Category Archives: talk

TJ Anderson’s 90th birthday Celebration!

I shall be travelling to Atlanta, GA, to celebrate
TJ Anderson’s  90th birthday with his friends and family.

The event is scheduled for August 17-18, 2018, and has been organized as a mini-symposium with a concert, composer session with TJ, and a banquet dinner.

The concert of works by TJ and his favorite composers is on Friday, August 17 at 7:30 pm at Canterbury Court Retirement Center in Atlanta. Artists include myself, Louise Toppin, and many others.

A mini-conference will be held on Saturday afternoon, Aug. 18, with a presentation of music by other residents of Canterbury Court, followed by a dinner/roast of TJ, hosted by the Anderson family, with Master of ceremonies Dwight Andrews and David Morrow of Morehouse Men’s Choir.

The celebration is hosted by Composers of Color Collective (CCC) and the Anderson Family.

Lecture and Demonstration by Professor John McDonald: “Stirring Up the Music: The Life and Works of Composer T.J. Anderson”

As Amherst College’s 2016-2017 Valentine Visiting Professor of Music, I was invited to present a talk on my in-progress biography on T.J. Anderson Jr. at the college’s Frost Library.

My talk partitioned and analyzed Anderson’s work and influence in five chronological phases.

Spinning Melodies Like Silk

Flutist Elizabeth Erenberg and I were invited to the Massachusett’s Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Lincoln Laboratory on August 9, 2013, to present Spinning Melodies Like Silk, a short interactive program based on our part in a project involving the synthesis of bio-inspired silk fibers.

The initial work was published by collaborators Joyce Wong (Boston University, also a cellist), and Marcus Bueller (MIT), as Materials by Design: Merging Proteins and Music in Nano Today, and is available at the National Center for Biotechnology Information. A summary (with video and my scores), may be found at the MIT news site. A briefer account appears in Wired magazine.

Elizabeth also played the music, for solo flute, that can be heard in the video below (courtesy of MIT).