Mikel Kuehn - Activities

Current Activities

2021-22 has been a productive year, mostly focused on a new portrait album through New Focus Recordings (released September 16, 2022). This collection features seven works composed between 1999 and 2022 including a new piece for soprano and immersive fixed media, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, based on Wallace Stevens' poem of the same name. For this project I’ve been awarded generous funding from the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University. I’ve also received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Two of my compositions garnered special attention this year: Chimera (2017, flute and piano) was awarded first prize in the Flute New Music Consortium Composition Contest and my recent fixed media ambisonic work, Unlocking the Keys (2021), received an honorable mention in the 2022 International Destellos Competition on Electroacoustic Music (Argentina). This past April, the New York City collective Collide-O-Scope Music mounted a performance of my 1994 work, Fünf Parabeln for soprano and chamber ensemble featuring five of Franz Kafka’s Parables. Last fall I participated in the documentary Composing in the Technological Age: Discussions with Patricia Alessandrini, Christopher Bailey, Doug Geers, Mikel Kuehn, Margaret Schedel. (Watch here).  I recently completed an immersive fixed media work, Perseverance: An Artist Rendering (2022) based solely on NASA's audio recordings from the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover.  Finally, I'm thrilled to announce that I will be joining the Eastman composition faculty in July 2023.