• "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 creates works that connect past and present in attractive and unexpected ways, provoking Gramophone to exclaim, “Each score is an arresting and appealing creation, full of fanciful and lyrical flourishes within traditional forms that are brightly tweaked." His music is characterized by a keen sensitivity to color, a mastery of form, and what the Louisville Courier-Journal has called a "compelling, innate soulfulness." Despite losing 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 immediately 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.

    Dillon's music, in the words of American Record Guide, is "lovely...austere...vivid and impressive." Three recordings of his music were released in 2010-2011 on the Bridge, Albany and Naxos labels. His works have been commissioned and premiered in the last four seasons by the Emerson String Quartet, Le Train Bleu, the Ravinia Festival, the Daedalus String Quartet, the Lincoln Trio, the Seattle Chamber Music Society, the Cassatt String Quartet, the Mansfield Symphony, the Boise Philharmonic, Wintergreen Summer Arts Festival, the Salt Lake City Symphony, the Quartetto di Sassofoni d’Accademia, the University of Utah and the Idyllwild Symphony Orchestra.

    In October 2010, Bridge Records released “Insects and Paper Airplanes,” a disk of Dillon’s chamber music featuring the Daedalus String Quartet and pianist Benjamin Hochman. Gramophone called it "highly recommended," saying, "Just when you thought the string quartet may have reached the edge of sonic possibilities, along comes a composer who makes something novel, whimsical and haunting of the genre."

    Dillon’s recording “Appendage and Other Stories” made Fanfare Magazine’s 2010 Want List. Raymond Tuttle wrote of it, "This is a terrific work. In fact, it is so good it made me weep. And Dillon, with his vivid imagination and his ear for vocal and instrumental color, seems to be a terrific composer.”

    In April 2011, Naxos released “Violin Music of Lawrence Dillon” featuring Sphinx Grand Prizewinner Danielle Belén. MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL described it as "an hour of music that is often profound without being pretentious, sometimes light-hearted but never 'lite', humorous without being arch, and immensely appealing but never frivolous."

    Lawrence Dillon is represented by Jeffrey James Arts Consulting.

  • Meta

    Entries (RSS)
« 
 »
Jun 07 2009

how fast is it?

Posted by Lawrence Dillon in Uncategorized
Happy to be home again, as always. I love traveling, but one of the best parts is getting back home, getting back to the familiar routines, the comfortable environs, and most of all the people who still love me even when I am a pain in the ass.
At this point, having participated in a bunch of professional recording sessions, I’m feeling like an old veteran. I’ve learned a thing or two about the process, and what better purpose could this blog serve than to share what I’ve learned? So here is my cardinal rule for composers in recording sessions:

Take responsibility for the tempos.

I’ve always liked to believe that there is a generous bandwidth of tempos in which my music can communicate successfully. That may or may not be true, but there are few things more annoying than ending up with a recording that sounds a hair too fast or a hair too slow. Don’t let them play more than two notes in the recording session at the wrong tempo — stop them immediately – because a take in the wrong tempo is unusable, regardless of how beautiful it may be in every other way. Conversely, if a take is in the right tempo, even if it has other problems, the recording engineer may be able to use some of it.

And that reminds me of the most excruciating performance of a piece of mine I’ve ever experienced – or almost experienced. I was a guest at a new music festival put on at a well-regarded university I had never been to before. I arrived for the dress rehearsal, which took place immediately before the performance. As I walked through the backstage area, I could hear the musicians rehearsing, but because of the labyrinthic design of the school I couldn’t find them.

They were playing my piece at exactly half tempo.

In a frenzied state, I ran up and down the hallways, opening every door, trying to figure out where they were. Then I heard them stop. The performance began a few minutes later.

I couldn’t bring myself to go into the concert hall. I left the building as quickly as I could, headed to the closest bar and got myself good and drunk.

What did I learn? At half tempo, not only is every moment in the piece in the wrong place — every wrong note lasts twice as long.

But that was a long time ago. Back to more pleasant, recent experiences.

This past week’s recording sessions reminded me that composers and performers listen differently, and though I’ve done a fair amount of performing, I definitely don’t listen the way a real performer does. I’m pretty good at spending hours imagining sounds, imagining note combinations, twisting and turning them in different directions. But I don’t have nearly the stamina for listening to actual music that performers have. By the end of an eight-hour recording session, I’m pretty numb, but the performers are still listening critically, still trying to get every note in tune and in place, even though they’ve been working much harder than I have.
One more reminder of how grateful I am that there are people who have different interests and skill sets from mine.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 7th, 2009 at 6:29 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a Reply