All About Me!

Hello gentle reader!

I’m Corey, the newest member of the arts,ink team! I’ll be posting every Sunday, and I’m super excited to be here! Exclamation points! But. I’m terribly afraid this blogging will turn into an egotistical rampage where all I do is talk about myself. And no one wants to read that. So let’s take this first blog post and do just that. Let’s talk about who I am, where I come from, and why you should trust any word that comes out of my mouth…

I’m from a small town in south-east Michigan, near Toledo, Ohio. I’m a sophomore here at UM, studying Music Composition. I’m really into contemporary art, and fancy myself an amateur visual artist. I am a DJ at the local radio station, WCBN (listen to me live from 1-3am on Monday night/Tuesday mornings!). I dig most music, from hip-hop to avant garde jazz. Some of my favorite bands/musicians include tUnE-yArDs, Sufjan Stevens, Jack’s Mannequin, Steve Reich, Nico Muhly, Alarm Will Sound, and much much more….Most of my posts will probably be about music, but I’m exploring everything around, so expect some theatre, performance art and whatever else is floating around my mind.

But let’s talk a little about studying music composition, because this tends to raise the most questions with people I meet. This means I take classes in music, but I take lessons in composition. And writing music is what I focus on. I do play a few instruments (trumpet, piano, accordion), but I’m not that good (still pretty good though!). As a composer, I do write “classical” music. But I have a real issue with that term. That’s worth another blog post entirely, but I don’t feel that just because my music is played in a concert hall, that it should be any less fun/interesting/relevant than anything else you might listen to. So, as a result, I like to explore ideas of genre in my music. Perhaps the best example of that is my string trio with accordion, blacklight…

blacklight by Corey_Smith

In blacklight, I tried to incorporate a club music aesthetic into an otherwise very modern and dissonant soundscape. It’s somewhere between a love song to Lady Gaga and a critique of the culture that exists around clubs.

Some of my other work you can find at my soundcloud, but I’ll also link to this interesting piece, called the radio keeps saying the end is near, or something like that. This is a piece I wrote last Friday, in a TWENTY FOUR HOUR PERIOD. It was a super stressful “Composer Marathon” event that the school of music put on. Essentially, I was given the ensemble of Cello and Viola at 8pm on Friday night, and was expected to perform a piece on Saturday at 8pm. This is what happened…

It’s not a great piece, but I’m proud of it, for sure. It still needs some work still, but it was fun to do! Particularly to add myself to the ensemble and start screaming at the audience, THAT’s pretty fun.

Anyway, that’s me and my music! I’m really excited to be posting here and look forward to next week, where the subject won’t even be me!