In April 2024, I received a grant from the South Carolina Arts Commission to help an ongoing project with my new music ensemble, What Is Noise. This grant will allow us to record our next album and seek out label backing. We plan to hit the studio this May, stay tuned!
‘This project is funded in part by the South Carolina Arts Commission which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts and is also funded in part by a generous award from the John and Susan Bennett Memorial Arts Fund of The Coastal Community Foundation of South Carolina.’
It has been a crazy two years for all of us, and this semester was no exception! I found out this April that I was lucky enough to be awarded a significant grant from Furman University, The Furman Standard. This grant is built around the Furman Advantage which is designed to give every student a meaningful, high-impact experience during their time here. This grant will fund a three-year long project with What Is Noise, and include three of our Furman Music students. We will be bringing on two interns to help with the running of the administrative aspects of the organization and will be commissioning a work by one of our composition majors.
I am very excited to have joined the faculty at Furman University! Check out our page and join us in beautiful Greenville, SC for some music making fun!
Catch us on WLRH Public Radio!
Last spring, I contacted two wonderful colleagues with a crazy idea. I wanted to create a piece for clarinet and orchestra that we could turn into a thought-provoking residency. Lucky for me, my friends tend to go along with my crazy ideas and the result was a work more moving and empowering than I could have imagined.
This April I had the pleasure of performing Joshua Burel’s Let This Darkness be a Bell Tower with the University of Alabama-Huntsville Symphony Orchestra. Radio host Dorrie Nutt at WLRH had us over for an interview and concert teaser!
Meraki has been selected as a recipient of Chamber Music America's 2018 Classical Commissioning Program. We have been working on this for quite some time and are ecstatic that we will be able to see this meaningful piece come to fruition!
Jerod Tate is a composer whose work we strongly admire and who we have established a meaningful relationship with. As of yet there is no repertoire for clarinet and piano duo based on American Indian folk sounds. This is a genre and culture that deserves to have their voices heard, and we hope to provide that through this collaboration.
*This commission has been made possible by the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Chamber Music America Endowment Fund.*
In 2015, thanks to generous funding from the Presser Foundation, I was able to visit the beautiful and hospitable country of Armenia. The people welcomed you as if you were their own, everyone eager to share their culture and yours. The food was cooked with heartfelt intent. And the music... the music, new and old, was treated with a sense of respect and admiration that I have rarely seen.
I was awarded a Research and Professional Growth grant from Furman University which funded the recording of Meraki’s debut album! The album, to be released later in 2022 features music commissioned by myself and my duo partner Elizabeth Hill. The pieces on the album include Be Still My Child, by Anthony R. Green, No Progress Without Loss, every new beginning… by Jaime Wind Whitmarsh, and Heloha Okchamali by Jerod Tate. We worked with recording artist Martin Aigner, and were lucky enough to be able to include a few Furman Music Students on the album.
I am thankful to live in a county that supports the arts as much as it does. This summer I was awarded an Artists and Scholars grant from Montgomery County. This grant will allow me to bring in my colleagues from What Is Noise to present an educational residency program at Albert Einstein High School in Kensington, MD. This collaboration with Instrumental Music Director Mr. Brendan Kelly has developed throughout the past few years. The program, entitled “Music: A Home Away From Home,” will feature works written by living composers that are representative of their homeland. Many of us have transplanted to new places and find that our ‘home’ is always a part of us, even as we establish ourselves somewhere new. At the same time, a new place can become home. The pieces we have selected for this program present that dichotomy through music.
From December to January I was the artist in Residence at Gettysburg National Military Park, which is hosted by the National Parks Arts Foundation. For the past few years, I have been working heavily with music from different cultures and lately have been experimenting with all the music that could be considered influenced by American culture. My time at Gettysburg, offered a moment of reflection where I could think about all that this country has endured for the sake of progress.
What Is Noise is absolutely thrilled to have signed with Centaur Records for the production of our debut album, Equivocal Duration. We recorded the album in Kalamazoo, MI with Gordon van Gent and the Overneath Collective. My sister Krissy Christofakis, a brilliant, creative mind, who is a visual artist disguising as an art therapist during the day, has created artwork based on each of the pieces! The album was officially released on March 1st, 2019.