"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.
For anyone who is curious about releasing a recording on a major label, here is the timeline for my violin disk on Naxos:
Four days of recording sessions: February 2009
Editing and mixing completed: July 2009
Release: April 2011
That’s right – more than two years from recording sessions to release. And we were given just one week to submit our feedback on the edits.
When I asked about the delay, I found out it was because they have 680 recordings in the pipeline. Amazing how well they are able to do what they do, with such a backlog.
As I frequently tell my students, music is a sublime art form, but a preposterous profession.
