, Aaron Hill, Mika Brunson, Taylor Crawford, Matthew Covington, Stephanie Patterson, JD Uchal, Sara Renner, Alex Meaux, Gina Moore, Ryan Morris, Ariel Detwiler, Ashley Mania, Haley Houk, Chris Werner, Shawn Karson, and most importantly, Kevin Day, you have changed my life in more ways than you have realized and I can’t thank you enough for it.
To the International Double Reed Society and its board, conference hosts, and future conference organizers: good job. Keep up the good work. Please put pronouns on all name badges for future conferences. Please consider allowing composers with works performed at IDRS conferences be considered collaborative artists, which would enable us to hear our contributions to the double reed repository without the financial burden of attending an already extraordinarily expensive conference. Please plan all future conferences in cities with easy access to international airports. Please reconsider planning conferences at 7500’ altitudes. Please be more transparent about the financial reports of the organization.
And, most importantly, please continue to foster an environment that encourages new music, one that includes a variety of diverse members, that supports its artists and vendors, and an event that gets better every single year. As much as I have to thank each and every artist who has made my music possible, I also owe thanks to you to make it possible for theme to have all been in one place at one time.
IDRS 2025
People have asked me if I’m already planning for IDRS 2025 at Butler University in Indianapolis. Of course I am. I met new people to collaborate with at IDRS 2024, including the English hornist who subs with my local symphony regularly, multiple oboe/bassoon couples who play spectacularly together, and enough people to easily organize an oboe d’amore consortium. Familiar faces want to collaborate again, including on a huge project that I could not be more thrilled to undertake. I’m planning on buying an English horn there. I already know that there’s a Starbucks in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency in Indianapolis, the host hotel for the 2025 IDRS conference. I already have at least five projects in the works for the conference with people who want nothing but to see me succeed, to have my music fill as many ears as possible.
And I’m open to doing more. I have nothing but ideas for double reeds. Ask me. I’m probably down. Six premieres was exhausting, but I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat. Actually, let’s do double that next time.
Of course I’m planning for IDRS 2025. You should be too. Let’s make some of those plans together. Let’s take those chances, make some mistakes, and get messy. Let’s have those moments of Blue Sky that result in cool things I would have never imagined alone.
See you in Indianapolis.