Well, now that the cat’s out of the bag, I suppose I should share that I’ll have two performances of my music at this year’s Midwest Clinic!!!

The Mountain Ridge HS Saxophone Quartet will be performing Polar Vortex on Wednesday at 1:30 and the Cedar Ridge HS Saxophone Choir will be performing Volcanic Ash on Thursday at 2:45 (different ridges, I assume ). I’m incredibly grateful to Aaron Vogel, Arminda M Velasquez, and all of these amazing high school students for choosing to program my works for this special occasion!

I’m sure I’ve told this story before, but one of my first inspirations to write for saxophone came from seeing the New Japan Saxophone Quartet perform at my first Midwest Clinic in 2013. I tweeted a very nerdy tweet about wanting to write a ton of music for sax quartet right after the performance and promptly started writing a humble piece called Snowfall when I got home, which later was expanded to a three movement suite called Polar Vortex (and then reduced back to a two movement piece).

It feels so fulfilling and like such a full circle moment to return to the conference 8 years later with both featured saxophone ensembles performing my music. I was already eager to attend Midwest this year after its cancellation last year, but this is an amazing cherry on top!

I can’t wait to leave the conference feeling inspired to write way too much for one particular instrument – who knows which one it’ll be this time??