Composer ∙ Engraver ∙ Performer
J. Clay Gonzalez - Harvard Portfolio
A three minute highlights reel. Check out the links to the right for a longer view/listen.
Score
17-minute
reel
full show
LOVE BEATS RAIN
An "immersion" performed at Strange Beautiful Music Detroit in September 2023. This represents work with my main creative project, the Regenerate Orchestra, for which I've served as founder, composer, and director. The group is composed mostly of community musicians, and seeks to establish a new populist paradigm for how classical music can exist in the modern world. It focuses on radically rebuilding the institution of the orchestra on a foundation that centers inclusion, place, and community.
A highlights reel. "almanac" is shown in the first 7 minutes. For the full piece, see link to the right.
Score
Full
performance
Recording from album
almanac
Another "immersion" with the Regenerate! Orchestra from December 2022 at Planet Rock Ann Arbor. This orchestra project represents 95% of my creative output for the past five years, and I'm really proud of the work I've done with it. I hope that eventually this model can be spread across the country and give classical musicians a new way to engage with their communities. For more information on the philosophy behind the practice, see the attached essay "Regenerate!"
Score
"Michigan State Song" from Circle Songs
Skip to 4:30 to hear me doing "Whapeton" with an audience, as part of a residency at the Ypsilanti Freighthouse Museum. Members of the orchestra play drones to accompany the singing audience. A couple of other songs from the collection are attached in the links to the right.
circle songs
Circle songs is part of my practice that complements the Regenerate Orchestra. It's a collection of rounds I've written that I've been spreading around the SE Michigan community with the intent that they may become part of the folk vernacular. It gives me a way to do solo shows, in which I teach the songs to an audience through call and response and then sing them as canons. Note that the Michigan State Song was written in collaboration with two other singers.
grow|thaw
Another immersion from 2023 with the orchestra.
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Essay
Jericho
Another immersion from 2023 with the orchestra.
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Essay: "Regenerate! Music For a Time of Disconnection"
An essay outlining the values and principals behind the Regenerate project. Written during the Monson Writer's Residency in Monson, ME in Fall 2023.