Jay C. Batzner (b. 1974) is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida where he teaches music composition and technology courses as well as coordinates the composition program. In his first year, Jay received two prestigious grants: one to create collaborative works with visual artist Carla Poindexter and the second to initiate electroacoustic music concerts in Orlando. Prior to this position, Jay was an active adjunct professor at several colleges in the Kansas City area while he completed his D.M.A. in Composition at the University of Missouri – Kansas City Conservatory. While at UMKC, Jay received honors including a Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship and a Dean's Doctoral Scholar Fellowship.
Jay's music ranges from instrumental chamber works to electroacoustic compositions. He has participated in numerous national and international festivals including the Wellesley Composers Conference and the International Young Composers' Meeting in the Netherlands. His music is published by Unsafe Bull Music and has been recorded on the Capstone and Vox Novus labels. Jay is a frequent contributor to the new music website Sequenza21.com and a founding member of the composers organization The Collected.
Jay is a sci-fi geek, an amateur banjoist, a home brewer, and juggler.
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8/07/2007
Programming
I'm the programming director for Electronic Music Midwest and I am currently putting together all of the concerts for this coming October's festivities. In some ways, the job is easy. I rip every accepted entry into iTunes, make a playlist for each concert, and keep the total music per concert at just under/around an hour. In many other ways, it is tough. Some pieces are made and broken by the pieces around them. Stage logistics dictate as much about what pieces can go together as artistic reasoning does.
Where should I put MY piece?
My strategy has always revolved around initial responses to the pieces. I pick a piece and say "Yes, this HAS to open our final concert, it rules!" or "This thing needs to be the centerpiece or focal piece of a concert." Then I try to put some variety and continuity around it all. My goal is to maximize variety and make continuity as subtle as it can be. For example, we had a LOT of pieces for cello and tape/electronics accepted. I could put them all on one concert to contrast the different writings, but it would be a logistical nightmare (individual setups for each performer) and after a while we might all get sick of cello and electronics music. I've scattered them out and hooked them thematically into other pieces. One work for live player comes late in a concert where a tape piece uses recorded cello sounds. One work with "Fishing" in the title is a bookend to a video piece with intense underwater imagery.
I haven't finalized everything yet, there are still details to consider, but this is the strategy that I have. It worked last year, anyway. I hope to never be "cutesy" in my thematic selections but just interesting enough to me that all the pieces make sense as a unit.
Come October, we'll see.
posted by Jay C. Batzner
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