Laurel Black Music

Premiering Reef , by Jason Haney, at the Contemporary Music Festival This fall has been a completely new adventure.  Not necessarily the events within it, but managing them while going through the 2nd and 3rd trimesters of pregnancy.  In most cases, it posed no extra challenges, but in others...phew!...more on that in a different post!  L+M Duo In addition to my teaching at JMU, L+M Duo had an active start to its second season, featuring a premiere at JMU's Contemporary Music Festival (CMF), a new program at Virginia Tech University, and a residency at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where we workshopped and recorded 8 student compositions.   I also performed Christos Hatzis' Fertility Rites  at CMF, a piece I booked long before having any inclination I'd be almost 8 months pregnant during the performance.  At this time I could still maneuver behind a marimba pretty well! I also presented a masterclass at Virginia...

Though it may seem that this post is about testing you on your professional music acronyms, I promise that's not the case.  Laurel's been a busy bee since school let out in early May. New Music Gathering 2017 New Music Gathering (NMG) is a pretty cool 3-day conference for anyone who participates in new music.  From May 11-13 we all gathered at Bowling Green State University to talk about, listen to, and dream about new projects together.  You can view this year's lecture, presentation, panel, and recital schedule here .  It was really cool - and not just because Steven Schick was the keynote speaker and featured guest artist.  L+M Duo performed during a concert on Saturday afternoon called Grab Bag of Awesome, featuring us as well as other chamber groups performing all kinds of music.  We played our first-ever commission, Magicicicada , by Pennsylvania-based composer Rusty Banks .  Though Marianne met Rusty before (actually at NMG 2016...

Thumbs. Without them who knows how we'd play our instruments. Interest in the relationship between the hand, wrist, and thumb began a few years ago when I took piano lessons to refine my technique. (As similar as piano and percussion are in theory , there's much less crossover than I mistakenly thought and hoped.)   Anyway, something my mentor said was when the thumb isn't being used it should relax towards the rest of the hand and fingers.  Sure, may sound obvious, but in the throes of playing - piano or percussion - it's easy to forget little things like this.  Brain: Play a broken 13 over 7, across 6 surfaces...crescendo...oh, right. THUMB. End Scene Thumbs that are mis-mapped, working more than they should, or working when they don't need to contribute to funny aches, pains, and numbness that can get mistaken for carpal tunnel.   Just like all other subjects in the Marimba Body series, how we relate to the structure and movement desi...

This last fall was one of busyness and development. There are lots of exciting things to announce, like: I'm now on faculty at James Madison University! I've established a new chamber group: L+M Duo with Chicago-based pianist Marianne Parker I was accepted to the PAS Health and Wellness committee The  @ percussion podcast is alive and well, recording episode 77 this week! JMU Being asked to join the faculty at JMU was certainly a highlight of the last few months. It's great to be at a university again, teaching with husband, and resume working with passionate, talented colleagues.  It has been great to teach percussion again, share my 'healthy playing' research findings, and occasionally exercise empathic skills in those "talking lessons" which more resemble life coachings than music lessons. I also taught a Percussion Methods class for the first time. I learned a lot: things I'd do differently, things I'd incorporate, things I...

It's been a busy first half of the month so far. Though summer isn't technically upon us, there's something about the month of June that makes it a month for personal projects. Perhaps it's because my entire life has been attached to an academic calendar, or perhaps it's because it's a month where there's typically more nice than dreary weather - either way, the first half of this selfish month has been a total joy. New Article It's been out for a little while, but you can read "Developing Kinesthetic Awareness: A Guide to Mindset, Explorations, and Wrists - Part 2" in this month's Rhythm! Scene .  Find it on page 14! TAPS East Coast By now there's evidence on social media that TAPS East Coast was a blast, both as a human and as a musician.  Held at the New England Music Camp (NEMC) at Snow Pond, the setting was nothing short of breathtaking.  The faculty were housed in cabins, the students in the new dorm, and our acti...

Next week on @ percussion we will chat all about competitions.  For episode 6 we invited Liz Galvan and Matt Penland in on the discussion, as they have "successful" competitions under their belts and, naturally, had different experiences. This session is well-timed - we recorded a few weeks ago - as it was right when I was in the midst of trying to figure out how to articulate whirling thoughts about competition, and more specifically, judgment.  We had great thought-provoking discussion, and decided, after an hour of talking, that judging is hard . Posts 1 and 2 of this Judgment series center on why that may be true, especially when our amazing brains work against us, shortcutting to biased pathways and rushed, incomplete opinions.  But what happens to our domain of classical percussion as a result of competition and the difficulties of judgment? From a practical point of view, judgment in music allows us to select the best players for orchestras, scholarships, o...