"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.
Check out the Santa Fe New Music Festival this Wednesday night – in addition to Piotr Szewczyk’s performance of ViolinFutura (coming soon to a planet near you), Piotr will be premiering my Fifteen Minutes, a set of 16 brief works I wrote for him under the mistaken impression that I was giving him what he asked for. As it turned out, I gave him everything except what he asked for. When I found out my error, I sent him Mister Blister by way of an apology. Mister Blister has become a fixture in the ViolinFutura show, and now Piotr has decided to take on the entire Fifteen Minutes set, which is quite wonderful of him, and ambitious, too – Fifteen Minutes is crazy virtuosic, and just plain crazy besides – there’s a movement with kazoo, there’s a rather rude use of a familiar Chopin tune, there’s a movement with a kitchen sink in it… well maybe that last is a slight exaggeration, but it's certainly one of the strangest pieces I've written. Anyway, Piotr emailed me an mp3 of the music for my feedback last week and I had just a few comments—it’s going to be a great performance. I’m very sorry to be missing it.
