About a week ago (before I spent a week in bed from pneumonia), I flew to Normal, Illinois for a few days on campus at Illinois State University. My stay was a part of the National Band Association’s young composer/young conductor mentorship. The program is a lot of fun — basically, three young composers and three younger conductors are selected, teamed up with one another, and one of the conductors ends up rehearsing and conducting one of the composers’ pieces in concert. 
The campus at ISU was beautiful, not to mention the weather was about 30 degrees cooler than here in Phoenix. My conductor was Stephen Meyer, an associate band director from Harrison High School down in Georgia. 
Stephen was really effective on the podium and the Prairie Wind Ensemble was really respectful and responsive, especially for only having a total of 45 minutes rehearsal time to work on Shadow Rituals.
The group is actually made up of about 80% local band directors and 20% other members of the Normal community. They were amazing and were so happy to play new music by young composers — really one of the best community bands I’ve ever heard!
The concert went great — Stephen broke the ice opening with SR. I made a lot of new friends, too. The other two composers, Carl Holmquist and Subaram Raman, had two great pieces. Carl’s was Salaam!, an exotic piece with middle eastern flavors. Suby’s piece, Finale from “Cilappatikaram”, makes the concert band sound more like a symphony orchestra. Seriously, this guy’s got some mad orchestration skills!
All in all, it was so refreshing to be in the company of great people who are all passionate about new music.
Almost a year ago, I blogged about one of Kevin’s shoots for a music video for the band “Audra.” A little over a month ago, we finished the shoot, and since then, Kevin and I have diligently been editing. We finally finished the cut last weekend and the band is in the process of planning some kind of a release party. When they decide to release it online, I’ll probably link it here for sure. It’s really high quality stuff — like, MTV quality (though that’s not too high of a standard these days).
