Kickstarter Success and Other Updates

Seeing my Kickstarter project Karelian Soundscapes get more than fully funded this last Friday was a beautiful experience. I felt so loved to see over 100 people give generously of their time and money to get the word out and support my efforts.

Now things move into the next phase: getting visas (since we raised the goal of $7000, we will be able to separately pay for my wife to come for at least part of the trip!), making travel arrangements (international flight, train ride from St. Petersburg to Petrozavodsk), finding accommodations in Petrozavodsk, and refreshing my contact with people in Russia to let them know this is really happening. Oh, and purchasing and breaking in the recording and sound engineering equipment I'll need.

All that aside, I still have to graduate this spring! In fact, by March 22nd I will have completed everything except one final course I'm enrolled in this semester. Right now I'm working on my Master's thesis piece. It was originally going to be a concerto for harp and orchestra, but the more I thought about it the more that feels like a doctoral level or beyond sized project. In any case, I'm very excited about the current project - a lengthy piece for 12 musicians. I feel like I'm really starting to accumulate all the various things I've wanted to into a single piece. It will definitely be the first large piece that I will be able to point to and say, "This is representative of my music and style." Sometime in March/April there will be a concert which will include both this piece and my recent Pierrot ensemble piece End's Beyond, and perhaps a few other works which have yet to premier.

Besides that, the Map of Trees album should be finished soon, and I'm still planning on doing my installation piece Private Constellations in the ALMA Lab at BYU sometime this semester.

Busy days! In fact, I just flew back from an out-of-state interview at a graduate school that went quite well, I think! A few other news bits: my hymn It is Finished will soon be my first ever published piece of music (more details when I get them!) Also, I will be performing the electro-acoustic parts of Map of Trees at the Utah Crosstalk concert this Saturday - a joint venture of BYU and UofU. Finally, my composer website rmichaelwahlquist.com is now live!