Episode 100! John Mackey joins me for a conversation about his hugely successful career, from Commodore 64 through his remarkable "Places We Can No Longer Go" that was recently premiered at CBDNA 2019!

Topics:

• The story of how John went from writing primarily chamber and orchestral music to becoming one of the most celebrated composers of music for wind ensemble and band.
• John’s background growing up and learning music and how to compose not in a traditional band, choir, or orchestra but instead on his computer through thousands of hours entering music via a joystick and reverse engineering what he was transcribing.
• The value of self publishing and the story of John’s growth from printing and shipping everything himself to having two employees to handle his current workload.
• The impact of writing dance music and how it’s influenced his compositional style and then an extended discussion of impostor syndrome, including John’s feelings about his most recent work Places We Can No Longer Go written about his mother’s battle with dementia and premiered at CBDNA just this past weekend.

Links:

• johnmackey.com/ostimusic.com
• Mackey: Redline Tango
• Mackey: Wine Dark Sea
• Ravel: Concerto for the Left Hand

Biography:

John Mackey has written for orchestras (Brooklyn Philharmonic, New York Youth Symphony), theater (Dallas Theater Center), and extensively for dance (Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Parsons Dance Company, New York City Ballet), but the majority of his work for the past decade has been for wind ensembles (the fancy name for concert bands), and his band catalog now receives annual performances numbering in the thousands. Recent commissions include works for the BBC Singers, the Dallas Wind Symphony, military, high school, middle school, and university bands across America and Japan, and concertos for Joseph Alessi (principal trombone, New York Philharmonic) and Christopher Martin (principal trumpet, New York Philharmonic). In 2014, he became the youngest composer ever inducted into the American Bandmasters Association. In 2018, he received the Wladimir & Rhoda Lakond Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his spouse, A.E. Jaques, who titles all of his pieces (and also teaches at MIT).

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