Wow. I think it’s finally hitting me. I didn’t quite realize it until I read this phrase in an email Bob Margolis, the director of MBM, recently sent me:

“Welcome to the Manhattan Beach Music family of composers!”

I’m still not sure how to react (though for those of you who have seen me, you know I’m absolutely thrilled!).

For the record, however, the version of Shadow Rituals I submitted to the competition is a simpler version than what ASU performed. I’m curious to know if MBM will let me change the version they want to publish or if they will just keep it as is since the ASU one is a grade 4 difficulty level. Certainly, people and other composers may not be happy if the grade 4 version is published for winning the grade 3 prize. But we’ll see what happens!

Well, I had a great big blog planned for Wednesday night but as soon as I heard the news, I had to push it back. So here it is now! Wednesday was such a great day for a number of reasons. For one, Linh and Loan and Loan’s friend and Loan’s friend’s guy-friend and Loan’s friend’s sister and I went for a day trip up north through Sedona to Flagstaff. It was great to play in the snow for a couple hours since Arizona hasn’t really had any all winter on account of us not having any rain for so long. Linh enjoyed it very much (isn’t she cute?!). Afterwords, we all had lunch at Oreganos before getting hot chocolate downtown. Loan made a snow angel. It was more of a snow asian, though. Lucky for her, her snow asian wasn’t made of yellow snow.
We also saw this huge mansion up in Sedona (is that a freaking observatory on top?!).
Speaking of observatories, my 7-disc DVD set of the old television show, Cosmos, came in the mail (along with a few new MBM scores).Many of you may not know this but before I realized that I liked music so much, I was a total Carl Sagan freak. I was reading his books in the 6th grade (though I had no idea what I was reading) and I even dressed up as him in our 6th grade wax museum (I’ll try and find a photograph). I’ve always had a passion for astronomy and if I didn’t dedicate the past several years to music, I’d probably be studying it. Not only is Carl’s Cosmos series informative, it’s really deep helping viewers to see the bigger picture of humanity and why we are here. He is definitely one of my heroes from childhood that I will never forget. In fact, he and Art Bell are the inspiration for one of my next major works for symphonic band. I’m really excited about it.

(A few universal quotes by Carl Sagan)