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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Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Foolery and Clubbed

Thursday night, Piotr Szewczyk will be playing my Mister Blister at the Spoleto Festival as part of his Violin Futura project. He’ll also play a selection from my Fifteen Minutes as an encore. Fifteen Minutes is a series of one-minute compositions loosely spun off the subject of fame. Here are the movements:
  • Grand Entrance
  • Distractions
  • Runaway
  • Jump Back
  • Sway
  • Memory
  • Contained
  • Foolery
  • Round
  • Gripped
  • Clubbed
  • Dissonance
  • Self Absorption
  • Carried Away
  • Listening
  • Minute March
Minute March is a take-off, literally, on Chopin’s Minute Waltz: I took one beat off of every measure to turn it from a ¾ waltz into a 2/4 march. It’s a cute stunt piece. The rest of the pieces are all bagatelles as well, although none come from pre-existent works.

Piotr tells me he is leaning toward playing either Foolery or Clubbed. I’m sorry I won’t be able to be there, but I’m nixing professional travel this summer in order to focus on bunch of creative projects, which I’m sure I’ll be blogging about as the hot months continue.

You can watch the entire Violin Futura performance on YouTube here. The other composers in this project are Mason Bates, Patrick Castillo, Carson Cooman, Moritz Eggert, Aaron Einbond, Mark Grey, Jeff Harrington, Daniel Kellogg, John Kennedy, Marc Mellits, Hiro Morozumi, Ethan Wickman, Nathan Williamson.