Awesome program of contemporary and baroque music with all-star friends the Sebastians. For this program we crafted a journey through time, interweaving baroque music from the stylus fantasticus—the new music of the seventeenth century—with new music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Saturday, October 8, 5pm
Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church
152 West 66th St

$50/$30/$20/Free for students

TICKETS (also possible to receive a special digital only version…)

Thrilled to present my first recital at ASU Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts next Tuesday at 5pm AZ time, featuring the music from my recently released album "Unsnared Drum," out now on New Focus Recordings.

Excited to share some phenomenal music from Tonia Ko, A.B. Kirsten, Nina C. Young and Hannah Lash live and in-person!

Free for ASU students, faculty, and staff, and be in touch if you need tickets. For those who can't attend in person, this event will be live streamed.

School of Music, Dance and Theatre events are subject to current ASU COVID-19 polices.  Please check this event listing updates. 

$15/10 FREE for students
Register here

Join us for a pre-release celebration of Unsnared Drum, coming out August 20th on New Focus Recordings. 

This solo snare drum album is the result of long-term collaboration with four amazing composers: Nina C. Young, Hannah Lash, Amy Beth Kirsten, and Tonia Ko. 

We’re excited to celebrate these musical friendships and take a closer look at our journey to reinvent the much-maligned snare drum.

Michael will perform the music on the album (the pieces’ NY premiere), joined for some special surprises by percussionist Mike Truesdell.

We will have Physical and Digital copies available for sale.

Doors open at 4:30 with music at 5, followed by a reception. 

FREE, but registration is recommended due to capacity limits.  Pre-order a copy with your event registration!

It’s been really exciting to see how Andy Bliss, Kerry O’Brien, and everyone at Nief-Norf have developed this organization into a major player in contemporary music. This weekend is their 10th anniversary, and I’m stoked to be featured on their mega marathon, with a new video of Tonia Ko’s Negative Magic, written for my Unsnared Drum project.

Check out the Nief-Norf website for the full marathon lineup!

Thrilled to take DWB (Driving While Black) to NYC for 3 days of performances at Baruch College. Written by Susan Kander with libretto by Roberta Gumbel, this piece depicts the story of a single mother teaching her child to drive in a country where it can be a deadly experience.

Here’s a piece about a community discussion at which we performed DWB last January, as well as an article about the performance

Tickets

Thrilled to take DWB (Driving While Black) to NYC for 3 days of performances at Baruch College. Written by Susan Kander with libretto by Roberta Gumbel, this piece depicts the story of a single mother teaching her child to drive in a country where it can be a deadly experience.

Here’s a piece about a community discussion at which we performed DWB last January, as well as an article about the performance

Tickets

Thrilled to take DWB (Driving While Black) to NYC for 3 days of performances at Baruch College. Written by Susan Kander with libretto by Roberta Gumbel, this piece depicts the story of a single mother teaching her child to drive in a country where it can be a deadly experience.

Here’s a piece about a community discussion at which we performed DWB last January, as well as an article about the performance

Tickets

Unique program at Susan Ellinger’s awesome Blue Sage series, featuring George Lam’s The Emigrants, Florent Ghys’ new November Foxtrot, and Robert Honstein’s Unwind. Join us before and after the show for a talkback about immigration and how telling the stories of others can shine a light on unique experiences.

My first go-round with Chris Theofanidis’ concerto Drum Circles, for percussion quartet and orchestra. It’s an amazing piece, and I can’t wait to share it with CO.

My first go-round with Chris Theofanidis’ concerto Drum Circles, for percussion quartet and orchestra. It’s an amazing piece, and I can’t wait to share it with CO.

My first go-round with Chris Theofanidis’ concerto Drum Circles, for percussion quartet and orchestra. It’s an amazing piece, and I can’t wait to share it with CO.

We’re thrilled to reprise our partnership with the Lied Center for another show of exciting percussion music.

Here’s a video highlighting last year’s week with Andy Akiho:

This time, our special guest is Eriko Daimo, marimbist extraordinaire. We’ve got an amazing program which moves from classic Japanese music about the earth and our relationship to nature to the solar system and beyond. Miki’s Marimba Spiritual, Nishimura’s Matra, Takemitsu’s Rain Tree, Fujikura’s UTO, and Xenakis’s Peaux

FREE
Live stream available here

Psyched to be returning to Tucson for a hometown show at local mainstay The Loft. We’ll be setting up shop in the Loft’s new Theater 3 for a program of works for cello, percussion, and video. We’ll play the world premiere of Florent Ghys’ November Foxtrot, a whimsical new work inspired by morse code, the NATO alphabet, and more. We’re also bringing Christopher Stark’s The Language of Landscapes to Tucson, and dusting off Robert Honstein’s Down Down Baby.

Tickets: $15/10
Purchase Tickets Here

A pre-finals tradition for my studio at KU. See everyone dress for success and bring their percussive A-Game for a program of works by Xenakis, Cage, and more.

FREE

Composer Ben Justis has written an epic piece about the Voyager satellite and its historic mission for the KU Percussion Group. Inspired by NASA’s Voyager mission and recordings of music on the Golden Record, a time capsule placed onboard in the event the spacecraft are discovered in the future, this concert-length work for percussion octet invites new encounters with art and music and ways of understanding our cosmic neighborhood. We’re partnering with the Spencer Museum at KU to present the world premiere, which will feature video projections and spatialized sound.

FREE

Honored and humbled to have the opportunity to bring my Unsnared Drum project to PASIC, the world’s largest gathering of percussionists.

See you in room 109 for 50 minutes of snare drum, live electronics, and mallet changes.

I’ll be presenting all four of the pieces in my Unsnared Drum project on home turf. This has been a really special set of collaborations, and I’m excited to share music by Tonia Ko, Hannah Lash, Amy Beth Kirsten, and Nina C. Young with the Lawrence Community.

FREE, and live stream here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3DURRHzEtk

The Percussion Collective takes the University of Nebraska for our Reich/Neustadter program.

Really thrilled to be joining Kansas Public Radio for their 2nd annual Live Day, a barrage of performances broadcast live on the radio from my favorite building in Lawrence, the Public Library.

I’ll be playing Robert Honstein’s Lost and Found, Tonia Ko’s Negative Magic, and Nina Young’s Heart.throb. I’m honored to be in such amazing company, and excited the KPR is putting an hour of unsupervised time into my hands…

I’m on at 2pm CST. Listen live at kansaspublicradio.org, to a rebroadcast at 7pm, or online after the event.

Taking my Unsnared Drum pieces to Kramer Milan and the University of Northern Iowa. Excited to share music by Tonia Ko, Amy Kirsten, Hannah Lash, and Nina Young with Waterloo!

FREE

Back in New Haven for a great program with the Yale Schola Cantorum and David Hill: Mozart Requiem and some amazing Brahms choral works. A=438, and I’ll be rocking the period timpani for this all-star band.

FREE

I’m always humbled and honored to join The Percussion Collective, our Justice League percussion ensemble.

This performance will feature Garth Neustadter’s stunning Seaborne and Steve Reich’s Sextet.

Ticket info here

World premiere of Robert Honstein’s Lost and Found on a triple bill with superstars Amanda Gookin and Sam Suggs.

We set out to create a program that plays on the idea of things lost and discarded, but also on the collaborative spirit driving our process. The three of us (and Robert!) have worked together for years in many different contexts and we wanted to reflect our friendship in a diverse show.

Lost and Found (commissioned by a consortium of percussionists) is a collection of nostalgic pieces for prepared marimba (which we called the “janky marimba”). Robert and I have been working on this piece together for years and I’m really excited to share it with the world.

We’re pairing Lost and Found with selections from Sam Suggs’s EDM Caprices, an original suite for solo bass pairing unaccompanied Bach transcriptions with arrangements of EDM pieces. The caprices, drawing on the dance-inspired origins of its subjects, sheds new light on both the Bach and EDM tunes through Suggs’s ingenious transcriptions and exhilarating performance. Cellist Amanda Gookin offers two selections from her provocative Forward Music Project: Stolen by Allison Loggins-Hull and Seething by Shelley Washington. Exploring the journey of a young girl who is sold into marriage, Loggins-Hull’s Stolen reflects on the theme of being lost or discarded on a deeply human level, while Seething by Shelley Washington viscerally brings to life suppressed feelings of anger and rage. Finally, Gookin and Suggs join forces to present works for cello and bass, including a new work based on musical fragments from Honstein’s Lost and Found.

It’s going to be great!

Details and ticket purchasing

NMC teams up with Sunflower Outdoor and Bike Shop,  Final Fridays and Humanities in the Wild. We'll be playing and chatting about Christopher Stark’s  "The Language of Landscapes," which was commissioned with the help of a Chamber Music America grant and explores the intersection of the natural and artificial worlds around us.  

Performances begin at 6:15 and 7:15, and we will have  complementary  beer from Free State Brewing Co. to inspire the conversation.

Humanities in the Wild is an official part of Final Fridays. It’s sponsored by the Hall Center for the Humanities, Sunflower Outdoor & Bike, Unmistakably Lawrence, and nearly 10 different KU departments/units.