Last month I finally finished up all my marching band shows for 2010. I always set June 1 as my deadline and I always never make it! The closest I have come is June 10, and the latest was this year. I blame that on the fact that I took a month off this spring to work on Dark Energy and then also had a few conducting opportunities. Honestly, considering the alternative (no work and no performances) I’ll take it!

While I won’t release the actual shows until October 1, here are the schools I wrote for, both new shows and old (library) shows:

• Albuquerque HS (NM)
• Allatoona HS (GA)
• Boiling Springs HS (SC)
• Brazoswood HS (TX)
• Clear Creek HS (TX)
• Clovis HS (NM)
• Cypress Falls (TX)
• Del Valle (TX)
• Hanks HS (TX)
• Harrison HS (GA)
• James Martin HS (TX)
• Lake Highlands HS (TX)
• Lake Orion HS (TX)
• Lake Travis HS (TX)
• MacArthur HS (TX)
• Mary Carroll HS (TX)
• McKinney North HS (TX)
• McNeil HS (TX)
• Mill Creek HS (GA)
• North Lincoln HS (TX)
• Park Hill South HS (MO)
• Pearland HS (TX)
• Robert E. Lee HS (TX)
• Seminole HS (FL)
• Stony Point HS (TX)
• Timbercreek HS (TX)
• University of Houston (TX)
• Westwood HS (TX)
• William Mason HS (OH)

I’ve also arranged/transcribed a few tunes for new schools opening up in the area.

• Cedar Creek HS – Alma Mater (TX)
• Four Points MS – Fight Song (TX)

Next up on my plate is a brand new piece to be premiered next spring in New York at Carnegie Hall.  A consortium, led by the William Mason HS Band (OH), has commissioned me to compose a piece for trumpet soloist and wind ensemble, featuring Boston Symphony Orchestra member, Michael Martin.

Between the composing and marching band judging and clinics this fall, I might have a little bit of time to write another percussion ensemble piece, which I am tentatively titling, “The Highway, 2.”  Basically, I want to make it close to the same instrumentation, difficultly level, and length, but be much cooler and much better!  So you know that means more rock!! 

Lastly, all my wind band music is exclusively available through RBC Music.  You can also purchase all my percussion ensemble music through Drop 6 Media, Inc., and my chamber works through me personally.

Now for me to go play some NCAA Football ’11.

So if you’re in the area, stop by and hear the piece that made me a month late on all my marching band shows!

It took until this past week to get a recording that not only (as close as possible) represented my “artistic vision,” but was good enough for the director to allow me to post it!

This version was performed by the James Martin HS Symphonic Band, David Carbone dir., and was conducted by yours truly.  While admittedly there are some minor errors here and there, overall this version pretty much nails the tempo, intensity, energy, and overall “feel” that I was hoping for when I wrote it.

So take a listen AND a look (I did conduct it), and maybe you too could join the “Voodoo Revolution.”*

“Voodoo Revolution” may not actually exist

“Voodoo” (mp3)

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Dave Carbone is the director of the Symphonic Band and we have worked together previously on their marching band show this past season and next season.

Also on the program are three works by John Mackey; “Red Line Tango,” “Strange Humors,” and “Undertow”. Yes folks, for the second straight week, I get to be on the same program as The Mack Attack!! Just call me Garfunkel….

So if you’re in the area, stop on by and hear some good music, and see what some have called, “…but wiggling” conducting!!

This will also be my second chance to conduct “Voodoo” (last fall I conducted the piece with the Westminster School).  Next week I will be actually conducting “Voodoo” in Arlington, TX (stay tuned for that!).

So if you’re in the area, lamenting the fact LeBron is no longer making money for the state, then come on down and here some good ol’ band music.  You’ll hear some John Williams, Robert Jaegar, Ralph Vaughan-Williams, John Mackey, and more!

I have been lucky enough to visit and work with the band twice in the last three weeks and am excited about the progress made.  This performance is the first of many lined up of  “Dark Energy” and I am grateful to Carl for the opportunity.

So if you’re in the area, stop on by and say hello!

1. Just because your synthesizer can do it, doesn’t mean the band CAN or SHOULD!

2. If you only used a couple of notes from a theme, melody, counterline, and/or ostinato, then you really DIDN’T play the piece.  This also goes for playing only 30 secs of a substantially longer work.

Oh yeah… And I got an iPad! So I’m updating this here blog from my bed. Yup, there’s an app for updating WordPress blogs!

So till I have more time and something of actual interest to say….

Just a quick note, since I posted the mp3 a few days ago, it has already been downloaded almost 500 times!  Plus, I have already secured three performances!  So to all of you… thanks!!

For those interested in further information regarding Dark Energy:

Dark Energy in 3-D

A 3-D scan of hundreds of thousands of galaxies has confirmed the view that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, due to a mysterious factor called dark energy. The galaxy survey, described in a study set to be published by the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, serves as one more line of evidence for dark energy’s existence.

The idea behind dark energy cropped up 12 years ago when astronomers carefully measured how quickly supernovas were receding from us – and noticed that the speed was increasing with time. Since then, other types of evidence have piled up, including a survey of 13,000 galaxies conducted using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.

The latest study kicks it up a notch by drawing upon the Hubble Space Telescope’s COSMOS survey of more than 446,000 galaxies. Using ground-based telescopes, researchers were able to determine the distances to 194,000 of those galaxies – and chart the distribution of matter out to about 12 billion light-years.

Astronomers even accounted for the presence of dark matter in all those galaxies by analyzing how the gravitational effect of that unseen material warped the light coming from even more distant galaxies. This effect is called weak gravitational lensing.

A similar technique was used three years ago to generate a 3-D map of dark matter disribution from COSMOS data. Yet another gravitational-lensing study along the same lines was published in The Astrophysical Journal this year. The latest study puts together the 3-D map with information about how fast galaxies are receding, giving astronomers a better understanding of how the cosmic expansion has changed over time.

“The sheer number of galaxies included in this type of analysis is unprecedented, but more important is the wealth of information we could obtain about the invisible structures in the universe from this exceptional data set,” one of the authors of the study, Patrick Simon of Edinburgh University, said in a news release issued by the European Space Agency’s Hubble team.

When the researchers compared their data with different computer-generated models of what the universe should look like, they found that the models without dark energy could not fit what they were seeing.

“Dark energy affects our measurements for two reasons,” said another co-author of the study, Benjamin Joachimi of the University of Bonn. “First, when it is present, galaxy clusters grow more slowly, and secondly, it changes the way the universe expands, leading to more distant – and more efficiently lensed – galaxies. Our analysis is sensitive to both effects.”

Harvard astronomer William High said that most of the previous studies of matter distribution have been done in 2-D, like taking a chest X-ray of a patch of the night sky. “Our study is more like a 3-D reconstruction of the skeleton from a CT scan,” he said. “On top of that, we are able to watch the skeleton of dark matter mature from the universe’s youth to the present.”

The European Hubble team released a color-coded image (in 2-D)  that charts the development of the cosmic skeleton. That’s the image that appears at the top of this item. White, blue and green represent structures that are closer to us, while red and orange structures are farther away. In all these spots, dark matter accounts for most of the mass being mapped.

Such a breakdown is consistent with the current thinking that all the matter we can see accounts for only 4 percent of the universe’s content, with dark matter making up 22 percent. The other 74 percent seems to be bound up in dark energy.

The Hubble study doesn’t shed any new light on what dark matter or dark energy actually is. To determine the nature of dark matter, scientists will probably have to turn to the Large Hadron Collider or future astronomical observations.

And dark energy? Figuring out what that is poses an even bigger challenge. Scientists might just have to accept dark energy as a property of the universe where we happen to live, and add a cosmic “fudge factor” to the equations of general relativity. Or they might have to come up with something else entirely.