This work is in memory of my rough collie, Bierken (9/12/20 – 8/26/22). He was a regular part of my composing process, often sitting under the piano while I wrote and played, giving me encouragement when he thought a particular passage was sounding good. While I was working on the musical ideas that would eventually become this piece, it was clear this was one some of his favorite music (though, in his book, nothing could top Chopin’s Etude op.10 no.4) – he would howl (at pitch!) during the moments he found most rousing. His singing actually helped me with my melodic writing, both with this piece and with others that came later. Though he wasn’t around to help me see this quartet to completion, I was able to finish it and expand his favorite parts (particularly rehearsal letters A and I-J) in a way I think he would have enjoyed.

A hypnic twitch is the sudden jolt, or sensation of falling, we sometimes experience as we are falling asleep.  Not only can they give us a shocking adrenaline rush, but they will often unwelcomingly jostle us out of a vivid dream, as well.  Try as I might, I can rarely find my way back into dreams that have been interrupted; usually when I fall back asleep, the next dream will be something completely new.  Even on the rare occasions when I do manage to pick up some of the threads of an interrupted dream, things are always different: people, objects and places that meant one thing before begin to take on a different character or appear in a new context; and narratives that seemed to be heading in one direction become hopelessly derailed.

In Hypnic Twitches, I try to capture the suddenness and intensity of these experiences, as well as their subtleness, and the way in which the tone and energy of a dream can change radically over a short period of time.  Though not programmatic, the piece can be loosely looked at as having a few sections that correspond to different states of sleep.  It begins with the act of sinking into sleep, and along with that, moving from consciousness into that vague and psychedelic state in which one is not sure whether one is awake or asleep.  From there, several dreams occur, which are interrupted and bleed into one another in various ways. 

Though I have worked with cellist, Mike Kaufman, many times over the past several years, this is the first piece I have written explicitly for him. One of his greatest qualities as a performer is that he is just as comfortable playing traditional Classical music as he is playing contemporary music, and his range of technical and expressive ability was something I wanted to highlight in this piece.

The explosive first movement has the cello “controlling” the wind ensemble, sometimes turning it on and off, sometimes leading it like a marionette. The cello eventually winds up the ensemble so much that it frees itself from the cello and takes on a life of its own.

In the quiet and ethereal second movement, the woodwind instruments form a faint halo around a fragile – and extremely high – cello melody. Most of the woodwind players are asked to play “flutes” made of PVC pipe in this movement, each one tuned to a different note.

The final movement begins in fits and starts, flickering back and forth between high-energy gestures and more relaxed, almost Romantic ones. As the movement progresses, these two different musical atmospheres increasingly influence one another, pushing each other in unexpected directions.

As a child, the music I first learned to play at the piano – even before Classical music – was the blues.  These experiences in blues improvisation were so early and strong for me that they have become an inescapable part of my musical thinking, and In the Blue is my biggest embrace yet of the blues in my music.  The piece uses the idea of the “blue note” (a note between a minor and major 3rd which is slightly out-of-tune for expressive purposes) as an influence for almost every aspect of the piece, both literally and metaphorically: the main musical motive is derived from the blues scale, much of the harmony in the piece is based upon clashing major and minor thirds, and there are several sections in which microtones are used to create the “twangy” effect reminiscent of the “blue note.” 

The first section of the piece follows the course of a tiny fragment (one could think of it as the DNA of the blues) which struggles over the first few minutes to assemble itself into music that can carry on in a way other than in fits and starts.  Upon discovering itself and figuring out how to become mobile, this bluesy seed transforms itself into a more groove-based lick that explores the playful, coquettish, and toe-tapping aspects of the blues.  The final section has a more flexible interpretation of the concept of the “blue note”, and explores its timbral implications: the clashing close intervals, the beating patterns it produces, its harmonic ambiguity, and the tension inherent in all of these things.

Short Winds is an ongoing set of short pieces for woodwind quintet. The first piece, “Wiggle Room”, has a strong urge to leave itself with some of its namesake as it decides whether it wants to slither and pulse, or slip into a lilting dance.

In “Weaves”, the instruments hesitantly piece together simple melodic fragments one at a time before weaving them all together.

In “Lick Machine”, each instrument starts with its own bluesy riff, or “lick”. As those licks change over time, evolving grooves emerge, ultimately leading to a frenetic rave at the end of the piece. This is not an entirely smooth process, however; like an old, hobbling machine, the music occasionally hits a snag, goes off the rails in a surprising direction, and must be stopped and started again to get back on course.

The prevailing affect of this piece is one of dreamlike weightlessness; and of searching for something, finding it, and then drifting away from it. The music begins in a barren and austere place, with an unadorned polyrhythmic pattern suggesting the music may simply follow the unfolding of a rhythmic process. However, the music gradually drifts away from this rigidity and blossoms into something more lyrical and vibrant, before retreating back into isolation.

Though the title may suggest otherwise, the piece is in a single movement. The title comes from a quote of Ranier Maria Rilke’s, which discovered near the end of the composing of the piece:

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.

The notion that – even in love – two entities remain separate and can only in fleeting and imperfect moments transcend this separation, perfectly captured for me the shape of the music.

This work was originally written for flute, viola, and harp, and was first performed by members of the New World Symphony (Grace Browning, harp; Henrik Heide, flute; Anthony Parce, viola) on April 26, 2014 at the New World Hall in Miami Beach, FL.

An insistent and throbbing pulse underlies a musical texture in which everything is informed by and expands upon the timbre and effects of the electric guitar, creating a sort of super-electric guitar in the process. Whether the guitar is using a delicate and shimmering delay or taking it “up to 11” with delirious shredding, the other instruments all find their own ways to amplify each effect and make them their own; simulating interference, delays, distortion, and more, in the process.

More personally, I wanted to use Velvet Hammer as an experiment in combining my favorite aspects of rock and classical music in as genuine a way as I could. From rock, I borrow its visceral and extreme sound world, both in the way the electric guitar is used and in the use of extreme registers and extended techniques in the acoustic instruments. From classical, I use its sense of form – unlike the predictable and undramatic shapes most rock songs take, I opt for something that is dynamic, unpredictable, and infused with as sense of tension and trajectory from beginning to end.

Last, the most important (and difficult) thing I wanted to do was to try channel rock music’s directness and accessibility. This is difficult because, in some ways, that directness and accessibility is antithetical to concert music which is complex, abstract and demanding of the listener (and I like all of those things). There is something very appealing to me about rock music’s unbridled and unrestrained sense of expression, though – whatever it is trying to express, it just goes for it; sometimes guilelessly, but generally with less of the artifice and sometimes crippling self-awareness that can accompany those of us who write more formalized music. As a concert music composer who grew up playing blues before Beethoven, I have always felt the competing pull of these two musical worlds and value systems, and a desire to reconcile them in a way that preserves what I love about each without diluting either. While I go back and forth on how possible I think that is, Velvet Hammer represents my most earnest attempt at it to date.

After having spent the better part of a half-year studying intensively for major exams while working on my doctorate in 2009, I found myself wonderfully energized and
ecstatic with my new abundance of free time once they were over. This piece was started while I was still in the midst of the euphoric, manic delight of having that heavy weight lifted from my shoulders. The music brims with energy that is in turns playful and volatile, and frequently changes in unexpected ways.

Scale 9 is the scale used to measure mania in the MMPI, a manual widely used by psychologists which provides diagnostic criteria for various mental conditions. I try to capture some of the hallmarks of a manic episode in this piece; especially distraction by irrelevant stimuli, flights of ideas, elevated mood, and accelerated and occasionally out-of-control motor activity.

As soon as I began writing what would become Little Green Pop, something about the sound-world of Ensemble Klang’s instrumentation screamed “Alien Pop Music” to me.  I’m not sure why – I have never heard any of it, nor have I ever had any particular obsession with extra-terrestrials.  Perhaps it had to do with the chirpy and elemental opening ideas I had jotted down, and the fact that I’d envisioned them nestled in a thick bed of reverb.  Regardless of the reason, I could tell I was not going to be able to shake the imagery of little green men jamming from my head, so I decided to embrace it and see where it would take me. 

Like most vernacular music, the core musical materials of Little Green Pop are quite simple, universal and accessible.  This is particularly true of the pitch material used; like much of our own popular music, it is heavily reliant on scales, modes, and stepwise voice-leading.  Where the piece becomes more foreign, however, is in its textures, modes of repetition and “groove”, and means of development.  Along those parameters, it seems to adhere to rules and idioms that are not quite our own.  

Though Stephen Hawking recently warned us that we should avoid attempting to contact aliens for fear they may want to take over earth for its natural resources, this is very good-natured music, and I am not too concerned about the guys responsible for it giving us a hard time.

I was in a bike accident in 2016 that required me to take a hiatus from doing anything more than shuffling around very slowly for several months. Many plans had to be canceled, including my attendance at a destination wedding of a good friend. Kindly Reply is a memento from this time: the piece flickers between exuberant, over-the-top moments and more subdued (if still slightly impatient) passages, capturing both my eagerness to get back to my normal routine and my acceptance that I would have to be patient.

Breaking Point places the electric guitar at the center of the ensemble and uses its sounds and techniques as the impetus for the activity of the other nine instruments. Writing the piece with an electric guitar nearby at all times, I particularly focused on two techniques: finger-tapping, and the extreme de-tuning of one string. The former allows for extremely fast and incisive passage-work; the second for a wide and wild array of humorous and surprising sounds.

Aside from these technical considerations, Breaking Point is about taking tension and stress to the point of becoming ridiculous and deranged. The piece begins with an electric guitar solo that rapidly accumulates energy as the other instruments emerge in its wake, and continues on from there to eventually reach a death-defying and manic groove. After this climax, the piece becomes quiet, but maintains its high energy level with rapid-fire piano passagework in the background. This faux-quiet section ultimately returns for a final, electric tutti section, until the music reaches its breaking point.

Like any object or a human under stress, the music can only carry on for so long at such high energy before it cracks. Upon reaching one’s breaking point, some have nervous breakdowns, some give up on the task at hand, and others double down until their last panicked breath. Others still reach a point of instant recontextualization, in which everything that seemed so stressful and menacing is suddenly felt as funny, trivial, and harmless: this is the breaking point reached in this piece.

As both a music and psychology major, I often delight in combining the two disciplines when I find myself with the opportunity. Just before I began writing this piece, I had read a fascinating article about 'bad wiring' in the human brain that described how mismatched and broken down neural connections can lead to myriad disorders, ranging from minor cognitive slips all the way to psychopathy. With this idea in mind, I set out to write a piece that would have a consistent line or 'wire' present throughout its entirety that would be altered and broken down in a variety of ways, often leading to unexpected and unpredictable outcomes.

All of the musical material for the piece is derived from the twelve-note line presented in the vibraphone during the opening, and though the line becomes transfigured and distorted by way of a number of different methods- such as layering on top of itself, inversion, retrograde, shifting from foreground to background, and by being broken down into its component parts, it always remains present in one form or another.

At one of the first rehearsals for Bad Wiring, a performer let me know that at first glance, the title is quite easily misread as “Bad Writing”- probably because our brains are far more accustomed to seeing those two words paired together as compared to the far less common pairing of “bad” and “wiring.” While this was definitely not my intent – I seriously doubt I have the courage to entitle a piece something that is easily misread as the last thing I want anyone to say about it – I suppose the title itself ended up demonstrating an inadvertent form of bad wiring! If only I had been clever enough to come up with that myself.

Fighting Words was written for Newspeak, an ensemble which commissions new works that find ways to engage with the political. Wanting to write something that would be relevant today without being attached to the ephemeral politics of the day, I used excerpts from various American presidents' war speeches and fashioned Fighting Words into a vague, archetypal war speech of its own. The piece focuses primarily on their aggressive, "call to arms" nature, along with the rallying and fear-inducing language that often goes along with that.

Fighting Words is not about any specific issues; my goal was not to present my own views, but rather to earnestly set what I think are compelling and evocative bits of text from presidents – both contemporary and historical, liberal and conservative, revered and reviled – in order to create a provoking and perhaps, for some, troubling experience. Music is a powerful and emotionally manipulative medium; there may be parts of the piece in which listeners find themselves feeling conflicted as they hear rousing or poignant music which viscerally and emotionally affects them, paired with text they find unsettling. This conflict is desirable.

TEXT:

“People, listen to me:

Frankly, definitely, it’s here.

Danger against which we must prepare.

We did not ask for this challenge,

but we accept it.

Liberty or death.

We must be the great arsenal of democracy!

We must prepare.

We know well we can’t escape.

We must prepare for danger.

Danger’s ahead!

We all know we can’t escape danger,

or the fear of danger,

by crawling into bed

and pulling the covers over our heads.

Let’s not blind ourselves.

Evil forces which have crushed so many others

are already within our own gates.

Your government is every day

ferreting them out.

They seek to cause internal strife.

These trouble-breeders have but one purpose:

it is to divide our people,

to destroy our unity.

What can the world hope for

if no turning’s found from this dread road?

That’s not a way of life.

In the long history of the world,

only a few have been granted the role

of defending freedom…

we welcome it.

To arms!!!

This is a war for us all!

This war is against us all!

When they try to intimidate us?!

We will not be!

They will hear from all of us!

Let us begin.”