10 August 2024
Stockholm, Sweden

These last days in Europe, in cool, rainy Stockholm, really do feel like the end of the summer, too. Then there are the characteristically long summer evenings, the light suffusing pinks and lavenders and dull yellows like a painter mixing a watercolour palette. Stockholm isn’t a ‘business’ trip by any means but a celebration of two great friends both embarking on a new journey together that could not be more deserved or timely. In the past, the indulgence of travel without a specific self-serving purpose would produce a heavy anxiety in me, if such travel were even affordable or realistic in the first place; these days, in rather different times, it just makes me think about what one gains and what one misses being singularly focused on work, a trajectory, a ‘life’ but not perhaps a life fully lived.

Hong Kong is calling after an all-too-brief stop in the United States to see my beloved family- each precious day feels like one stolen from time, too, and increasingly so. Later this month, on a world premiere I unfortunately can’t attend, Quatuor Arod will play my String Quartet no. 2 (2024) written for them in Wissembourg, France, and the autumn should have a variety of things I’ve already mentioned far too often in the past- various performances of the String Quartet no. 2 in Europe, the European premiere of a completely new version of Vivacissimo (2023), the world premiere of Otherhood (2022) in Finland, and a screening and conference centered around Russia: Today (2020) in Oxford, UK. Throughout all this, I’ll be planning the German premiere of that piece in spring 2025 (it will be a busy one, as The Once and Future (2021) will also come to Europe for the first time!) perhaps alongside something in Asia, too.

I’m also looking forward to writing something new again, including getting an ambitious project that’s sort of fallen by the wayside back on track. The two weeks in Berlin helped clarify some further plans with regard to venues, collaborations, and funding. It will be an incredibly busy autumn but one in which I hope to create more time and use it more wisely than in the past, when so much energy had gone to fulfilling obligations that were never mine in the first place, or expecting something out of collaborations that ended up slightly less than fair. Case in point, the Vivacissimo that audiences will hear in Kunsthaus will be one fully under my creative control with a major visual artist and a Swiss dancer/choreographers. Let’s see what happens.