I hope you’re having a safe and happy holiday season. As another challenging year comes to a close, I have to review 2021 with you, a year that saw huge artistic growth for CutTime Productions, even though our ensembles barely performed. Instead we created valuable, new artistic products (assets), increased our publication sales, benefited from federal stimulus and a labor shortage in local orchestras. In some ways it was our best year since 2015.

It began with a request from Orpheus Chamber Orchestra for a string orchestra “arrangement” of Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross. (I believe this video is only available until New Year’s.) They accepted my suggestion to include oboe and horn parts to keep the Sephardic character. Obviously, it was a strong performance, yet surprising with theologian Dr. Keri L. Day interpreting each phrase in the wake of martyr George Floyd.

Next, CutTime Simfonica® played a Facebook streamed set to accompany Detroit artist Timothy Orikri (pictured above). This was the perfect warm-up to tape six video tracks for ProMusica of Detroit, creating our best hi-def videos so far. They can be watched without interview here (30-minutes), and with the interspersed interview here (76).

Last summer we had several more publication sales and orchestra rentals. A few orchestras are taking advantage of my CutTime Players reductions of famous symphonic works during socially-distanced concerts. And my funky orchestration of Pork ‘n Beans (played by National Repertory Orchestra in July) helped to grow new audiences, showing that classical music is not always erudite.

I received vaccinations in April and began subbing a few small orchestras last summer. There has been such a worker shortage that by August I was able to leave the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance. What a lifesaver PUA was. I finally have a new suit! Good thing I kept my weight down.

In mid-September I began subbing back into the Detroit Symphony. Naturally, it’s refreshing now to return to where CutTime was born, and play relevant repertoire like the William Dawson “Negro Folk” Symphony led by beloved former DSO Assistant Conductor Thomas Wilkins. He premiered my first Essay, so I shared with him the score for Essay No. 2, finished this year.

CutTime shows are still stuck, given the limitations of the smaller presenters that tend to hire us. We are waiting, but we keep Zooming to meetings, conferences, emailing introductions, thinking about new methods and hooks for audience engagement that have not really been tried. And we have been literally dreaming up sticky new music to express both the strange times we are living in and a romance in the past!

More great news is that CutTime Productions won a Creators of Culture grant of $3,125 from CultureSource! This funding is for a rehearsed new program on our Classical Revolution Detroit series, experimenting specifically for new visuals to make classical music immediate, knowable and essential for people who avoid formal classical concerts, but in a club setting. The grant will specifically let us develop several styles of visual enhancements via digital projectors. At least one performance will be scheduled for spring 2022: more with donations, sponsorship and invitations.

Artistically, CutTime improved its craft and library fourfold, to promote healthy grieving and adjustment thru new music. As usual, I found my best musical ideas surfaced early into, or coming out of a nap! (There was so much time to kill). I could consciously pick up from there, but these key initial phrases were truly gifts to us all! They were the seeds from which blossomed some "sticky phrases." This has been my best period of composing since the Gitcha Groove On! album (08-09). I’m very excited about each one, esp. to see if the newly-named New American Elegy (NAE) series can have the healing effect I’m hoping for. Below are links for you to listen (mostly MIDI) and hopefully agree. Epic classical is much like the blues that help us feel some empathy.

Two weeks ago was the 9^th anniversary of the Sandy Hook school shooting, a preventable tragedy that crossed a red line. It sparked a strong composition, Let The Children Play, Part I, that the quartet recorded remotely last year to test reactions. Improvements are now ready for a big premiere with the string sextet. And I have a dream to perform it in Newtown itself. Since it was begging for a sequel, I finished Part II last month, which is even better! (This is how I make lemonade.)

The Romance Indeed I composed for my beloved Bass Mom, Barbara Van Dusen is a charming work about flirting in college after a chance meeting in the library. We gave it a soft premiere at Barbara’s residence in May. Now she wants a recording badly and so do I.

But there will be six other pieces to record with strings too. The Funeral March, in particular, is a very American elegy, with ancient spirits called by drum and drone in commemoration. We then escape the intense grief mentally for pleasant and fun memories of the deceased. This alternates, like scenes in a movie, to bring forth our strange mix of feelings in the wake of shared tragedies such as the pandemic, extreme weather, mass shootings, global warming and Covid economic disruptions.

Percy’s Farewell fulfilled my promise to a man who passed in 2018. Dr. Percy Moore was a beloved department head of ecumenical studies at Wayne State University. He befriended me at a church concert in his last years to ask me for “a little piece someday with my name on it.” Starting as a dirge, the 2^nd theme introduces significant mystical, theological and existential phrases. There’s even some sass and humor he would’ve loved.

The largest work of this period, Essay No. 2 Never Forget, I composed directly to full orchestra. Having consulted on some technical issues, I only recently started sending out scores to orchestras with this MIDI recording. I have half a mind to start a new orchestra with this composition, and have the greatest aspiration for this work to take the layperson suffering from personal or collective grief to their own depths and heights; again, in the wake of such great tragedies worldwide.

Best of all, last week another flash of music hit me, and I couldn’t stop until I finished the Chaconne for Interesting Times. Since it doesn’t change key, I had a rough draft within a day. A chaconne is a Baroque form very much like the blues; a repeated chord progression with infinite possibilities for personal, emotional variations. Here I include some gospel phrasing and harmonizations. This must be the first work we perform and record as a sextet with a ceremonial drum.

You can hear all 90-minutes of my new music in MIDI here. In all of my compositions, the collective wisdom of our shared musical legacies, both classical and otherwise, are woven in. Imitation is not only flattery, but it's where learning starts. This deep and broad well of shared and hidden meaning works without words, and yet is surely central to our senses of self, purpose, pleasure and community. People are grieving the loss of family, friends, homes, businesses and lifestyles. In a time of need, may music be a healing balm when we make recordings and concerts safely available after Omicron.

I know this has been a long read. There was so much exciting news I wanted to share with you, my biggest fans. It was the best of times during the worst, because music that might last for generations has been squeezed out of their hiding places by psychological pressure! I will leave these behind for the world thru CutTime, and history can judge it.

I will also have much to share with you about 2022, including two orchestral performances coming up and a shift in strategy for CutTime®. So be sure to check out the next newsletter in January/February, and maybe you can help push us over the hump to guarantee CutTime grows into the future, even after me.

Until then, please get your immunities up against Omicron with vitamins D3, C, K2, Zinc and vaccines. And please, tell me your hopes and suggestions for CutTime, be they positive or negative.

Happy New Year!