"There are no two points so distant from one another that they cannot be connected by a single straight line -- and an infinite number of curves."
Composer Lawrence Dillon has produced an extensive body of work, from brief solo pieces to a full-length opera. Three disks of his music are due out in 2010 on the Bridge, Albany and Naxos labels. In the past year, he has had commissions from the Emerson String Quartet, the Cassatt String Quartet, the Mansfield Symphony, the Boise Philharmonic, the Salt Lake City Symphony, the Ravinia Festival, the Daedalus String Quartet, the Kenan Institute for the Arts, the University of Utah and the Idyllwild Symphony Orchestra.
Although he lost 50% of his hearing in a childhood illness, Dillon began composing as soon as he started piano lessons at the age of seven. In 1985, he became the youngest composer to earn a doctorate at The Juilliard School, and was shortly thereafter appointed to the Juilliard faculty. Dillon is now Composer in Residence at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where he has served as Music Director of the Contemporary Ensemble, Assistant Dean of Performance, and Interim Dean of the School of Music. He was the Featured American Composer in the February 2006 issue of Chamber Music magazine.
Spent a couple of hours at the Red Cross today, donating blood. I thought it would be pretty quick, but I was painfully mistaken. After digging around in my left arm for a few minutes, they finally found a vein. Just one problem: they couldn’t get it to cough up any blood. So they took a few jabs at my right arm, with similar results.
For two hours, I had four very gracious and increasingly frustrated Red Cross nurses hovering over me with needles and tubes, trying desperately to squeeze the life out of me.
I know some people who refuse to believe that there are such things as living, flesh-and-blood composers, so I guess I was just doing my part to prove them right.
posted by Lawrence Dillon
5:21 PM