Lawrence Dillon@Sequenza21.com

"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.


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Sunday, February 18, 2007
Off to the links

On Wednesday I’m off to Michigan for a festival of my music. Eastern Michigan University is mounting quite an impressive show, with three days of events. Students, faculty and guest artists will be performing six pieces of mine: Façade (1983), Dunigan Variations (1991), Furies and Muses (1997), Amadeus ex machina (2001), Big Brothers (2004) and Blown Away (2005). You can read all about the festival here.


I’m looking forward to meeting Anthony Iannacone, who organized this event. Every other year, he has one of these festivals, which they call MUSIC NOW. Students have been studying my scores, writing papers about my work, even contacting me with questions in advance of my visit. Again, it’s all very impressive.

The challenge for me will be the 45-minute convocation speech I’m supposed to give about my music. I work very hard on a daily basis to keep my enormous ego in check; the prospect of talking about myself for 45 minutes is a bit frightening. I’m not sure how I’ll ever stuff that cat back into the bag when it’s all over.

But for now, I have lots of links. Drew Traxler, about whom I wrote in my last post, has more silly Wright Flight cartoons on his page here. And Beau Roberts, one of the other actors in last weekend’s performance, has an interesting post mortem here. And there's a nice review of the piece in the Mansfield News Journal.


And the amazing Piotr Szewczyk, whose Violin Futura project I’ve chronicled before, premiered my Mister Blister last Monday along with several other works on a New World Symphony Forum Concert. The following day, he had them all posted on YouTube here. Congrats and thanks, Piotr – I’ll be giving you some feedback when I get back from Michigan and have a chance to give a close listen.


Meanwhile, I’ve got to get back to work on this convocation speech.