Hi!
It has been a minute (a three-year long minute) since I’ve posted anything detailed on my site. Allow me to fill you in on what’s been going on with my music:
End of 2019
My first opera, Mirror Game, premiered at Portland State University! The team, from the director to the performers, did a wonderful job bringing the piece to life. I hope to find the opportunity to tweak and workshop the piece a little more in the future (we’ll see). A link to PSU’s fantastic performance can be found on my site’s page about Mirror Game, linked here.
Midas, my piece for sextet, premiered in collaboration with the Kaufman School of Dance at USC. The video to the performance is linked here - Important to note: due to some agreements, the recording itself is overdubbed and isn’t by the actual group playing in the video.
2020
Hey look! It’s me next to Alan Pierson, kinda. (2021)
Sploopy, written for Alarm Will Sound (a dream come true! Ahhhh!), had a reading session in concordance with my composer residency at Mizzou International Composer’s Festival (June 2020). The pandemic made everything go online, but it didn’t keep the composers from getting to work briefly with the ensemble! (More in 2021.)
HOCKET joined the meeting, a cute 45-second tidbit duet for toy piano and grand piano, was commissioned and released along with pieces by 49 other composers for the HOCKET duo’s album #What2020SoundsLike
I also orchestrated and composed for a huge international project with accomplished musician and music producer Jae Deal at the helm. A lot of creative hitches are keeping it from getting released; here’s hoping we see something in 2022.
2021
After years of being a finalist, I received an honorable mention for ASCAP’s Morton Gould Young Composer’s Award with Sploopy.
Bantam Winds was commissioned premiered by my dear friend Dr. Erin Cameron’s group, the Bantam Winds. The performance can be found here. Erin is a CLARINET BEAST which is cool since she and I go all the way back to high school.
Dr. Erin Cameron and (almost Dr.) Celka Ojakangas dress up as Steely Dan in 2008. I’ll take this down if Dr. Cameron tells me to. This is a very important and historical picture.
The return of Sploopy: I returned to the Mizzou International Composer’s Festival for 2021. Once again, it was online, but this time there was a recorded performance of Sploopy, which should be released in June/July 2022.
2022
Chance of Showers and Parade were both commissioned and premiered by the Raleigh Symphony Orchestra for their March 2022 concert (postponed from 2020 AND 2021.) I appreciated the opportunity to work with an orchestra again. A thanks goes out to conductor Dr. Jim Waddelow for commissioning me!
Scribbles was commissioned and premiered in May as part of trumpet virtuoso and friend Kenken Gorder’s upcoming album, NüToots. The piece is for double bass (Will Yager), soprano sax (Sarah Hetrick), trumpet, and animation that I made myself! I am pleased to have managed to get a dinosaur onstage somehow in one of my pieces. (No really, see the photo below.) A clip of the performance can be found here.
Scribbles (2022) is a piece that plays with microtonal tuning and a dinosaur chasing a stick man, among other things.
I played viola in and wrote a piece for the 2022 Blackhouse New Music Workshop. A video recording of my piece “I didn’t do anything wrong” can be found here.
I also made a goofy video earlier this year that counted as my DMA recital (I’m all but dissertation now!) - it plays through some of my works from 2019 to 2022 in case you’re curious:
That’s all for now! More good news and posts soon.
Best,
Celka Ojakangas