Mendel’s Newsletter #9 (Oct 26)
Last month I teased some big news about some upcoming personal projects. Well, since that newsletter, there’s one other big piece of news that I’m excited (and a little baffled) to share.
Before I get into it though, a quick housekeeping note: I’ve migrated my newsletter away from Mailchimp to MailPoet. This solves a problem I was having where Mailchimp’s content ecosystem was pretty closed off – aside from the direct email delivery, my newsletters existed on an obscure Mailchimp URL outside of my website. I tried numerous ways to migrate that content into my website, but none of them worked in a way that wouldn’t have required a lot of extra work.
Mailpoet is a WordPress plugin that allows me to take posts I write directly on my WP-based website to email subscribers. That means that the newsletters natively live on my own site in an ecosystem for which I have more ownership and more control. There are also some Mailpoet features that I plan to implement in the future that will offer up more flexibility to my wonderful subscribers.
There may be some translation problems between how these newsletters look on my website versus how they are delivered to your inbox – if you notice anything that seems off in content or formatting, please feel free to reach out to me.
Enough of that! Here’s the exciting things happening!
Missing Piece is world-premiering my new work in December!
Over the summer, Missing Piece commissioned me to write them a new work. As of early October, i have given that work a double-bar, and they’re going to premiere it in Chicago with their colleague and new music violist extraordinaire Michael Hall this December. They’re also giving it another performance in New Orleans in March of 2027 with Sixto Franco, the Versipel Collective violist who is also my colleague and friend.
The piece, An insistence For Something Greater, has some creative parallels to my percussion quartet The Spaces Between – towards the end of my deadline for giving Missing Piece the final score, I was struggling with the material that I had been writing for them – music that I was and am still fond of, but the deadline pressure was paralyzing my ability to work out the structure of what I was trying to do with the piece. As a result, like what I did with The Spaces Between, I ended up tossing it on a mental “For Later” shelf, started completely over, and wrote a new piece from scratch in a furious 3-4 day period from a more intuitive compositional place.
I’m really happy with how it turned out – it definitely has the fingerprints of my strongest creative influences in it between my love of drumline-like interlocking rhythmic systems/grooves and the instincts I have for harmonic richness that comes from both my favorite minimalist composers and electronica artists, as well as the kind of harmonic writing I did with my marching band arrangements. I’m excited for Dan, Kelly, and Michael to bring the piece to life for the first time. If you happen to be in the Chicago area, please come to the show and say hello. The concert is on December 6th, at Dan and Kelly’s community space, the Bridgeport Music Collective, located in Chicago.
For your GRAMMY® Consideration!
Speaking of The Spaces Between, I’m stoked to announce that the New Focus Recordings album that it was released on this past year, the Portland Percussion Group’s Patterns and Form, is up for a GRAMMY® consideration in Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance! It continues to amaze me how much the work is still spreading its wings and reaching more people. If you have not already seen the excellently produced music video for the piece, I encourage you to watch it. I remain, as always, humbled and grateful for the Portland Percussion Group’s advocacy for the work that has brought it this far, and I also offer thanks to New Focus Recordings for putting the album up for consideration.
Be sure to spread the word! You can buy/stream the album in all of the normal places and support them and all of the composers featured on the album. A huge congratulations to them for reaching such an important milestone, and I look forward to what comes next for them.
A Full Evening of my music in New Hampshire
Finally, I’ve been given the unique opportunity to be the featured composer for the “Flick Gig” series at Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, NH! This is thanks to my very good friend and former roommate/coworker/music partner in crime Mark Lighthiser who has consistently been an advocate for my creative practice throughout our friendship. The concert will be a Mendel Music extravaganza, featuring both acoustic and fixed media works that I’ve written over the past five or so years, and maybe a new work that I write specifically for the show. We’ll see if I have time between now and then to pull it off.
I have to say that I’m really grateful to Mark for giving me the platform to do this. It is incredibly rare for composers to have a whole concert devoted to entirely their music, and I intend to take full advantage of the opportunity. This will be the first time that I get to showcase my music in the New England area, and I’m excited to get some great performances and hopefully make some lasting connections in the new music community up there.
All of this honestly leaves me a little speechless. I’ve written before about how I don’t seriously set long-term goals, and my general ‘heads-down-and-do-the-work’ mentality doesn’t afford me a lot of space to assess or reflect on career milestones.
Truth be told, this newsletter is one of the things that forces me to step back and realize the significance of news like this in ways that sharing via social media never did. That deserves its own newsletter or blog entry, but the TL;DR is that prioritizing a (mostly) regularly cadenced newsletter to a dedicated listserv makes for a more genuine self-acknowledgement of my milestones.
For that, I give thanks to my direct subscribers. Even if you don’t read every detail, even if there are newsletters that you don’t open at all, this format gives me the platform to express myself in a way that is truly myself and at a depth that socials no longer has. It’s been an interesting addendum to my creative journey, and I look forward to what I deliver to you – and to myself – in the future.
As always, a majority of the work that I’m doing for myself and for the organizations I am a part of could always use more direct support. If you want to help me pay the bills and continue what I’m doing:
Donate to me directly:
Donate to Versipel New Music:
That's all for now! Thanks so much for being here, and until next month, happy new music making!