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.

The solo piano version was premiered by Sean Friar on March 22, 2023 at Harris Concert Hall, University of Memphis, in Memphis, TN.

[This work is for a soloist on both piano and percussion.]

I love that something as ambitious and impractical as Danny’s piano-percussion project exists. Though many of the pieces written for him are extremely difficult and his setup requires a great deal of logistical planning, it also creates the possibility for a unique kind of music both in its sound-world and in the theatricality of watching what a single performer can do.

The difficulties don’t only lie with Danny, however. One of the challenges in writing for his piano-percussion project is that it’s easy to write music that is utterly impossible for a single performer to play – I discarded many of my initial ideas after concluding they would be better suited to a duo. And while there is much a duo can do that Danny can’t, the inverse is also true and I wanted to make sure Chrysalis was a piece that only made sense for a soloist to play. While a duo can certainly play more instruments at the same time, they can’t play with the unity and interconnectedness that a single performer can. This is what most appealed to me about writing for Danny – just as a pianist can create fluid and sensitive phrasing between his two hands, Danny can do this across the piano and percussion sound worlds. This unique quality of Danny’s setup is put front and center in the opening of the piece, in which the music is comprised of nuanced, intricate, and interwoven gestures in which the piano and percussion are often inseparable.   

The title, Chrysalis, comes from watching the lifecycle of Monarch butterflies on the recently-planted milkweed in our backyard; and the beautiful, jewel-like chrysalises they leave hanging from the leaves.

Fit was written with Pianoteq software though these tunings could potentially be created with other sampling software. Whatever the software used, the sample itself should be that of a concert grand piano (I used the Grotrian Concert Grand in Pianoteq) with a dry, non-reverberant sound.

Fit is about two very different kinds of ideas trying rather hopelessly to fit in with one another. Both pianos represent certain identities that are, at first, willing to sacrifice certain aspects of themselves in order to fit in with the other. At the outset of the piece, our default tuning system, Equal Temperament, comes out as the dominant one and defines the musical material of the piece on its terms, making it quite difficult for any other tuning system to follow its lead.

At the outset, the confident and swaggering material presented in Piano 1 takes advantage of equal temperament’s unique ability to make triads a tritone apart (C major and Gb major) intervallically equivalent to one another. Piano 2 tries effortfully to copy this material in a variety of ways: at first, it uses a tuning system that gives it a variety of ways to approach the first chord but no means of approaching the second; next, it uses a tuning system that gets remarkably close to Equal Temperament but is still slightly at odds; eventually, Piano 2 chooses to be itself and settle into a tuning system that is dramatically different from anything else we’ve heard. There is at first conflict between the two tunings systems but eventually Piano 1 becomes interested in trying to do things Piano 2’s way, but that also doesn’t last. The push and pull between the two pianos and tuning systems continues as the pianos try to find ways to make music together while both being themselves.

Fit was premiered January 28, 2020 by Ray-Kallay Duo (Vicki Ray and Aron Kallay), Tuesdays at Monk Space, Monk Space, Los Angeles, CA

Whether in music, or story-telling, or dating, a good tease is always about giving just enough of something to keep the one being teased – if not a bit ruffled and challenged – tantalized, and drawn into what the one teasing is going to do next.   Like that, Teaser thrives on acknowledging the expectations it sets up and toying with them.  It idiosyncratically leads the listener along a path filled with surprise, sleight of hand, abrupt about-faces, and mischievous reinterpretations of its own material.

One of the many aspects of Mariel’s playing that impresses me is how effortlessly and comfortably she performs music of vastly different idioms and emotional content; she has no difficulty shifting between complex experimental music, spare minimalist, standard repertoire, and folk music, all in a single concert.  In fact, she enjoys it.  I have a similar taste for navigating through a large palette of sounds and musical languages when I compose, and it seemed natural that my piece for Mariel would take advantage of our shared omnivorous interests.  The result is a piece that at times sounds coquettishly bluesy, other times naïvely simple, and sometimes, outright frenzied.  It is a somewhat theatrical piece in this way –  the more the performer is able to exaggerate the sudden stylistic and affectual changes, the more successful it is, and the more the sensation of the “tease” is felt.

In addition to all this, Teaser calls for a great deal of virtuosity on the part of the performer.  Almost every attack involves a double stop, and that is often only the skeleton of what the performer must play.  The piece also makes frequent use techniques including playing pizzicato notes with the left hand while bowing with the right, playing glissandi at different rates on different strings, and harmonic “flickering.”

Originally composed for English horn, this piece was written shortly after I and oboist, Claire Brazeau, visited the Galleria Borghese in Rome, where Bernini’s stunning Apollo and Daphne sculpture resides. The sculpture depicts the climax of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, in which Daphne is transformed from a nymph into a tree in order to evade Apollo’s lustful advances. At the time of my visit, Claire and I were already planning to collaborate on a new piece and this sculpture seemed like the perfect inspiration for it. Not only does the sculpture itself tell a story in a way that few works of visual art do, but I’d recently heard Claire play Britten’s Six Metamorphoses after Ovid –possibly the most performed work for solo oboe – and it dawned on me that Daphne’s metamorphosis was not one of the six Britten chose. Writing on Daphne felt like a fitting way to pay tribute both to the great sculptor and to one of the most important works for oboe. Mezereon comes from the plant, Daphne mezereum, one of many poisonous plants in the genus Daphne, named after the nymph herself.

This work was premiered in May 2012, at the American Academy in Rome in Italy with Claire Brazeau on English horn and Sean Friar on prepared piano. It was substantially revised in early 2013 and performed more by Brazeau and pianist Danny Holt.

Elastic Loops has had a unique life among my pieces; it’s one of the earliest in my catalog (written in 2007 when I was still an undergraduate) but substantially revised 10 years later to over twice its original length, becoming quite a different piece in that process. I subsequently made another shorter iteration of the piece based on that version, trimmed down to 8 minutes but quite different from the original. Coming back to this music after so much time was a challenge – I wanted the newly-composed music to sound like a natural expansion of the original music rather than the commentary of an older composer looking back on his early work. The listener is welcome to guess which sections are older and which are new, though I hope it won’t be obvious.

The title describes how the piece works on both its smallest and largest levels. There are repeating bits of music that are constantly being changed (stretched, condensed, thinned out, reordered, etc.). The shape of the piece as a whole is akin to a rubber band being stretched tight, slowly loosened until slack, and then stretched again even tighter before being flung into the distance.

This work includes approaches to piano that have most influenced me as a performer: the intricate and evolving patterns of some of Ligeti’s études; occasional lyrical flourishes from composer-pianists like Chopin, Scriabin, and Rzewski; a touch of Bach’s counterpoint; and perhaps most importantly, the exuberant, uncouth, extroverted playing of Rock and Roll legend Jerry Lee Lewis.

A playful, humorous, and flashy showpiece, Wind-Up Etude is filled with ideas that obsessively wind themselves up until they explode, jettisoning themselves off in unexpected directions.  Loosely in rondo form, the piece’s different sections are characterized by markedly different characters, weaving between the soundworlds of dainty classical music, blues, and more.  The performer is encouraged to emphasize and exaggerate these sudden changes.