Selected Music Examples

Each flows into the other

2 hours for piano and electronics

Of a rose synge we

8 female voices, based on the macaronic text (Middle English/Latin) of an Advent carol from the fifteenth century by the same name.

Combination 15.13.16.12

Combination is a generative work for violin and percussion, in which the score regenerates for each new performance situation, determined by the percussionist’s free selection of metallic instruments. The acoustic features of these selected percussion instruments determine the exact scordatura tuning of the violin strings though a series of equations. To preserve the relationship between the specifically tuned violin strings and the percussion instruments, only natural harmonics and open strings are used in the violin.

Most musical parameters, such as bow technique, percussion beaters, rates of change, types of inflection, textural and gestural typologies, dynamics, individual section timings, and the minimum duration of the work are all determined from the acoustic relationships between the selected percussion instruments and violin tuning.

Ego dormio, et cor meum vigialt

Title Translation: I sleep, but my heart is awake

Countertenor voice and accordion, on text derived from fragments of the Latin Vulgate Bible and the 23rd sermon of St. Bernard de Clairvaux, written in the early 12th century.

Alone

Solo violin, after the Edgar Allan Poe poem of the same name.

Chain Shift

contrabass flute/piccolo, tenor saxophone, percussion, voice, violin, and electronics; composed for the Wet Ink Ensemble

A chain shift is a linear movement along a phonological scale. For example, in the Great Vowel Shift in medieval England, the pronunciation of English underwent a significant dialectical change: over the course of a few hundred years, nearly all of the vowels were raised. For instance, the English word “beak” was once pronounced “bake.” Thus, the Middle English “eh” vowel was raised in the mouth to the Modern English “ee” vowel while still corresponding to the same written symbols -- the phonemes themselves shifted along the chain. Gradual changes in pronunciation occur in all languages and are expressed in the rich diversity of dialects around the world. Chain Shift draws on this concept as an abstract seed and takes multiple dialectical glances of the opening word of a fragment from Eugene Onegin.

A Fountain Unseen

clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, 3 cellos

On January 19th, 2011, the nearly completed first version of A Fountain Unseen, in addition to all sketches, was stolen at gunpoint. The only remnant of this version that still exists is a blurry cell phone picture of five measures – only 11 seconds in length. As a composer dealing with this loss of record, my strategy was to wander the space of my memory, recreating the paths between musical memories and allowing them to cluster into concrete musical statements as they formed an orbit around the recovered five measures. Like a fountain’s cascading water, the essence of the musical statements is preserved, yet the flow has been recontextualized by my experience. The particularly unusual instrumentation of clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, and three cellos casts a uniquely dark and dense color upon the work and saturates the texture.

Watercolor

piano

Although Watercolor is more about the color of water than the technique of watercolor painting, the work is particularly evocative of the soft undefined shapes and slightly blurred marks that result when pigments are applied to wet paper. The piano is analogous to colorless water because of its relatively uniform timbre and an identical spectral envelope across its range. Accordingly, I aim to capture the prismatic and fluid nature of the piano.