Tortoiseshell Music Home of composer Nathan Curtis

It's been over two weeks since my last%20recital, and I still haven't written about it. I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, but that's because I've been so busy working on the next recital, which is zomg tomorrow. I'll tell you about the upcoming recital in a second, but first let me tell you about the last one. My recital on August 30th, which I named "Anarchist Nut," went quite well. In particular, the premiere of the Holy Tango Songbook was excellent, with guest performers Lorinne Lampert and Stephen Williams doing a great job singing and playing piano, respectively. Also, Francis Heaney gave a number of readings from his delightful Holy Tango of Literature, which may be worth the price of admission all by themselves. For my own part, I faltered a bit in the two older pieces on the recital -- I somehow managed to make mistakes I had never before made, not in several hours of practicing -- but held my own on the new works. Several people have told me that they couldn't hear the mistakes, which is understandable since they don't know what was supposed to happen at those points, but a little discomforting to me as a composer, because that means that the audience was reacting to something other than what I had written. Yes, that's a bit egotistical of me, especially for something so trifling as a couple of wrong notes out of however many pieces, but I am hardly the only egotistical composer in the world. I've been working on editing the recordings from the recital, and I hope to have them up for sale sometime next week. To whet your appetite, here are Lorinne and Stephen singing "Skinny Domicile" (after Emily Dickinson) from the Holy Tango Songbook. And, lest I forget, I want to give a hearty thank you Lorinne, Stephen, and Francis for their invaluable assistance in putting on this recital. So, now we come to my next recital, which is, as I mentioned before, tomorrow. This one is called "Musical Hydra," as I will be playing a lot of new music on a lot of instruments -- specifically, bass trombone, flute, and piano. In addition to my own works, I will be playing pieces by fellow Tufts graduates Beau Kenyon and Warren Weberg, as well as my advisor John McDonald. "Musical Hydra" will also be recorded, and I hope to get those recordings online sometime in the next two or three weeks. But why wait for the recording when you can come hear it yourself? Again, for more details please see the event listing.