On May 3, Seattle keyboardist/composer Wayne Horvitz won the $275,000 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award for jazz. Other winners in that category include such major figures as Henry Threadgill, Matana Roberts, Wadada Leo Smith, and Dave Douglas. A prolific musician who also owns the Columbia City venue the Royal Room and teaches at Cornish College for the Arts, Horvitz is involved with the groups Electric Circus, Gravitas Quartet, and Sweeter Than the Day. He's also collaborated and improvised with some of the world's most adventurous players, including John Zorn, Briggan Krauss, Bill Frisell, and his wife, Robin Holcomb. After the jump, read about the four goals Horvitz hopes to accomplish with the time and money that this award allows.
1. To complete, within the next two years, three projects which are in their infancy, and which this award allows a new level of support. 21 Pianos and Those Who Remain-Part II are both installations: electro-acoustic compositions in conjunction with performance. [The latter will premiere at Seattle Art Museum in January 2017.] The third is The Heartsong of Charging Elk, a chamber opera of sorts, based on the novel by James Welch.
2. To record and document a fairly large back catalog of chamber music, including through composed compositions for piano and voice, piano alone, string trio with electronics, a string quartet with improviser, and so forth.
3. To take time to consider new projects for the coming decade.
4. And finally—to afford the luxury, that is the time, to focus consistently on my own practice as a pianist, and my own research as a composer and electronic musician.
