CURRENT PROJECTS

CD Release: Neil’s newest CD, Lockdown Fantasies, was released on Other Minds Recordings in January 2023. It features pianist Geoffrey Burleson performing the title piece, and pianist Kathleen Supové performing Journey’s End.

Better Than The Alternative, commissioned by the Pennsylvania based NakedEye Ensemble (piano, electric guitar, clarinet, cello, percussion), for performance in their 2025-26 season. This piece is a 30 minute musical performance which explores how we age.  It will include musical performance, video, and the words and images of many old people, to describe what the aging process feels like, how the elderly manage to persist, and their perspectives on their mortality.

Video and audio from recorded interviews will be incorporated into the performance and will help tie the movements together.  In each movement I plan to manipulate and loop both the audio and video content to form a musical and rhythmic foundation for the acoustic instruments, to define the musical and narrative structure, and to frame the emotional content.  Four large video monitors will be on stage, placed among the musicians. Each screen will show the introduction and manipulation of new spoken material from the interviews, and will then freeze and fade, leaving the impression of an ever-evolving set of aged faces appearing among the performers, and then fading away.

So, Not A Sonata, written for flutist Tessa Brinckman and pianist Kathleen Supové.  As the name implies, this piece is a break from the fully notated and structured pieces I’ve been writing recently.  Working closely with Tessa and Kathleen, I’m giving them a set of structured but flexible pages of notation and instructions for a piece which is definitely not a flute and piano sonata.

With a series of solo engagements coming up, I’m working on a number of new solo mashups.   I’ve also recently revised my 1990 score to the film Sanctus, by the late experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer.  I’ll be performing the score live with the film.