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Last May I wrote (very quickly) a short piano concerto called Cellular Automata. It's going to be performed in Coimbra, Portugal, by the Orquestra Clássica do Centro as part of the 2011 Bridges conference.  The piece turned out very well, and I'm eager to hear it played!  There's also a performance of an older piece, Piano Games, at the Highscore Music Festival in Pavia, Italy.  Beyond that, I've been thinking a little about graphical models of musical structure in which points represent notes and am preparing to get started on a piece for the Third Coast Percussion Quartet.

Other than that, I am trying to relax a bit and enjoy the summer!  This week, we go to the beach for the first time!

Beat Therapy is an album of pieces combining jazz and classical ideas. It sounds like jazz unless you listen carefully, in which case it starts to seem more classical!  You can get it from Amazon.

I would like at some point to write a trade book about music, one that provides a very friendly introduction, suitable for nonmusicians, to my way of thinking about music. In this context, I've been thinking a bit about the paradoxical situation we're in: theorists have been discovering that tonal music is much richer than we had ever expected. Yet composers themselves haven't really caught up to this: many contemporary composers are very intuitive, or even non-intellectual, and to some extent they've thrown out the baby of theory along with the bathwater of atonality ... It's not hard to imagine a renewal of interest in tonal composition as new theoretical perspectives gradually infiltrate the compositional community. I suppose I'd like to help this process along with my own compositions.

Just finished working with the wonderful Ansermet Quartet, who performed and recorded two of my pieces: Typecase Treasury (for string quintet) and This Picture Seems to Move (quartet) at Princeton. I'm planning to release these, along with The Eggman Variations on an album shortly.

My book A Geometry of Music is finished, and now available from Oxford University Press.

I am writing pieces for the Third Coast Percussion Ensemble and a few other ensembles.