Cal State Long Beach (CSULB) lecturer and bassist musician Tom Peters has been nominated for a 2014 Grammy for his work on “26′ 1.1499″ for a String Player,” one of five John Cage pieces on the album The Ten Thousand Things on MicroFest Records. Peters joins fellow performers Vicki Ray, William Winant and Aron Kallay with nominations. This marks Peters’s third Grammy nomination.
It was discovered that John Cage had recorded himself performing “45’ for a Speaker,” a piece from 1954 that features overlays of Cage speaking, and the recording was considered the first American recording of the piece. This then prompted MicroFest to record for release the four solo works on Cage’s The Ten Thousand Things, what is largely considered to be a seminal work by the experimental composer.
“It took me over a year to learn ’26’ 1.1499″ for a String Player’—my part in The Ten Thousand Things—and over the past 10 years it has become one of my favorite pieces to perform,” said Peters, an Altadena resident and Arcadia native.
Peters, who teaches double bass at the Bob Cole Conservatory of Music at CSULB, has also been performing with Southwest Chamber Music since 1998 and the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra since 1993. As a composer, Peters creates music for silent films, where he performs original scores and then electronically loops them or passes them through synthesizers.
“Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance is a tough category to crack,” said Carolyn Bremer, director of the Cole Conservatory. “It isn’t an inconsequential classical category. This is the big time, and he is nominated along with, for example, the recording of last year’s Pulitzer Prize winning work.”
Additionally, Peters is a writer; together with his wife, they created The Aspie and the NT blog, which documents Peters life as someone with Asperger’s Syndrome and the ups and downs it has on a relationship.
To order John Cage’s The Ten Thousand Things, click here.
Photo courtesy of CSULB.
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