Robert is a composer and pianist living in New Haven, CT. He is finishing up the MMA program at the Yale School of Music. He also accompanies dance classes at ECA and teaches composition in the Yale College Music Department. Send me emails at rhonstein@gmail.com !
So I’m very excited for this thursday evening. The amazing Laura Grey with the help of Caspar Lam, has put together a fantastic event called Present Continuous. Basically, Laura and Caspar reached out to creative people throughout the Yale community to fashion an evening of collaborations between designers, composers, sculptors, architects, photographers, painters and others. I’ve been around this place for a while and it’s pretty rare to have an event that brings together so many different members of the community. Anyway, I’m very excited. The show will be at the University Art Gallery from 530-730 on Thursday March, 4th and will feature installation, performance, sculpture and other types of work. And, of course, there will be a fabulous reception afterwards (courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery…thank you).
My contribution is a collaboration with designer Brendan Griffiths. It’s a site-specific sound installation called ‘Room Tone’. Basically we’re using google voice to translate crowd noise into text and then diffusing the text via eight earbud sized speakers discreetly placed throughout the space.
Hopefully I’ll get some photo and audio documentation to post later.
So my good friend and filmmaker Jeff Miller recently entered a short film into the Louis Vuitton Journey Awards contest. The contest required each filmmaker to respond to a given text however they saw fit. I’m not so sure about the text, it’s a little hokey. Actually, it’s kind of awful. But, Jeff did an amazing job creating something beautiful within the contest’s heavy constraints. Shooting in Hong Kong where Jeff has been living this past year, the film features beautiful shots of Hong Kong and its surroundings. I contributed music to the project. Actually, I wrote the piece for another short film of Jeff’s, but Jeff and I both agreed it worked perfectly for the Journey short as well. Anyway, we got to the finals, but sadly the esteemed Jury (and the public) picked another entry to win. Oh well…I still think Jeff’s video looks awesome and for my part, I’m pleased with the music. Check it out:
This past January I joined forces with cellist Leanne Zacharias, violinist Cristina Zacharias, percussionist Ed Reifel, and singer/songwriters Christine Fellows and John K. Samson to form the Correction Line Ensemble. We represent a wide range of musical backgrounds–composer, classically trained instrumentalist, rock star, songwriter, baroque specialist, freelance percussionist–and together we try to make music that synthesizes these backgrounds into something greater than the sum of our parts. Our first attempt, a series of shows in the Winnipeg area, was a whole lot of fun and by the reactions of the folks who came out to the shows some kind of a success as well. The show included Bartok string duos, re-harmonizations of a Bach Chorale, group arrangements of John and Christine’s songs, and one of my own compositions. It’s a pretty exciting group, with each member bringing considerable experience and accomplishment to the table. But more than being incredibly talented musicians, these guys are awesome, wonderful people. If I weren’t making music with them I’d probably trek up north anyway just to have a beer.
Plans are in play for a more extended tour of eastern Canada in Fall 2010.
Coming soon, CBC Radio 2 The Signal broadcast of our show at the West End in Winnipeg.
About a year ago my good friend and talented filmmaker, Jeffrey K. Miller, decided to check an old gmail account he had left dormant for years. Before deleting his entire spam box, Jeff decided to scan through it for anything important that might have accidentally ended up as spam. To his great surprise he found about a hundred emails from a popular online dating site addressed to himself, Jeffrey K. Miller. This was curious. Jeff had never registered for this particular site, or any other online dating service. Yet, here they were, 100 emails documenting every single correspondence of Jeffrey K. Miller within the dating site: every email sent and received, every poke, wink, blink, chat, and even all the spamy legal messages containing privacy policies, updates, warnings and alerts. Puzzled and intrigued Jeffrey and myself poured through the correspondence. What we discovered was astounding. In the pages and pages of electronic communications a story unfolded of love, betrayal, lying, cheating, and unfulfilled longing. Through some miracle of the internet this other Jeffrey K. Miller had left us a meticulous record of his tragic amorous affairs. We knew instantly this was a gift, a rare case of creative gold falling from the sky. We set out to write an opera.
Of course, it takes a while to write an opera. Last spring I workshoped a scene, just to try things out and experiment with the material. It went well. Now we’ve stepped back and we are crafting a full libretto from the collection of emails. By Fall 2010 I should have a handful of piano/vocal scenes, perhaps with some scenes fully scored (and…perhaps…a few of those will turn up on a very exciting concert that might happen in October 2010, but more on that later).
Anyway, below is the scene I wrote last spring. I’m excited by a lot of the material. Dramatically, the scene doesn’t really have a context. Most likely it wont exist in it’s entirety in the final version, but bits and pieces will likely turn up. I’ve also reconsidered my use of speaking. I’m quite liberal with the speech in this scene; however, ideally I want the speaking to be far less frequent, and to fulfill some kind of specific dramatic function when it does happen.
Check it out. Eric Barry, Tenor. Amanda Hall, Soprano. Emily Righter, Mezzo. Damien Pass, Bass. Timothy Andres, Piano.
I’m very excited to have a commission from a great group of singers in New York, the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus. The piece will be featured on a concert with two other new works inspired by or loosely related to the pleasure principle (I have to admit…I’m not quite sure what the pleasure principal means…but I think it’s suppose to feel good). As of now I’m leaning towards setting some Haiku’s by the 17th and 18th century Japanese poets Basho and Issa. Normally I’m quite nervous about setting poetry, because when it’s good poetry I usually feel like there’s nothing I can add to it (poetry itself is already a kind of perfect spoken music, right?). But, with these Haiku’s I feel like there is such a wonderful humor and charm about them that music mighty actually complement the text in a satisfying way. Plus, the haiku form is so terse that there is a lot of room for different text-setting strategies. Like, I can either set it literally with no changes or repetitions or do some renaissance, mass-style, super repetition stuff, or maybe some more adventurous chop-up, weird sequencing stuff. I don’t know. I think it will be a suite so I get to try it a bunch of different ways!
I’m very excited that the Albany Symphony is going to read my new orchestra piece, 200 OK. The reading is part of their Composer to Center Stage Program and will take place at 2:00PM on May, 22 at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC). I’m not sure exactly what the program entails, but I gather there will be some workshop sessions with orchestra musicians, conductors, administrators, and their resident composer, John Harbison. Also, and I’m very excited for this, we’ll get tickets to concerts in their American Music Festival, which (and this is what I’m really excited about) include new works by my friends Ted Hearne and Timo Andres.
Well, I’m finally going to SEAMUS. I’ve got to come clean, but I’ve actually kind of stopped writing electro-acoustic music. Even so, I still find these conferences to be interesting and eye-opening. Thankfully I managed to eke out one piece while studying electro-acoustic music at UT. Other people seem to enjoy the piece because it keeps getting programmed at all these conferences. I think, however, that this might be the last one. I’m looking forward to hearing what people are up to and I’m also really excited about Minnesota, a state I’ve yet to experience first hand.
So, if anyone is in the St. Cloud, MN area Thursday April, 8th at 10:30 AM. Come on by! I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.
So it seems like the thing to do these days is to find a bunch of buddies who write good music and put on a show. I’m happy to say I’ve jumped on the band wagon and that on April, 12th myself, Ted Hearne, Timothy Andres, Chris Cerrone, and Jacob Cooper are taking over the downtown hot spot, Le Poisson Rouge. We’ll be putting on a show of our music featuring performances by excellent musicians from New York and New Haven. My piece is a trio for violin, cello, and percussion. It should be a lot of fun.
On April 1 my trio for violin, cello and percussion will be on New Music New Haven. The piece has gone through many incarnations. It began this past summer in west texas and grew a bit this past January in Winnipeg. Now it’s grown again. I’m still unsure about a title. For now it’s just called ‘Trio’. Stark, I know, but nothing else seems right. I’m really excited to have three fantastic players from the school of music taking on the piece. Marjolaine Lambert, Neena Deb Sen and John Corkill are all monster musicians and I can’t wait to hear them play the piece.
Come out to Sprague Hall at 8 PM on April, 1 to hear it. Other composers on the program include Adams, Akiho, Johnson, and Kuenn.
