Composer Alexander Blank is working on a solo piece for flute. This might seem like enough to fill a residency, but it is not a typical musical score. Much of the music that Blank writes is microtonal, or “using pitches that lie in-between the white and black keys of the piano,” and these explorations have opened up his compositions to literally billions of additional possibilities. Blank uses a natural phenomenon called the  harmonic series  to organize his musical ideas and sound palette. For this piece, Blank looked at the first 64 pitches found in the harmonic series and narrowed that number down to 21 unique pitches that vary in how far “out-of-tune” they sound. He then ordered them “from the highest level of sharp to the lowest level of flat” and placed that range on a gradient colored scale. This visualization assisted him in analyzing the properties of each of the chosen pitches and how they relate to each other in various ways. He calls it “a kaleidoscope of...

Avy Claire has been busy. Mid-way through her residency she moved to a larger space and has ordered paper multiple times while at Mt. San Angelo. The result is a VCCA studio full of work—paintings hanging on the walls and sculptures resting on every flat surface and suspended from the ceiling. Having worked in a variety of mediums, Claire is currently painting, and says,   “For the past few years I’ve been consciously focused on what a brush stroke does in a painting and how I could pare that down and get really spare.” While at VCCA, she has been experimenting with cutting out those brush strokes, wondering what would happen if they became objects that people could experience in three dimensional ways—even by walking around them. To that end, Claire says she has been doing “a lot of tests.” By trying different paper, different weights of paper, and different adhesives, she has created pieces that work on the wall while at the same time have the potential of bein...

2009 VCCA Fellows Reunion Saturday, November 14 7 p.m.-9 .m. Community Room at Westbeth 57 Bethune Street, New York, NY For more information and directions: http://www.vcca.com/NYreunion.html

VCCA Fellow Helen Benedict's fifth novel, The Edge of Eden , is out today from Soho Press. Inspired by her parents' anthropological field notes, the book is set in 1960, on the tropical Seychelles Islands, a thousand miles off the eastern coast of Africa. Benedict's lush descriptions of life on the islands are  firmly based in the realities of the time. The role of black magic in Seychelles culture, passed down from the country's past as a former slave colony, the decaying culture of British colonialism's last gasp -- these form the background of this witty, sharp and yet heartbreaking novel about a family unraveling and a child's desperate attempts to save it. For more information: www.helenbenedict.com