Name (Ascending)

About Piece:

Dark Sand, Sifting Light imagines a piano playing in the distance, overheard through an open apartment window. As the listener poised beneath the window begins to daydream, the piano sounds take on larger orchestral colors. Her mind wanders and the music transforms.

About Piece:

Salt began its life in 2005, when I found myself driven by a chord of six notes. First I made a progression moving the chord by parallel motion. Then I changed the inner voices, rotated the notes, inverted the chord, juxtaposed it with its mirror and other transpositions of the chord, and added more notes to the chord. To color the chord, I added non-harmonic tones as ornamentation. These non-harmonic tones normally resolve to the harmonic tones, and thus end up doubling the chord tones themselves. In short, I experimented with all the possibilities opened up by this one chord. The idea of transforming a single chord without losing its fundamentals, combined with the sparkling image of the ornaments, reminded me of the properties of salt. Thus was born the title of the composition. Just as salt preserves its taste no matter what it is mixed with, the essence of the original chord of the piece is not lost throughout the entire work. In order to enhance the metaphor, the electronics used in the piece—built on the resonance model of the main chord with spectral transformation—employ the actual sound of dropping, spreading and touching salt. Finally, the title Salt also reflects my Christian faith and my musing on the words “Ye are the salt of the earth.” Thus the piece has the touch, taste and also the meaning of salt.

About Piece:

Deadlines are great sources for inspiration! I remember finding out about the ACO orchestral reading opportunities (Underwood and EarShot) this past autumn and thinking that I would love to participate; however, I did not have a standard orchestra piece. The only orchestral work that I ever wrote was a short steel pan concerto, which did not qualify since it was a concerto. I believe the deadline was in the first few days of December. So, after Thanksgiving rolled around and all the melatonic turkey wore off, I decided to write a short orchestral work because it has been a dream of mine to write for larger ensembles with infinite timbral pallets. After six straight days of non-stop composing and sleeplessness, I finished this short, brand-spanking new work titled Tarnished Mirrors. One day, I would love to expand this piece into a three-movement composition and come up with some “real” program notes after it has marinated, and after I have had some time to think about what the material is truly about when speaking beyond the musical vocabulary.

About Piece:

The piece I'm proposing would incorporate the rhythmic techniques used in Cuban rumba, utilizing its language to move the orchestra into a fresh direction and beyond its normal boundaries. As a musician who plays both classical and Cuban music, I feel I have a unique understanding and experience to bring these two very distinct musical worlds together.

About Piece:

Leaf Catalogue is an ode to all the tiny little netted veins, the malachite spines and splintery emerald epidermi, the viridian curves and fern-green webs turned to sea-foam in the sun.

About Piece:

It is remarkable how one same object might look rather different depending on the moment of the day or night in which we look at it. Similarly, different situations can be seen from completely opposing points of view, depending on their context. Velocity, light, weight and texture can all vary in appearance at a glance. 

Elapsing twilight shades reflects my particular interest in creating sonic structures that behave in a quasi cubist fashion. In fact, listening to the piece is a bit like looking at an abstract painting. One idea is presented from several different perspectives. The ""space"" around the idea is manipulated, folded and viewed as if through a kaleidoscope, repeated by many different lenses. This is the starting point for a work that gradually becomes inflected by a few humorous moments and a delight in symphonic tradition. There are two main critical arrivals in the piece, where the previous music is expanded into a more rhapsodic and quite different dimension. For me these moments represent a special ideal of collective beauty, achieved only through hope and freedom.

About Piece:

In 1949, my grandmother, mother, and aunt were on a ship traveling across the Atlantic, displaced by WWII, and far from their native Estonia. My grandmother used to tell me how she was summoned to the ship’s officers’ quarters, the captain having learned that she was a concert pianist. As the unbolted piano bench slid back and forth, and the boat rocked and heaved, my grandmother poured her pains into the piano, playing Chopin’s third Etude, known to her as “Chopin’s sorrow.” She was lucky, traveling aboard a stout ship in a time when the US was actively welcoming displaced persons. But these days, as I hear about migrants desperately floating across the Mediterranean in an attempt to get to Europe, it is easy to imagine my grandmother, or someone like her, not making it; I imagine a storm sinking the ship and the sounds of her piano spreading out across the ocean. And I imagine far away, a mother and daughter standing by the seashore, hearing just a faint glimmer of Chopin drifting in the waves.

About Piece:

Crystal Skies (2013) was inspired by my experience skydiving for th first time in upstate New York. It was a chilly November day, and as the airplane ascended into the air, it became even more freezing thousands of feet above the ground. When the door of the plane opened, and I stepped out onto the ledge, I could not wait to fall backwards and sink into the clouds. The freefall lasted approximately one minute, and then I felt like I was just floating in the air. In my piece, I wanted to capture that feeling of being suspended in the chilly sky, as if I was flying. The string textures reflect the icy sky, portrayed by the artificial harmonics and ornamented lines that weave in and out of each other. The woodwinds represent birds gliding in the sky, and for a moment, I felt like a bird as I was slowly descending to the ground.

About Piece:

Noit-Alimissa (Assimilation) is an effort to combine the influences of Post Second World War Contemporary Classical Music with Contemporary Jazz, to create an organic
musical entity. The melodic, harmonic and rhythmic materials are announced in the introduction and developed through the composition following the the formal scheme: Introduction, A, B, C, A, Coda

About Piece:

Diversions is my first purely orchestral work; as its title suggests, I aimed to write a piece that was entertaining and lighthearted in character. Accordingly, it roughly models any number of 19th century concert overtures, falling into three sections and an overall formal scheme of ABA.

The principle motive of Diversions is a four-note figure that is derived from the main melody of the work, a tune that is heard in full only towards the end of the piece. The inaugural section of Diversions features a series of fanfares that are followed by two tutti orchestral statements of this four-note cell. The tutti statements themselves frame a series of antiphonal dialogues between various sections of the orchestra that are based on the four-note figure. A transitional section follows the second tutti outburst and elides into the slow middle section of the work, which features extended solos for English horn, oboe, and trumpet. The concluding section, marked Allegro vivo, is essentially a set of variations on the four-note cell, beginning with a gentle, lapping gesture and culminating in the grand, triumphant statement of the aforementioned tune.

A word about the dedication: Diversions is dedicated to Andrew Johnston, the son of long-time family friends, Jim and Lisa Johnston. Between 2001 and 2003, I dedicated three short pieces to each of Andrew’s older sisters (Claire, Julia, and Sarah). When Andrew was born in 2004, his father requested that any piece I write for Andrew be suitably big and loud, “preferably with anvils.” Alas, I couldn’t bring myself to include an anvil in the scoring for Diversions, though I trust a log drum and some tom-toms will suffice.

About Piece:

Disarming The Tempest  is a symphonic poem illuminating the plight of returning combat veterans suffering from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).  In AB form, its disjointed A section represents the tempest within, while the lyrical B section offers the inner peace they long for.

Its exposition reveals four short melodic motives derived from four spoken phrases, three of which are among a civilian’s concept of conversation-starters with returning combat veterans.  In this setting these phrases induce a tempest within, rather than help the veteran infantryman feel welcomed and at ease, as they can prompt guilt, pain and indignation. 

The three, increasingly offensive, civilian phrases are  So good to see you!, We’re so glad you made it home alive! and  Did you kill anyone?   The fourth phrase used is the humble veteran’s response, Thank you. Thank you very much.

About Piece:

Shedding Skin for symphonic orchestra, composed by Courtney Bryan, was inspired by the poem of the same name by Harryette Mullen from her book Tree Tall Woman (1981). Shedding Skin was composed for the American Composers Orchestra after attending the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute 2012, and deals with the concept of “notated improvisation.” Exploring this concept of notating improvisation, I plan to use the symphonic orchestra as a sound world for which I will notate music based on the concept of improvisation and the inspiration of the spirit. 

About Piece:

I was taking long walks through New York City; grime and glitter, glass and iron, duality at every turn. High rise buildings, warehouses, unexpected gardens spilling out between nooks and crannies in the city's walls. Listening, I could hear trains beneath me, planes above me, trucks rumbling by. Turning another corner and the sound would evaporate into air and birdsong. I drew a landscape of New York, not as it exists in any physical sense, but in a sweeping, sensory summary. Lines and rectangles colliding, each a duplicate of the last. Between angular clusters I drew the curved shapes of birds, untethered in the air, sometimes spilling out between blocks, or soaring right over the building clusters. I put a pin in that drawing, right above my desk, and began to compose the shape of that abstract skyline. An orchestral landscape, loud and unbridled, paved with gold. 

About Piece:

This year seems to be passing quickly. I was thinking of composing a piece about time compressing, and then I watched an interview with Richard Hoffmann, my former teacher who had come to Los Angeles in the 1940s to study privately with Arnold Schoenberg and who became his amanuensis and a close friend of the Schoenberg family. In his interview, Richard told a story of Schoenberg at the end of his life, when he could no longer walk down the stairs of his house and spent all day sitting in his room. There was a clock on the wall in front of him, and one day he asked Richard to put the clock behind him because he didn’t want to know how slowly time was passing.

About Piece:

Etaoin Shrdlu
Is an orchestral variation that was inspired by a non-sense phrase etoin shrdlu, which appears on newspapers using “hot metal” typesetting – a “run down” of the keys on the Linotype keyboard when errors were made by the operator. ETAOIN SHRDLU explores the possibilities of sound of the orchestra, spontaneity, freedom in form and errors.

About Piece:

While there isn’t a specific program attached to the music, I feel that the phrase “tripping the light fantastic” accurately describes the general spirit of the piece. The Light Fantastic is a virtuosic whirlwind for the orchestra, exploring the ensemble’s capacity for contrasts ranging from the visceral and bombastic to the intimate and ethereal.

At the heart of this short “concertino for orchestra” are two major motivic ideas: a short melody that is introduced by the piccolo at the very beginning and a repeated-note fanfare at the first major climax of the piece. These two motives are developed, tossed around the ensemble, hidden, found again, chopped up, hastily glued back together, pitted against each other, and finally brought together to drive the piece to its inevitable, thunderous conclusion.

About Piece:

My idea was to transform the image of distance in its different aspects. My title refers not only to physical distance, but also mental distance. The third and sixth movements express physical distance, while the other movements involve my emotions of distance between memories, reality and illusion, existing, vanishing and beyond. When I finished composing it, I realized this piece suggests freedom without distances, that is, overcoming bounderies of distance.

About Piece:

New York composer, Louis Chiappetta began studying composition at Mannes College of Music’s Preparatory Division at the age of 13. He is a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music, receiving a bachelor’s degree studying with Keith Fitch. In 2011, Chiappetta was awarded a Fulbright Grant to study with Julian Anderson at the Guildhall School of Music in London. His works have been performed at London’s Wigmore Hall, New York’s Carnegie Hall, Aspen Music Festival and School, Dartington International Summer School (UK), and MusicX Festival (Switzerland). Chiappetta has won several prizes including an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award (2010), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Scholarship (2011), and the Cleveland Institute of Music Donald Erb Prize (2011).His recent projects have included Fracture, a series of clarinet miniatures written in collaboration with choreographer Thomas Peacock and the London Contemporary Dance School, Echoes of Embers for baritone and small ensemble, and Chroma for orchestra. In 2012 Chiappetta participated in a professional training workshop at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute where he studied with  Kaija Saariaho and Anssi Karttunen. As a participant, his trio Loops, Clocks, and Shadows was premiered at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall.

About Piece:

One of the problems that the symphony orchestra presents to the contemporary composer is that it seems to embody the hierarchies and stratification of the aristocratic classes that it was originally devised to entertain.  In Control Flow, I respond to this issue by exploring various kinds of musical control. 

About Piece:

Lately I've become interested in writing pieces that consist of only one section, usually in the form of a long, slow build of density and variety in sound. This piece takes that model: there are no delineated sections and no transitions, just the goal of reaching the ending and revealing the core of this music's material. Different layers weave in and out of the orchestral texture, with the clarinets leading the more lyrical nature of the piece, the percussionist activating a sound 'object' that acts as an on/off switch for certain musical events, and the piano and second violins playing out a ritualistic pattern of bell-like chords. 

One of the inspirations for this piece is the work of California artist Andres Amador, whose sand murals flourish into massive and stunning images, but are inevitably washed away by the ocean.

About Piece:

About Piece:

Inspired by experiences with family members experiencing dementia and coma recovery, Slippages is a multifaceted meditation on the fluidity of our self-consciousness. More than expressing sadness or a loss of control, the piece moves through a range of emotional spaces seeking musical expression for those moments that function like hinges between disparate states of perception and experience. In musical terms, the piece explores the seductive power of texture and color to momentarily pull us out of the narrative directionality of melodic development.

About Piece:

From infinity for orchestra is an imaginary perspective of an unreal landscape. The work is mainly composed by the juxtaposition and contraposition of colorful textures that present different points of view of this temporal reality. The unreal landscape is inspired by the question “What would be our reaction if we could see our planet, our home, our bodies from a long distance?” As an answer, I created a nonexistent plane that will take us from common spaces to distorted atmospheres. Floating bright and suspended patterns and textures represent a sort of spatial aloneness. On the other hand, a fanfare-like texture evokes a kind of human spirit that is full of energy, unstable and heavy. The first sketch of the piece was composed in Bogotá in 2015, and it was finished one year later in New York City in 2016.

About Piece:

Mercury-Redstone 3 is the name of the NASA mission that first sent an American astronaut, Alan Shepard, into space. Today, this tremendous accomplishment has been somewhat overshadowed by two other, more celebrated historical events. The first took place three weeks before Shepard’s suborbital flight: the Soviet Union launched Yuri Gagarin into space, beating the States to the punch. Then, just over eight months later, NASA launched John Glenn all the way into orbit aboard Mercury-Atlas 6. But the somewhat unheralded nature of the Mercury-Redstone 3 mission imbues it with a special quality for me. To imagine that first U.S. spaceflight is to think of the unadulterated thrill of exploration and an unfathomable exhilaration. What must it have felt like to be among the first to touch the sky? I hope to capture in this piece some of the sense of wonder and excitement that NASA, and the sheer audacity of human spaceflight, have brought me since I was young.

About Piece:

Scene is a general designation for any situation in which some kind of narrative is unfolding. The "pas de deux" is more specific: a part of the ballet choreographed for only two dancers. Although my pas de deux is freely written and emerges directly from the preceding music, its passionate lyrical character still sets it sharply apart from the highly rhythmic music that makes up the rest of the work.

About Piece:

Into Focus is a work that seeks to aurally explore the three areas of visual perception known as the focus, fringe, and margin. These three regions of a human’s vision, depending on where the viewer’s attention is directed, have widely varying degrees of resolution and detail. Through a continual blending of harmonic blocks that fade in and out, in volume level, tuning, and instrumentation, Into Focus strives to evoke these blurry areas of visual perception through the medium of sound. From one harmony to the next, the listener is taken on a journey of continually unfolding perceptual interplay where tonal regions meld together, making a dense landscape of harmonic ambiguity and constant dynamism.

About Piece:

Palimpsest is scored for piccolo, flute, oboe, English horn, clarinet, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons (2nd alternating on contrabassoon), 2 French horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano, and strings. The word comes from the Greek palimpsestos, meaning “a papyrus or other kind of writing material on which two or more sets of writing had been superimposed in such a way that, because of imperfect erasure, some of the earlier text could be read through the later over-writing.” (From the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology)

I sketched most of the material summer 2010 and, after seemingly endless revisions, “completed” the piece March 2011. I include quotation marks around “completed” because, as Derek Bermel cited to me from Paul Valéry regarding my discomfort in submitting a final draft, thereby surrendering further opportunities for revision: “a poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Palimpsest is essentially finished, but feels abandoned somehow. Perhaps the process is more important than the end result, though admittedly, I can’t wait to listen to it rehearsed and read.
 
Palimpsest is divided into three sections: fast, slow and fast. Ascending chromatic runs, descending triplet figures, string glissandi and tremolos, a measured accelerando, and a foreshadowing of quarter-note triplet hocketing in the winds and brass populate the first minutes. The slow section juxtaposes extended string hocketing with solo statements from the French horn and English horn. Eventually a mournful solo passes from tuba to contrabassoon, juxtaposed with a somber melody in the first violins and violas. The concluding fast section picks up where the first left off; chromatic runs - ascending and descending, polyrhythmic punctuations in the strings, ghosts of the string hocketing now in the winds, brass and percussion, and a final almost-tutti measured accelerando.

About Piece:

I have spent the past year living in Prague, collaborating with local musicians, dancers, and visual artists. The work we created together allowed me to see Prague – its streets, its language, its heroes – through their colorful eyes. To discover secret places, stories and sounds. This composition is dedicated to them. It is both personal and voyeuristic. It is a peculiar hybrid organism – at times sentimental, at times playful, at times frightening – brought to life through the symphony orchestra.

About Piece:

This piece draws its inspiration from the concept of four Mythological or Ancient ‘relics’ that, over the ages, have been carried forward into the present time with their meaning gradually transformed or altered to represent something more modern but still commonly encountered in our western culture.   

Draconian Measures makes reference to Draco (600BCE), the first legislator of Ancient Rome who was known for instituting particularly harsh, cruel and unforgiving laws.  

Lilith, Begone is primarily conceived of as a lullaby.  The word ‘lullaby’ originated from the Jewish ‘Lilith-Abi’ which translates as ‘Lilith, begone’.   In particular versions of Jewish folklore Lilith was known as Adam’s first wife and she was molded, by God, out of the same dust as Adam (whereas Eve is said to have been made from one of Adams ribs).  Because if this she saw herself as Adam’s equal and did not respond well to his desire to rule over her.  Eventually she left Adam and the Garden of Eden.  However, she was pursued by three angels.  They demanded she return to the Garden and upon refusing she vowed to forever steal the souls of little children as vengeance on Adam’s suppressive treatment of her.  The angels would not agree to this and so Lilith made the condition that if the mother of the child hung an amulet above the baby as it slept in its cradle, Lilith would pass over that child.

About Piece:

I began writing “Impressions” with a handful of self-consciously simple ideas in mind. I was thinking about how so many of the composers I admire can take what is basically a very simple idea, an idea that can seem almost naïve to begin with, put it through their compositional mill, and end up with surprisingly complex results. This was a process I wanted to somehow try and replicate in my own music. I based each movement on just one or two very simple ideas, and, at the very least, I would try to keep the clarity and definition of these basic ideas in tact as I began to fleshed them out: gradually moving from unpitched to pitched sound (or less sonorous to more sonorous) in the first movement; a slow, unaccompanied melody played in unison, but somehow “blurred” in the second movement; and a “tintinnabulation” of high-pitched sounds, and another unison, this time fragmented (“splintered”) rather than blurred in the third movement. I wanted to move towards complexity but not complicatedness, and, above all, I wanted results that were very musical.

About Piece:

I started the writing process by sorting through a variety of harmonic  structures that I sensed would go well with the instruments of the orchestra that I was unfamiliar with. I tried to imagine the many ways these structures could be colored and how they’d sound coming from various combinations of instruments. Having somewhat established things vertically I was then able to begin thinking about form and how things would proceed rhythmically. The fun and challenge thus far in the writing process has been trying to find a place for my ideas in this larger sonic palette while keeping a sense of balance amidst all the instruments and  possibilities.

About Piece:

I also wanted each movement to have an almost self-contained musical language - movements that are very different to one another, at least on the surface. I wanted them to be almost like a set of style studies, but of no styles in particular. That said, the “style” of each movement is not unique. There are clear influences at play. (This was an exercise in craft more than anything else, and I felt easy about writing something that is so clearly in debt to the craft of others.)

About Piece:

To the Ancient Egyptians the human soul is comprised of five entities, the Ren (name), Ba (soul), Sheut (Shadow), Ib (Heart) and Ka (Spirit). This ancient belief is the basis of the Concerto for Orchestra. The work is divided into three movements as a representation or musical abstraction of the life of ones soul or musical journey. 

Through each movement, the ideas of Name (melody), Soul (harmony), Shadow (form) and Heart (rhythm) are developed until the moment of Ka (catharsis) is reached when all five elements converge bringing about rebirth. Like the human soul, I have tried to translate the five parts of the human soul into the basic elements that create a piece of music. From birth, these musical elements are introduced, developed, reintroduced and by the end or death, only the essence remains, the soul.

About Piece:

The Light-Bringer alludes to the story of the fallen angel, Lucifer, who strove to usurp God’s power and was cast out of heaven as punishment. (The Latin name “Lucifer” literally translates as “light-bringer.”) But rather than represent this narrative programmatically through music, the piece is structured around the number 666, “the number of the beast” mentioned in Revelation 13:18. While this number has at times been interpreted as a reference to ancient emperors, religious leaders, or modern governments, it has traditionally been accepted as a symbol of an antichrist aligned with Lucifer and therefore another representation of Lucifer.
 
With that pretext in mind, the number six is embedded within the structure of the work. This can be heard on a small level with musical motives and sonorities being repeated six times, melodic and harmonic intervals of sixths and its inversions, a melody or harmony of six pitches, a progression of six chords. On a larger level, the work is built on six major sections with the main climax occurring roughly 666 seconds (eleven minutes and six seconds) into the work. On a visual and performance level, tempo markings are all multiples of six.
 
The work is in one movement but maintains the contrast of tempo and sectional structure typical of a symphony (a tripartite structure representing God’s Trinity and ultimately the foretelling of Lucifer’s doom) . It begins with six block chords from the brass, played while strings sustain subtly shifting sonorities. Then the instrumentation is reversed, with the repeated block chords played by the strings. After a series of variations on these motifs, the music shifts suddenly into a vigorous symphonic scherzo with energized passage of agitated sixteenth-notes - a cosmic battle-scene, perhaps, as angels swoop with clashing swords in aerial combat. It is war music in its evolution of epic conflict and dramatic rupture.
 
The subsequent section can be seen as a traditional slow movement. In a restrained tempo, but maintaining the emotional intensity, it is the relative calm before the final storm. The reduced dynamics and slower surface rhythms, combined with gentle harp punctuations, create an anticipation of the finale. In the concluding section, all the preceding rhythmic and textual-motifs are recalled for a final, climactic reckoning. At the peak of the dramatic intensity Lucifer is divinely banished and slinks away to a dark pianissimo abyss in the double basses, as harp and timpani toll his demise with faltering weakening pulses. 

About Piece:

The Isle of Eriska is a work for large orchestra inspired by a small, magical island off the west coast of Scotland. Francis’ goal was to capture the essence of the island and his experience of it. In the piece, the composer integrates certain Romantic and Impressionistic sensibilities such as lush, tertiary harmonies and the use of melody in a traditional sense mixed with a more atmospheric atonal world of suspended motion and subtle changes in coloration.

About Piece:

Out of Line features a single line that, as the composer explains, “is exploded throughout the orchestra.” As the piece progresses, the through-line opens up and gives rise to other lines, chords, and rich textures. Originally written for the smaller Bang on a Can Summer Festival, the piece has been substantially revised to make use of ACO’s Orchestra Underground ensemble.

About Piece:

The title Dreamscapes is both an allusion to the mysterious process of conjuring up music and the ethereal, hazy atmospheres that I believe are the dominant color of my composition.  

Personally, the most daunting part of composing any large ensemble music is deciding on the initial direction and material of a composition. To help make that choice this time around I thought about the many sonic possibilities, improvisational concepts, and compelling artistic visions presented throughout the Jazz Composers Orchestra Intensive, listened to favorite orchestral and jazz works, and started daydreaming at the piano and many other hours of the day.  I can’t say what I took from where, but as I composed I could hazily feel past thoughts and experiences inform my musical decisions as I searched and struggled for the identity of my piece.  I think the music reflects this thought process -- nearly every section of the composition starts from a distance, with strange and sparse sounds growing into landscapes or narratives, depending on how one likes to imagine music. 

The JCOI experience impacted this piece in several concrete ways.  In response to faculty member James Newton’s adage to use one’s own musical language, I’ve incorporated elements of the blues that are part of my improvisational style.  My writing process was also fueled by Antony Davis’ paraphrasing of Ellington on the blues (to further paraphrase, it’s more of a feeling than a form), and Steve Coleman’s method of composing by transcribing one’s own improvisations. Inspired by Gabriela Lena ¬Frank and Anthony Cheung’s presentations, I revisited Bartok and checked out Henri Dutilleux to further fertilize my imagination.  

The form of the song is a loose take on the classic jazz form of an intro, followed by a melody, solos, and more melody.  Rather than using any exact recapitulation, there is constant color, harmonic, and rhythmic variation of material and diversions and development to the point where that structure is perhaps not even noticeable, as if an adventurous jazz combo was playing freely with all elements.  This approach I think lends itself to the idea of dreaming, where surreal developments and juxtapositions are completely sensical.  In the “solo” section of the piece, players improvise with short melodic fragments, gestures, and percussive rhythms, gradually layering sounds in a sonic collage.  Melodic material from the beginning of the piece returns in this altered landscape.  From there, the music settles on one harmony for a long stretch, building up in many layers in which new and old melodies, harmonies, and rhythms interact, before returning to the gentler, dreamy mood from the start of the piece.

About Piece:

Dawn Hochsprung was an incredible person I had the fortune of meeting when I was a student at Roger’s Park Middle School from 2000- 2003, where she was an assistant principal. I worked with both her and her husband, George, as a member of National Junior Honor Society. When the tragic events occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14th, 2012, I, like everyone else in the Danbury area, was shocked and deeply saddened. The Hochsprungs had always stuck out in my mind as not just outstanding teachers, but some of the most caring, genuine, and positive people that I had come across during my time growing up in Danbury. I felt immediately compelled to write something for George and also for the other families who lost loved ones.
I titled the piece Dawn not simply because it is dedicated to her, but because the nature of Dawn’s actions on the day of shooting are the inspiration for the character of this piece. When she became aware that her school was in danger, her immediate response was to protect the children of the school. She put herself in harm’s way in an entirely selfless act in an effort to save the lives of her students. Her legacy is one of selflessness, positivity, and extraordinary courage. This piece celebrates that legacy.

About Piece:

A penumbra is a region of space in which part of the light source is obscured. Essentially, it is a shadow surrounded by light-one dark and hazy outline in the middle of complete clarity. In the summer of 2011, shortly before I began composing Penumbra, I was in a transitional period in my life at which point many aspects of it were drastically changing. I found myself reflecting on memories quite often and became fascinated by the experience one endures when drawing upon a deep, meaningful memory, much like diving into one’s own shadow, removed from clarity. I was intrigued by the way one can simply get lost in it, almost like one is dreaming while still conscious and then suddenly snap back to reality. I find that there is nothing else quite like this feeling of exploration of familiar yet unfamiliar, obscure emotional territory within us. 

In my fascination with this feeling, I also found there is much to be gained. There is a reason we remember and a reason why we find ourselves lost in memories. We are trying to make light of something and as we reflect upon it, it spurs us to think of things in our own life that may be connected. This spurs us to explore parts of ourselves that may not be at the forefront of everyday life. Memory is just as much a wonderful tool of the human brain as it is an emotional reflex. When the mind finally snaps back to reality, it is often with a greater understanding, completing the excursion into one’s own mind. It is this journey of diving into our own shadows, memories, and obscured parts of ourselves in order to return with a greater understanding that I am striving to evoke with this piece.

About Piece:

Grindhouse refers to the term for a movie theater that specializes in showing exploitation films. While my piece shares its title with the recent motion picture directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, it is not related to the plot of that film in any way. I did, however, hope to effect during my work a similar sense of mental and emotional anxiety, as well as over-the-top energy, experienced while watching films found in the exploitation genre. My goal was to compose a piece that exaggerated the different extremes of an orchestra, including the registers of instruments, rhythmic durations, and dynamic ranges. Resultantly, the work presents substantial challenges to the performers in terms of stamina. It is a sort of miniature concerto for orchestra, featuring every instrument and/or section of the ensemble at least once during the course of the piece. 

I have long been fascinated with fast and aggressive music. Grindhouse embodies these characteristics, but attempts to combine its spiteful atmosphere with rapidly changing tempi and odd subdivisions of the beat, instead of a steady pulse. The piece, which is cast in a series of episodes, is connected by relentless harmonic and rhythmic motives. It begins sparsely orchestrated in a low register and develops continually throughout, undergoing frequent changes in formal direction, and ending with an insistent shriek.

I began composing Grindhouse in Aspen, Colorado during the summer of 2009 and completed the score in Ithaca, New York the following winter. It lasts approximately eleven minutes and is dedicated to my dear friend Elizabeth Joan Kelly. The work is scored for an orchestra of piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, a large percussion battery (three players), harp, and strings.

About Piece:

Completed in 2009, Consequence is a work in two contrasting movements: The first is a series of smaller sections, relatively independent—almost a succession of false starts, attempts at climax, and retreats; the second movement is made of two extended parts, with a very gradual increase in tension that sets a clear direction toward a climax at the end of the piece.

About Piece:

The Machine takes its name from the title of a traditional Scottish and Cape Breton fiddle tune and social dance from the 18th century called “The Machine Without Horses.” This title immediately sparked my imagination and curiosity. What was the story behind this fiddle tune? What machine was the composer referring to? After a bit of research I could not find any definitive answers, only guesses. Living in a world with ever advancing technology I was fascinated by the idea of being shocked by a non-horse-driven machine. I wanted to create a machine-like orchestral sound, powered by harp, piano and percussion, based on very simple musical material that spins out into an accumulation of sound and energy. The machine-like musical language in a three-part (plus coda) form is in a kind of snowballing odd meter minimalist style--repetition and variation inspired by my study of folk traditions. 

About Piece:

If one were to ask my grandmother to talk about her life, she’d choose to narrate it by walking through her home telling the story of how she and my grandfather found each antique, trinket, and piece of furniture that completes their life together. One piece she particularly treasures is her grandfather clock; and an especially meaningful moment in my life was when she asked my husband to wind the clock for her, as I had seen my grandfather do countless times before. Talking to the Time introduces motives and melodies throughout the piece that build upon each other the way one tells a story. Each new melody or section has come from something that has previously occurred as it develops further into the piece. Just as my grandmother walks through her house telling her life story, each piece inspiring a different chapter, so too does this music continuously build on its own narrative.
I died happy in my sleep…
Our children around and you looking down
from heaven’s a julep on the porch…
You and me rocking the grandfather clock is tick tick talking
to the time we used to wind it
–Punch Brothers

About Piece:

Bounce owes its name to the literal “bouncing” of the first notes in the piece: the instruments that open the piece play an energetic tune that jumps between high and low notes.  Much of what happens in the piece from that point forward is built from canonic techniques, where a copy of a melody that was just played is echoed back at a slightly later interval of time.  Aside from a slow middle section, the music is overtly danceable, with an audible beat that should keep toes tapping for most of the piece.   The lively and exuberant nature of the music was inspired by my nephew James, a firecracker of a little boy who, with glittering eyes, bounces around my sister’s house.  

About Piece:

Bismuth: Variations for Orchestra is the product of a desire to compose a piece with a high degree of abstraction, many of my recent works having been heavily informed by extramusical sources. Loath to entirely abandon my affinity for intertextuality, however, I titled the work Bismuth in order to highlight the kinship between its own colorful, angular style and the kaleidoscopic patina and geometric edges of a pure bismuth crystal. Musically, the work is laid out in a large arch form with an opening theme and seven continuous variations. Each successive variation is in fact a variation upon its predecessor rather than directly upon the theme, and thus it is the distinctive characters of each variation, rather than the musical materials being treated, that are primarily responsible for articulating the work's form. After the first three variations—a bombastic and martial Interlude, a grimly humorous Scherzetto, and a lyrical Arioso respectively—the theme is restated verbatim amidst a tumultuous and dramatic accompaniment in the central fourth variation. Subsequently, the characters of the first three variations are revisited in reverse order for the final three variations, and the work concludes with a brief and choked-off recapitulation of its opening bars. Bismuth was composed between October and November 2013 in Manhattan and Wallkill, New York.

About Piece:

In Winter, for orchestra, was composed in the winter of 2007. The initial ideas for the work emerged the year before while living in Minnesota. I was compelled to write the piece after encountering the following haiku written by Basho:

Winter solitude –
in a world of one color
the sound of wind.

Basho’s haiku has an astonishing capacity to evoke a rich series of images and ideas through a remarkable economy of words. 

In Winter is a quiet piece, marked by slowly shifting bands of sound. The work is sparse: there are no themes or figurative gestures to speak of; rather harmonies are frozen, and significant emphasis is placed on reconfiguring the orchestral colors that comprise these harmonies in order to offer a dynamic (or prismatic) view of the materials. There are three basic ideas in the work, each one allied with a line from the haiku, and like its textual source, the music is at once concentrated and evocative. The work does not intend to present a particular image or series of images, nor does it illustrate a program; however, in its recursive ruminations of the haiku emerges a physicality animated by spaces, textures, and sensations I associate with winter.

About Piece:

The title “music from elsewhere” comes from a passage in Margaret Atwood's novel The Robber Bride and evokes, for me, a sense of dichotomy between two types of music:  one that is fully present, audible, and familiar to us, and another which is more mysterious, emerging into our perception only in fits and starts - the ""music from elsewhere.""  The idea of this dichotomy appealed to me because it seemed to capture a facet of the experience of daily life, namely, that if prosaic and familiar concerns largely shape our existence, they are occasionally interrupted by a sense that something larger and more fundamental is at work behind the scenes.  Music from elsewhere attempts to capture that sense of an ineffable, larger something.

In the present work,  the ""music from elsewhere"" evolves over the course of the work's fifteen minutes, starting from thick, murky chords in the low winds and strings to high, bright ones in the flutes and violins, finally encompassing the entire ensemble at the climax.  Alternating with these chords, which lack a clear sense of pulse, is another type of music that is sharply rhythmic, often heard as thumping attacks in the basses and percussion.  

These musics continually emerge from and subsume one another throughout the work.  At the dramatic center of the piece, the two finally merge; the "music from elsewhere" takes on a rhythmic element at last in a series of hammering chords for the entire ensemble.  These hammering chords continue to reassert themselves as the piece closes, but in shorter and shorter outbursts.  Never beaten, they simply vanish as the murky texture from the beginning re-emerges.  The work is a circle; the music does not die away or end, but continues, elsewhere, out of our hearing but always present.

About Piece:

Forward Ornament is a fast, sleek, short burst of energy, that explores, fights, dissolves, and re-forms Baroque notions of symmetry, clarity, harmony, ornamentation, and line. Its inspiration comes from the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures of Italo Calvino. With this work, I begin a series of pieces that meditate on the six characteristics that Calvino prized and valued above all others: lightness, quickness, visibility, exactitude, multiplicity, and (the unfinished) consistency. Ornaments - those rapid musical flourishes that are not really necessary but serve to decorate a melody, harmony, or line take center stage in this piece. Like the singing of birds, these musical crystals are ornate, yet clear, clean, and light.

About Piece:

Kaman Fantasy takes its name from ‘kamanjah,’ the Arabic word for ‘violin.’ The piece is an exploration of the Arabic ‘maqamat’ (sets of scales) and rhythms in a Western classical context. The music embraces both traditions, often swaying back and forth between Arabic and Western idioms. As a first-generation Arab-American, I have often found myself shifting between both cultures in the way that I think and act, sometimes voluntarily, most times not. Kaman Fantasy is a reflection on those experiences.

About Piece:

When I began writing Maelstrom, I knew I wanted to keep people right on the edge of their seats, holding on for dear life, as their ship, the concert hall, catches a devastating current that puts them at the heart of an unrelenting storm. The sawing string section in the beginning sucks the unwarned vessel in, reeling it into a whirling black hole of low brass and high woodwind runs. We then change perspective and view the storm from the eyes of those bewildered and terrified sailors, who bicker amongst themselves in confusion and despair, evoked by the punches of the low woodwinds and the quarrel between the horns and trumpets, with of course, the unforgiving storm of the string section always present in the background. Eventually the storm subsides, turning those fast repeating string lines into soft and seemingly innocent pizzicato triplets. But as more and more layers begin to be added, the crew starts to panic once again — the storm is back in full force and it becomes just a matter of minutes before the ship and her men become forever lost in the depths of the Maelstrom. 

About Piece:

Sometimes when I lay down to go to sleep, safe in my home, next to the person I love, I hear an alarmingly present voice calling from inside me saying, ""i want to go home.

Dear listener, what does this mean? It does not mean I am unhappy, or alone or lost. Rather, it may mean that worlds within worlds exist inside us, and there are many homes therein. Music is a life raft that I travel upon through these worlds. The Other River, as best I can tell it never stops moving. This is Part one. To be continued.

About Piece:

Passeig de Grácia for orchestra is dedicated to my parents, who both gave me and taught me to appreciate life. The inspiration for this piece came during my solo trip to Barcelona. While wandering around the famous Passeig de Grácia (Passage de Grácia), I was impressed by the city, the so-called “The Great Enchantress.” The city is like a warm breeze from the Mediterranean Sea intertwined with a passionate and artistic spirit. Barcelona is the city that tells the whole world how it once made a fascinating dream come true. Antoni Gaudí was the dream shaper who filled the real world with gleaming colors, swirling sparks, and painted dreams. He used his magic to ignite the starry sky, embrace us, and fulfill our deepest dreams. These dreams are the remains of his time, floating along with the passion of art. Magic oozes from Barcelona. Mirth saturates in every lonely soul. The orchestra is the medium to express my feeling of this glamorous city, and Gaudi, one of the greatest artists. This is my enchanting, dazzling, and passionate dream come true.

About Piece:

I endevoared to make the musical themes emerge through a veilof color and atmosphere by sometimes burying them inside the background orchestration. The piece is intended to function like a lens gradually moving from soft focus to a more stark clarity and in the end, a retun to the wistful airiness of the opening glissandi strings.

About Piece:

The Glorious Train Ascending is an attempt to translate the rhythmic vitality of the jazz tradition’s greatest contributors to the realm of the symphony orchestra. These rhythms have always captivated me with their transcendently beautiful mystery, similar to John Milton’s imagery of creation in “Paradise Lost,” from which poem this piece derives its title. The piece moves through a series of episodes that expand upon forms developed by Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Thad Jones from the big band tradition to Tony Williams’ nebulous, exuberant metric modulations in Miles Davis’ quintet in an effort to bring a personal language, rooted in the rhythmic traditions and techniques of jazz, to the symphony orchestra in a way that may look vastly different on the page, but captures their spirit in performance.

About Piece:

My new orchestral work is a tone poem about my native area in the Big Thicket of East Texas.  The textural and acoustic sound-world is born of the tangled woods and shaded creeks of the Thicket.  My musical lines teem with voices from my family and my past: the strange ecstatic blend of gospel and honky-tonk I heard as a child in our rural Pentecostal church (where my father led the singing and I played trumpet), the high fervent singing of my backwoods Baptist grandmother and other kinfolk, as well as the songs and folklore of the Big Thicket, still resonant with old Scots-Irish roots. 
I seek to recreate the acoustic of the cloistered, pine straw-laden boughs of the thicket, as well as the more open acoustic of the pastures, clearings, and coastal plains.  I have incorporated a number of folk ballads collected in the Thicket (many of which can be found in William A. Owens’ Texas Folk Songs of 1950), as well as fiddle tunes and hymns, all refracted through the lens of my imagination.    
My primary aesthetic models are literary, in particular William Faulkner, who so admirably balanced modernism and unique sense of place.  The piece has no preconceived notion of form, but rather follows an intuitive episodic narrative.  As Flannery O’Connor said, “You don’t dream up a form and put the truth in it.  The truth creates its own form.

About Piece:

In the opening stanzas of The Auroras of Autumn (from which my work’s title is drawn), Wallace Stevens uses the image of a serpent thrashing after having shed its skin, glimmering and flashing as if possessed, as a metaphor for the majestic beauty of the Northern Lights. I found this idea, of something primordial, that is at once terrifying and arrestingly beautiful, to be a very poignant one, and one ripe for musical expression. With Spectre of the Spheres I sought to create something that moves and breathes like the mystical and unfettered Aurora, with a reckless vitality, inexorably, and of its own accord.

About Piece:

All the While resembles a dream in which the vignettes and recollections from waking life collide in a dream state. All the While is through-composed and is intended to stand on its own, although it may later become a movement of a larger work.

About Piece:

Commissioned by the Chicago Sinfonietta in partnership with the Chicago Architectural Foundation, Shards of Serenity is one of four movements that make up the work ChiScapes, a collaborative composition celebrating the architectural landmarks of the city of Chicago.  In addition to my composition, ChiScapes includes movements composed by Armando Bayolo, Christopher Rogerson and Vivian Fung – each movement corresponding to a different building.  The Chicago Sinfonietta premiered the work on June 8th, 2013, with Mei-Ann Chen conducting. 

Creating compositions inspired by other art forms is something I have done many times, but in this instance the art that serves as inspiration is art that I have only experienced via pictures and words – Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall, on the campus of IIT.   Many who have actually been inside of the structure comment on the serenity experienced both inside and out.  I can imagine feeling serene in such a large, open structure in which natural light streams through the ceiling to floor windows that envelope the entire building.  Undoubtedly light streams in through all of the windows at various times of day in many different ways.  With no internal walls to direct the journey through the building, a visitor would likely be forced to confront their physical location and presence at whatever location they found themselves within the building.  Perhaps initially one’s attention would be drawn upwards since the glass at eye level is translucent, while the glass above eye level is transparent.  And, again at least initially, I would imagine there is a moment of disorientation – an uncertainty about where to focus.  Eventually a visitor would find their bearings, creating their own personal experience in the space.  Shards of Serenity is a sonic representation of this type of experience, with the sounds being inspired by the physicality of the open space  Timbres and harmonies emerge from the orchestra from various locations, changing once they appear, creating the aesthetic of a serene space.

About Piece:

Rise is a brief orchestral essay on moving upward. The music is one extended ramp, an awakening followed by a brief fall, landing somewhere different then where it began. It is also a  meditation on the idea of the pastoral. From Vivaldi to Strauss, there is a long tradition of evoking the pastoral landscape in symphonic music. What does it mean to romanticize nature in the post-industrial, climate-changing 21st century? Perhaps this explains the somewhat haunting mood of the piece. There is a celebration of the natural world, but also an unsettled feeling that never resolves.

About Piece:

Shan Ko, employs material derived from Hakka music. There are various types of Hakka mountain songs, with an abundance of lyrical content. The song-type associated with my piece is called Lao-shan-ko (old mountain songs), which are among the oldest and simplest of Hakka folk song-types. Lao-shan-ko is the name of one such tune, which I have referenced. I am particularly drawn by its use of the minor triad and the libre feeling of the original tune. As a result, many minor triads juxtaposing with the predominantly pentatonic harmony are deployed to explore various timbres between different instrumental groups in the piece. Many times, the melodic fragments are stretched and heavily decorated. Sometimes the echoes of those fragments are produced between instruments. It is the spirit of freedom and spacious acoustics in the mountains that I have tried capture. 

About Piece:

Screens are everywhere now. Looking around a crowded room, chances are that you will see many people standing or sitting next to each other with their faces buried in their phones – the great contradiction being that technology interconnects us more than ever before, but our lives become isolated and still by tapping in to that connection. 

In Still Lives, that contradiction is played out in two contrasting movements. The first movement, reunion, is anxious and blurry, featuring an obsessive rising gesture introduced by the violins. The second movement, wire tap, crackles with energy as pitches are gradually added to the open-fifth gesture of the strings, a buzzing mass of overtones and noise. 

Still Lives was completed in July of 2014 in Brevard, North Carolina, and is dedicated to Lee and Hannah Curtis and their son, Shepard, who was born during the first revisions of this piece.

About Piece:

Atlantic Crossing is the first movement of a programmatic suite themed around the Middle Passage. A recurring theme in the composer’s works is the Middle Passage of Africans to the Americas. Atlantic Crossing evokes a narrative journey through the exploration of orchestral timbres and forms.

About Piece:

My piece Carried By The Winds draws inspiration from many different ethic/folkloric and stylistic sources, including several Latin styles, funk music, jazz, Eastern European folklore, and more. To avoid that it sounds like a 'round-the-world-in-9-minutes' collage, I am using extensive motivic development techniques to tie it all together. The basic 6-note motif is heard throughout in its many variations.

About Piece:

Blaze of Autumn (Five Images from Fall) was inspired by fall in the Midwest.  After spending my formative years as a native Californian, I was very impressed with the beautiful fall colors found in Ohio, where I moved for college.  This work seeks to capture the magnificence found in autumn as green explodes into radiant reds, oranges, and yellows.  There are five brief movements, each an image of a fall scene.

About Piece:

yet the dew remains in pale (2011-12) is inspired by a sentence in Shi Jing (The Book of Songs), literally, "white dew not yet dry".  The dew remains after darkness and iciness, and also reflects our inner tears in a universal sense.  As the musical context, the work has five structural images in seven continuous sections.  These structural images are: I. intoning and praying, II. as in a dream, III. the memory, IV. rising winds, tears as mountain rain, and V. loss, as time falls into dimness.  Even though the work's sound world is filled with colors, everything will ultimately fall into paleness, as in thick fogs but overwhelmingly...

About Piece:

The Floating Bridge of Dreams was written by composer Adam Jenkins in 2010-2011 as part of the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute, a unique collaboration between a select
group of jazz composers, the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University and the American Composers Orchestra. Prior to writing this piece, Mr. Jenkins’ primary compositional output had been for big bands, small jazz ensembles and arrangements for pop musicians and flute choirs. This first foray into the world of orchestral music presented a number of questions. First and foremost was how to approach melody and
rhythm, two staples of all musical styles but often approached very differently between different genres and cultures. Rather than try to write a piece in the jazz style (a term
whose meaning is vague at best) he decided to just begin with the theme (heard in the opening) and let any influences come out naturally. The result is The Floating Bridge of
Dreams. The title is derived from a poem by the 12th century Japanese poet Fujiwara no Teika: “Spring Evening-Clouds over the Mountains Seem to be Floating Bridges in my Dreams.” Using the mood and images presented in the poem as a guide, the piece was
structured in four basic sections ranging from ephemeral to more tangible back to ephemeral. Although not overtly jazz influenced, the composers jazz background emerged in more subtle ways -namely in the flowing triplet based rhythms and harmonic language the piece is bathed in.

About Piece:

In 1609, Galileo Galilei climbed the tallest hill in Rome and looked into the night sky through an instrument of his own invention: the telescope. His initial glimpse into the cosmos led him to record that the heavens were draped with “innumerable stars, scattered in clusters.” This was the first discovery of that vast, sidereal array we now know as the Milky Way.

Four hundred years later, I found myself on that same hilltop, writing music as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. While there, I would often wake up before the sunrise and walk to my studio beneath the very same sky Galileo had observed so many centuries earlier. At these moments, when the city was still and the stars shone brightly, I would feel a deep connection to history, a special, timeless kinship with Galileo, and, above all, an urge to be productive with my allotted time. So, I decided to write an orchestra piece about the mysterious and expansive nature of both time and space, and found it fitting to use Galileo’s words as a title.

About Piece:

The composer describes Toccata for Orchestra as “equally haughty and aggressive, with equal amounts of pomposity and humor. In the middle of the piece, a slow lyrical section gives a brief respite from the storm, but this reverie soon disintegrates into an instrumental battle to claim the foreground. The piece resumes its rollicking, with aggressive jabs and playful turns, and increases in intensity and momentum, eventually culminating in ecstatic flourishes that form its end.

About Piece:

So they sent their ravishing voices out across the air and the heart inside me throbbed to listen longer.
-Homer, The Odyssey 
That voice was a lamentation. Calmer now. It's in the silence after you feel you hear. 
-James Joyce, Ulysses 
[It] is still conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never. 
-Franz Kafka, The Silence of the Sirens 
There are ships that sail in the periphery, invisible to temptation or desire. For such travelers, nothing is lost. No helm broken by rocks, they remain obscured by mist, marginalia to the horizon. Many would risk ravage for ecstasy, but instead they journey towards the vanishing point-swallowed by the waves of an ebbing surf, blind to those who beckon from that fatal shore.

About Piece:

Timber  is a macabre and hallucinatory look into the forest.  The piece begins with a mysterious and dark harmonic palette which represents dawn and awakening.  The harmonies brighten, as more daylight is revealed, and lead into a new section marked by falling chords.  The chords fall like trees, more intricately after the other leading into a slow build of string pizzicatos surging upward.  The final section finally bursts open with a jazzy flare and quickly evaporates into a dreamlike state as the temple blocks remind us of the falling chords.

About Piece:

The genre of Japanese "Noh" drama that deals with dreams, illusion and phantasms is called "Mugen". Kohei's Mugen is an orchestral depiction of the surreal world where dreams and nightmares dwell and where the bounderies of reality and unreality are not clearly defined. His orchestration references the timbres of the japanese shkukahachi and gongs.

About Piece:

Shakespeare’s sonnet number 73 has inspired the melody, which reveals itself at the end of this piece.

SONNET 73
That time of year thou mayst in me behold ?
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang?
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, ?
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. ?
In me thou seest the twilight of such day ?
As after sunset fadeth in the west, ?
Which by and by black night doth take away,?
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. ?
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire ?
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, ?
As the death-bed whereon it must expire ?
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by. ?   
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,?   
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

About Piece:

This piece is inspired by the book of Isaiah, chapter 59, which describes the “gap’ between people and God. It has a restless energy, and, as I envisioned it, suggests an image of someone fighting to find a moment of peace amongst the turmoil that overwhelms his life. Just as he gets a glimpse of light, the struggles take over and the hero finds himself (or herself) in a climax of emotions and of possible hope. “We look for light, but all is darkness; for brightness, but we walk in deep shadows” (Isaiah 59:9)

About Piece:

Cepheus is a constellation that harbors the dark matter nebula Sh2-136, Bok globule CD230 and many other mysterious bodies and phenomena that lie some 1,200 light-years away from Earth. Haunting the Cepheus Flare is part of a greater collection of short works for varying ensembles inspired by images of outer space. The work is a collection of four miniature pieces for chamber orchestra that explores themes such as subtle variations in timbre and color caused by varying doublings of instruments, repetition and expansion, and programmatic association (as in the movements “jazz” and “counterpoint”).

About Piece:

Iterations opens with a blast from the Horns, sounding a jagged, syncopated motive that will become the basis of much of the musical material. The Juxtaposition of these jagged motives with lyrical passages, dissonant orchestral eruptions, and triumphant chorales, is at the heart of Iterations.

About Piece:

While on tour in Brazil in 2001, I was given an insider's view of the infamous Morro da Babilônia Favela in Rio de Janeiro, which few outsiders could experience at that time.  The sights, sounds, and smells, and the harsh reality of the residents’ daily lives, where even a basic staple–propane–was controlled by drug lords, will stay with me always.  The dichotomy between the opulent, lush beaches of Copacabana and its poor neighbor was equally striking and haunting.  There seemed to be a predominance of natural rhythms created by the actions of the daily routines of the population. The sounds of crowded streets and alleys had a striking crescendo and diminuendo.  These easily translated into musical language and allowed me a foundation on which to build this composition.  In addition, the deep blue patches of the rooftop water reservoirs contrasted with the earthen colors of walls intersecting in asymmetrical angles suggested musical patterns and textures I have tried to capture in this work.

In this setting, the adolescent street circus performers seemed an anomaly at first, but the explanation was equally enlightening and a testimony to the human spirit and outreach.  Homeless children in high-risk situations, such as juvenile delinquents and slum-dwellers, were socially integrated into circus schools to give them a purpose and skill to lead them to more self-assurance and independence.  The revelations about the ""Children of the Candelaria"" massacre highlighted the plight of these youths and begged their presence in this composition.

The history of the Brazilian ""choro"" or ""chorinho"" is strikingly similar to that of the American jazz art form: both coming of age in the early part of the 20th century and featuring improvisation as a commonality.  Loosely translated, ""Rodas de Choro"" can mean jam session; for me, this evokes the same joy and freedom of musical expression as our native jazz.
In this work, Morro da Babilônia, I have drawn upon these memories to musically convey my emotions with these musical vignettes that, hopefully, will expand proportionally and be the embodiment of a larger work.

About Piece:

As we grow older, we start to associate seasons with people that we once knew, events in the past, and most of all, memories.As time goes by, we start to lose track of the seasons passing by us, and we forget the magic of seasonal changes, how ravishing it was to experience the first warm fragrance of spring from a deep, contemplative winter, the pulsating liveliness of summer, the soft caress of southern tropical winds on our bare skin, the resistance of autumn's arrival in summer's presence, and the dance of golden and scarlet leaves in November, its wind replete with memories of the past. Seasonal changes mark the passing of time- to witness the majesty of seasons on our own is not enough, we have a need to share it with someone, to witness together the beauty and glory in each other's life.

- Have you found your favorite season yet?"

About Piece:

About Piece:

The original inspiration for my piece, Vogelfrei, were photos I took of the various shapes and patters formed by overground train electrical wires. In 2012 I spent several months in Moers/Germany as an artist in residence. Moers is a town on the edge of the Ruhr valley, an old industrial and coal mining region which has an extensive rail network. I love the seemingly endless combinations of the electrical wires and connectors suspended in the air which are interrupted by pylons and masts and I tried to somewhat capture this texture in my composition.

About Piece:

When I started writing Promises in September of 2014, I imagined the orchestra as an enormous machine relentlessly chugging away to accomplish some sort of task, or moving towards a goal of some kind. But, even as I got a little deeper into composing the piece, I still wasn’t sure what the goal was. Should the music grow bigger? Should it get smaller and smaller? Should it push so hard that it breaks apart? Eventually one of my teachers said to me: “This music seems like it’s promising something. You just have to decide whether or not it’s going to break its promise.” This made me think not only about the concept of a musical promise, but also about some of the promises that I’ve kept and those that I’ve broken in my life. The music started to represent something more personal and profound, and I composed the bulk of the piece with these thoughts in mind. In the end, I don’t know whether the piece keeps its promise, but I like to think it does.

About Piece:

The composer imagines a journey under the celestial sky. The reddish star of Aldebaran, among many, symbolizes eternity. The traveler follows it, but depending on the altitude and the latitude, the traveler’s viewpoint during his ongoing journey in relation to the star has never been the same. Ever changing is therefore the nature of unchanging.

The focal pitch of On Aldebaran is F#. Its pitch identity is ambiguous and arbitrary, implied by the constant conflict among multiple sets of harmonic patterns in different rhythms moving alongside. The tone color of F# is composed by mixed ensemble, either well blended or extremely contrasted. The form of the piece is also open to interpretation, not limited to be perceived as a composed-through movement or multiple sections. On Aldebaran draws from the composer’s memory of the tune from Nan-quan music and tributes to Japanese Gagaku. The orchestration grants the harmony a greater role to form stratum, eventually becomes a confluence of everything without boundaries.

About Piece:

Since the time I first began composing, I had a predilection for writing dance music. In fact, one of my earliest compositions for orchestra paid homage to the Viennese waltzes so popular during the fin-de-siècle and attempted to deconstruct the waltz into something of my own. Disharmony of the Spheres is my more mature take on a similar idea. Written during the fall of 2011, Disharmony is the fifth and final movement of my second symphony. It borrows the traditional Scherzo and Trio form but quickly devolves into something entirely different. The “scherzo” section resembles a danse macabre, and the “trio” is ethereal and light; however the delineation between the two sections disintegrates as themes from the “scherzo” and “trio” collide. This collision sets a course for chaos, redirecting the classical “harmony of the spheres” to disharmony. 

About Piece:

Love and death, are two revolving themes in the novels of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, particularly in his Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore.  In his seductive and enigmatic narration, death is sorrow but also beautiful.  I am deeply impressed by his stories and decided to write a series of works in 2008.  Beyond the Life is the title given to this series of works. But it is by no means that I am depicting any scene of his story in the music, indeed, the music is a mystical reflection upon the reading experiences.  The title means the death of a beloved one has become part of another's life; death and life are not in opposite direction, indeed the death of a beloved one would somehow determine how the people around live their lives.
The music divides into four sections. The opening section starts with a wistful oboe melody, representing the longing for a beloved but lost one.  Two motives from this melody will be further developed and transformed in the later sections.  There is a transition leading to an exciting section that develops rhythmically by means of changing meters and metric modulations, and it contrasts with the pervious section as well as the next one, which is quite static and features a transparent orchestral texture and color. In the final section, materials form the second section comes back, and getting  more intensified.  When the music is approaching its climax, a vibrant orchestral texture is created by accelerating the tempo, and increasing the dynamics and musical activities. 
The oboe melody comes back in the coda, the music ends with a surprising chord, letting the  tension suspended in the mid air.
Though in the same series, Beyond the Life I,  which is scored for solo violin, only shares the same philosophical concept with Beyond the Life II.  These two works are not required to perform side by side, and should be musically treated as independent works. 

About Piece:

Symphony No. 3 was written in memory of my father, who passed away two years ago. It is a one-movement work containing several sections of contrasting character, including three primary melodic structural elements and textural materials. I first composed the three melodic materials, which together symbolize my complex feelings about missing my father. The intensely dramatic middle sections depict the time that I and other family members flew back to Taiwan to be with him during his treatment. This process was a precious journey for my family, during which we encountered sadness and depression. The three primary ideas are linked to three recurring melodic themes: the triplet pattern by woodwinds (doubled by piano), the long lyric contour by the strings, and the lively repetitive 16th-note rhythm. These three thematic materials are juxtaposed, intertwined, and interlaced with one other throughout. Those sixteenth-note figures function as decoration interwoven with the other two themes. In the middle sections, I also added new pitch material inspired by the Taiwanese folksong, Gao Shan Qing (???, or The Green, High Mountain). Finally, the music of the last section turns to a more peaceful mood, in which I depict my family's gratitude for the time we spent together.
 
In sum, Symphony No. 3 makes ample use of three primary materials, to create rhythmic vitality, complex textures, multiple melodic contours, and dramatic dynamic changes, all taking place concurrently.

About Piece:

In this piece I tried to follow the narrative of an idea, first from the initial thought, and then flowing through all of the inner dialogue that invariably ensues (the questioning, the doubt, the enthusiasm, the certainty etc) before it gains enough momentum to manifest in actual physical form. In the process of following this trajectory, my challenge was to keep an improvisational flow through the sometimes quickly changing moods and get through to the end within the time frame of five to six minutes. By far, the most challenging aspect of composing this piece was the time limit, the creative tension created by this limitation I am sure helped shape the dynamics of the piece.

About Piece:

This piece is a musical expression of the process of meditating on a mantra. Although the mantra – a three note repeated theme - is continuous (with a distracting theme disrupting
the meditative pace at certain points) the varying harmonic colors help describe the various moods and shadings of mental thought that unfolds as the meditation progresses.
Beginning with a deep meditative pulse and ending with the jubilation of being released from the world of the body, enlightenment is achieved.

About Piece:

No American city has as central a place in music history as New York City, serving as the birthplace of both salsa and hip hop, as well as a thriving home for jazz, rock and blues for over 100 years. The city’s culture, a confluence of nationalities from around the world, has produced vital folk music scenes across the five boroughs, each informing the city’s listeners with music and dance traditions from both locally grown and far-away cultures. New York’s Brazilian population, concentrated largely in Astoria and Manhattan’s Rua 46, is one such community that is becoming an increasingly vital part of New York’s cultural landscape. With Brazilian Day reportedly drawing over 1 million people into the city last year, many can identify with the impromptu formations of an intricate, ebullient samba batucada on the corners of city blocks, where amateur musicians, whether rich or poor, black or brown or white, pick up instruments—a drum, a scraper, a shaker—to create grooves enviable by many professional bands in other parts of the world. Such percussion jams often elicit the participation of nearby amateur singers and dancers.  This shared music can go on for hours.

The strength of community that is formed by the creation of music such as the samba is perhaps one of the most distinguishing trademarks of Brazilian music, and is of particular import to any major metropolis where fostering a sense of community will help drive citywide habits of mind. With Mayor Bloomberg enacting Climate Week to kick-start collaboration between the public, organizations, and private businesses to tackle climate change, as well as the citywide efforts of GreeNYC to encourage civic engagement with regard to environmental stewardship, the music of the samba acts as a symbol of combined effort—one where people of all backgrounds and abilities can play a small part in a far-reaching whole, as well as one that, through the thunder of drums, song and dance, predicts a more collective, brighter New York. 

Samba Koocho Hairy Boocho illuminates many qualities of the samba genre—itself a result of five centuries of Portuguese, African, and Amerindian rhythms, dances, and harmonies working together—to symbolize the powerful results of shared ideas.  The piece blends Latin rhythms with African music styles, exploding with the sounds of drums and bright instrumentation, and highlights the interplay between the up-tempo duple beat and the three dance steps that are performed in each bar of a samba, creating a mélange of both alternating and simultaneous duple and triple meters. The resulting samba is decidedly of the City: with music that erupts with the blare of horns, moves urgently from start to finish, and contains as its foundation a theme that bumps, shouts, leaps, ducks underneath, reacts to others, and explodes into a million pieces all without losing its identity or sacrificing its uniqueness of spirit.

About Piece:

The bottom of the ocean is one of the few places on Earth that remains largely unexplored.  Deep down in the Abyssal Zone, 13,000 feet below the surface, a strange menagerie of marine life manages to survive the crushing ocean pressures and freezing temperatures.  Shrouded in total darkness, bioluminescent creatures thrive on geothermal vents, while large-jawed anglerfish and giant squid sift through the sediment for food. On the 23rd of January, 1960, the Swiss research bathyscaphe Trieste became the first (and only) manned vessel to reach an area of the zone known as the Challenger Deep. 
The Abyssal Zone is a monument to explorers of the unknown, a slow descent into a region filled with beauty that defies its inhospitable landscape.  Safe within the bathyscaphe, the listener is witness to the marvelous and dangerous deep.   
At the same time, it pays homage to other musical explorers who took the plunge into uncharted depths.  Harmonically and formally, the piece mirrors the voyage of the Trieste, descending from the familiar to the bizarre and back again.  The primary theme is a scalar descent of two perfect fourths, and its contour generates most of the harmonic material of the piece.   While writing The Abyssal Zone, I held to my belief that a composer’s responsibility is not simply to explore uncharted waters but to “report back” in such a way that the listener can best imagine the journey for his or herself.  An effective storyteller plays to the strengths of the psyche, and the human imagination responds best to contrast, to expectation and to surprise.  The hope is that the audience will imagine a more vivid Challenger Deep with the aid of the orchestra.

About Piece:

Two Rivers is a single-movement work, which is inspired by the life my grandfather, Jacob Marschak who passed away long before I was born. Jacob (known affectionately as Jascha) was born in Kiev, Ukraine to a Jewish family in 1898. According to his memoirs, Kiev was a city with two rivers: “The river Dnieper overflows the lowlands every spring, and the Slobodka, on the opposite side, is completely flooded”. Something about the image of these two rivers coexisting in the same city, each with its own path and character, reminds me of the trajectory of his life, and also seemed like an elegant structure for a piece.

As a young man, Jascha became active in the Menshevik Party (the social democratic party). In his memoirs, he recounts struggles with Anti-Semitism and political persecution. He even served two months in a Czarist prison for political agitation. When the communists started to consolidate their power, he left Kiev for the Caucasus. There, though barely twenty, he served briefly as Minister of Labor in a short-lived  autonomous republic.  After some narrow escapes, he emigrated to Germany and began building his life as a scholar. He fled the Nazis for England in 1933 and his career flourished at Oxford. Various professorships kept leading the family west: to New York, Chicago, New Haven, and finally Los Angeles. 

Jascha managed to find his way to a stable and fulfilling life, while few of his friends and family back home could say the same. There is a clear dichotomy then, between his early life in Russia and Germany, and his life in England and America, and I am attempting to represent the two very different ‘rivers’ in my music. 

The first half (‘river’) of the piece is in a constant state of flux. Beginning with the opening jagged gesture, each passage seems to lead somewhere significant, but never settles on anything for very long. We hear moments of sorrowful blues, pessimistic harmonies, and even a hint of mournful klezmer from a solo clarinet.

In contrast, after a blues-infused introduction, the second ‘river’ is much more playful and rollicking. The jagged opening gesture is reharmonized and given a jazz-tinged treatment while the harmony seems hopeful and optimistic. 

In composing the piece, I was hoping to ignite some kind of connection to this great man I never had the fortune to meet. And while we are separated by time and space, we share a bloodline, and I do feel a curious new way of identifying with him through my compositional process.

About Piece:

If you find yourself kayaking on a lake near the Fukushima Nuclear Plant that was damaged during the Earthquake in Japan, is it fun or perilous? Maybe a bit of both? Crazy?  My imagination went wild when my friend invited me kayaking there, and a combination of thoughts both horrific and mundane ensued.  What could possibly happen kayaking near the “other mountain?” This orchestral segment takes one through this imagined kayak ride.

About Piece:

The tone Poem Mind’s Eye Inverted, borrows from the jazz musicians experience and explores the outward communication of ideas that are instinctual, visceral and intuitive, through lyrical musical gestures. An abstract dialogue between the woodwinds, brass and strings in the middle section of the piece alludes to the improvisational interaction that happens in a jazz setting. Parts of the composition employs what I call tone fields, which are subsets of available tonal pitches that varies in each octave.

About Piece:

In the last few pieces that I’ve written, I’ve been obsessed with finding the “ghost in the machine” – that is, I’ll imagine some great big engine or device that is mechanically cranking out music, and over the course of the piece I’ll try to uncover the spirit within that machine and the core emotion that seems to be driving the whole process.  This piece, Thank You for Waiting, is the first one in a while where I didn’t have any kind of conceptual mechanical device in mind.  Nevertheless, I can’t help but notice some similarities to these older pieces.  The music is initially set off by something one could easily imagine as a giant car horn or alarm, and over the next 14 minutes a melody unwinds, in various states of strength and decay, that seems relentless in its momentum.  It is a melody that, in my mind, never lands or completes itself.  The title of this piece, Thank You for Waiting, could easily serve as a note to any audience of my music, but here specifically it expresses my hope that the unsettled and unresolved nature of the musical material will be heard as a texture in and of itself, and that the “waiting” on the part of the listener will become its own reward.  Additionally, as this piece was my doctoral dissertation in composition at the University of Southern California, the title is a very direct message to my wife, family and professors, all of whom did lots of waiting of their own while I finished this piece.

About Piece:

The word “strobe” conjures up quite a few images and concepts for me. These include jarring pulses of bright light, the stop-motion we might observe when watching someone or something move under a strobe light, and electronic dance music (or “EDM”). But while Strobe references all of these things - with sharp, pointed, scattershot rhythmic textures, erratic shrieks of brilliance and the occasional thumping kick drum, it also explores some fleeting images that don’t necessarily go together, like photographs that disappear before we can fully grasp them. The piece’s central section features soaring but wistful oboe and horn melodies, followed by a swing-jazz-like interjection with muted trumpets, snare drum and piano. But this suddenly vanishes into a darkly sonorous string chorale. While the acute brilliance of the early part of the piece eventually returns, this shadowy tinge persists in the background, especially at the end, when a shattering major chord in the winds and brass leaves behind wispy, glowing sonic artifacts that quickly vanish.

About Piece:

First Light traces an arc from veiled, shadowy origins through episodes of delicate interplay and contemplation. The hesitant primary theme, perhaps not recognized as such initially, confidently returns at the culmination of the piece before giving way to a subdued coda. McPherson says, “For me, dawn often suggests a night of work gone on too long, but this piece seeks to evoke a setting quite removed from urban life, the course of a day unburdened by the usual routines.

About Piece:

Sleeping I am carried..." is based on a melodic fragment from Alban Berg's Mombert setting "Schlafend trägt man mich," Op. 2, no. 2. I scatter references to this melody throughout, but perhaps most noticeable is the poetic connection between Mombert’s imagery and the atmosphere and form of my piece. In a dream, Mombert’s speaker traverses a great distance to return home, passing over a landscape whose rough outlines and blurry forms appear only in peripheral vision. My piece transports the listener through a hazy sonic landscape of overlapping musical ideas. One idea emerges and comes into focus, only to disappear again, as another comes to the fore. Wispy lines in the strings and flutes wind around each other, and rumbles ascend from the depths of the orchestra. In a moment of clarity near the end, Berg's vocal line appears complete as the bass line of a radiant chorale. This subsides, and the piece comes to rest on an extended melody in the strings, concluding with a final evaporation of the dream world.

About Piece:

Over the past year, I have fallen in love with visual art, poetry and film from the Surrealist movement. Both the expansive, dream-like worlds and confluence of juxtaposing elements created by artists like Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Frederico García Lorca and Frederico Fellini (amongst others) have appealed to me greatly and have had a significant influence on my work. This piece attempts to explore these contrasting emotional worlds: the dream-like and the juxtaposed. The first movement, “Dalí” is most significantly influenced by his famous painting The Persistence of Memory.

In Contrasted Perspectives, evocations of shimmering waves of heat, distant bells and clocks are interpolated with melodic fragments that foreshadow material that is to come in the second movement. The quasi-blurred, yet luminescent timbral world of this movement and its almost subconscious reference to the following movement aims to depict both the emotional and psychological state of one who is dreaming. The second movement, “Fellini,” deals with the idea of juxtaposition. What excites me most about Fellini’s films are how the unexpected juxtapositions of images and ideas create a multitude of emotional worlds ranging from mirth to terror to tragedy and everything in between. In this movement, I have attempted to explore the same idea of juxtaposition in two ways. On a surface level, I attempt to combine sounds that evoke elements of reality but are found in unlikely combinations in the hope of creating new and interesting sound worlds. On a structural level, I have juxtaposed various musical styles, from jazz, to Stravinsky, to an Italian-style opera overture while retaining a limited amount of musical material. In finding juxtaposition on both sonic and structural levels, I hope to have evoked this confluence of emotion that was expressed so vividly in the Surrealist movement.

About Piece:

This piece is constructed drawing from inspiration of multiple sources, namely the intense awakening I experienced during the JCOI intensive. I explore redirecting my language of improvisation, balancing those sensibilities and transferring that conception to the orchestra. This work also represents my ongoing exploration to utilize the principles of classical homeopathic healing to cultivate musical accompaniments to various human behavioral pathologies.

About Piece:

Portrait of a Moroccan Cantor singing about Love or Memories from a Place I’ve Never Been is a personal journey to be perceived it as an open love letter to Morocco and to my late Grandfather, Albert Elharrar who was born in Casablanca, 1937 and passed away four years ago. The inspiration is taken from Chapter 8, Verse 7 of ""Song of the Songs” wherein King Solomon, speaks about the tremendous power of love, comparing it to a fire that cannot be washed away even by the greatest rivers or to something that cannot be replaced or fixed even by the greatest fortunes in the world.  After several trips to old cassette stores in some very religious parts of Israel, I found a version of the verse that moved me the most being sang by a Moroccan Cantor. While writing, the image of my late grandfather kept coming up,  particularly his singing of the Shabbat dinner prayer I heard almost weekly while growing up.  

Ornaments, small fragments and key landing points in the Cantor’s lines as well as my own musical reflection of the text has become the “bread and butter” of the piece providing its main themes, motives and textural ingredients. The vocal element is apparent as well as usage of the Makammat (the middle eastern modal system), Moroccan Shaabi rhythms, aleatoric techniques and a transcription of the memory of my late grandfather singing the Shabbat prayer melody that is turned into a fugue - all of which wrapped by the words of the verse as an envelope for the entire endeavor.

About Piece:

While composing this piece I reflected on images of Harriet Tubman journeying -of Tubman's pounding African heart, the dark night sky and its wisdom, the wondrous miracle of freedom, the torture of circumstance, the gentleness of the field, the evil in humanity that menaced her Journey to liberate others. These images are woven into the work's sound fabric.

About Piece:

"Old Seven Mile" is the longest continuous bridge over open water, located in the Florida Keys. The first bridge built there, completed in 1935, still stands, but it’s a shadow of a newer bridge built in the 80’s. A drive on the new bridge provides views of the old, which is a ghost of the golden age of expansion in Florida. The image of the bridge stuck in my mind and returned to me in a series of dreams in which the old bridge was being constructed but never fully completed.  

The work conveys the idea of the bridge-in-progress with a broad theme that is ghosted in the beginning in the trumpets and low oboe that is expanded later in the piece. The frantic, insistent music of the beginning is an imagined scene of the construction of the bridge during a storm, with whirling winds, heavy machinery, and dredging boats working to connect the two islands together. The frantic construction is interrupted by a moment of solitude and beauty – a night full of stars on the water, before returning to the bustling activity of the construction. 

About Piece:

"Water Colors, for orchestra is inspired by the act and art of painting. The piece is based on two alternate themes: the first is played by the strings section and occasionally is accompanied by chords in the piano and harp. Like a painter who lets his brush move freely on the canvas, the melodic line moves freely up and down. The melody is pretty mellow, nothing about its rhythm, dynamic or intervals is too expressive or dramatic.

The second theme is in complete contrast, it is very rhythmic, loud and played by the brass section.

From time to time, between the two themes' appearance, there is a phrase that is divided between the entire orchestra which consists of a series of ascending and descending broken major triads.

The piece has three main sections, the first section contains the two themes that appear alternately a number of times. In the second section the order and organization that characterized the first section are now falling apart, the meter is not steady, the harmonic and melodic directions are not clear and the entire orchestra joins its forces together to create five big, loud and dramatic outbreaks. In this chaos, the first theme ""finds"" its way out, while the chaotic atmosphere dies, and that theme takes us to the third and last section which is based on the ascending/descending broken triads. The excitement is elevated and reaches a big climatic point at the end of the piece.
"

About Piece:

 For the Under Construction Reading Series I intend to continue my search for a new musical language, test my artistic ideas, and last but not least, have a priceless dialogue with the musicians about both the artistic and the pragmatic side of orchestral writing, during this rare and extraordinary opportunity of workshopping an orchestral work. I hope the piece will be direct, compelling and virtuosic, expressing an individual’s voice in today’s flood of choices, with today’s speed and spectacle, but as clear as a PowerPoint presentation and from a very personal and intimate perspective. Music, like life, is all about finding your way through difficult situations: the more challenging it becomes, the more rewarding the results. I’d like to hear that in music.

About Piece:

The concept for Icarus Dreamt is from the inspiration of Arthur Ganson’s kinetic sculpture, Machine with 23 Scraps of Paper, Henri Matisse’s collage, Icarus, and the Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus. Icarus Dreamt combines allusions to the fluttering scraps of paper in Ganson’s sculpture, lyrical gestures of Matisse’s collage, and the narrative trajectory of the Greek myth.

About Piece:

Rhythms and sounds can reveal the power of the invisible world. Turning the pages of the Nature’s Book of Life, one may re-discover a sense of mystery that is part and parcel of our existence. Learning to see the words that have not been written down gives one the ability to perceive the contours of light and darkness more clearly and understand the wind that brings change. The difference between a deeper communication with the forces of nature and a method of divination disappears as future and the past become intertwined.

About Piece:

Love and death, are two revolving themes in the novels of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, particularly in his Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore.  In his seductive and enigmatic narration, death is sorrow but also beautiful.  I am deeply impressed by his stories and decided to write a series of works in 2008.  Beyond the Life is the title given to this series of works. But it is by no means that I am depicting any scene of his story in the music, indeed, the music is a mystical reflection upon the reading experiences.  The title means the death of a beloved one has become part of another's life; death and life are not in opposite direction, indeed the death of a beloved one would somehow determine how the people around live their lives.

The music divides into four sections. The opening section starts with a wistful oboe melody, representing the longing for a beloved but lost one.  Two motives from this melody will be further developed and transformed in the later sections.  There is a transition leading to an exciting section that develops rhythmically by means of changing meters and metric modulations, and it contrasts with the pervious section as well as the next one, which is quite static and features a transparent orchestral texture and color. In the final section, materials form the second section comes back, and getting  more intensified.  When the music is approaching its climax, a vibrant orchestral texture is created by accelerating the tempo, and increasing the dynamics and musical activities. 

The oboe melody comes back in the coda, the music ends with a surprising chord, letting the  tension suspended in the mid air.

Though in the same series, Beyond the Life I,  which is scored for solo violin, only shares the same philosophical concept with Beyond the Life II.  These two works are not required to perform side by side, and should be 

About Piece:

Seed grew out of one of numerous rhythmic/melodic ideas that I'd jotted down and shelved. The original sketch was for piano and a couple of uncommitted melodic instruments. Following James Newton's advice to our group about bringing our unique voice to the medium, I wanted to organically incorporate my love of African and other non-Western-derived percussive rhythm, and counterpoint in my piece. I will expand my experience with writing for orchestra, especially strings and percussion, using both traditional and contemporary technique.

About Piece:

The Latin phrase “Et in Arcadia Ego” is a wonderful little line that nobody seems to know the actual meaning of. The words essentially translate, “I am also in Arcadia,” and are most famously known as the subject of two paintings by Nicolas Poussin from the seventeenth century. I first encountered the subject when reading an essay by the art historian Erwin Panofsky, in which he traces the evolution of interpretation of the phrase by artists. The main point of his thesis is that the phrase originally was seen as a memento mori, conveying the warning that even in paradise, there is also death (personified as the “I”). Over time this meaning was gradually reversed: even in death, one may find paradise. Other interpretations of the phrase Panofsky cites range from a depiction of “elegiac sentiment,” to meditations on the past, to simply depicting pastoral beauty as seen by an artist (the artist replacing death as the “I”), and everything in  between. Panofsky’s analysis, as well as the various artistic interpretations of the phrase, immediately struck me as a source for musical elaboration. It had everything: life, death, a pastoral setting, contemplation, emotion, humor, a concept (Arcadia) that appears in both intellectual discussion as well as pop culture, etc.. The resulting piece is an abstract reaction to the Latin subject and its various artistic guises. While nothing in the piece is a literal depiction, there are two ideas that stem directly from the life and death  images associated with the subject. The piece opens with atmospheric sounds made by the strings playing  unpitched material behind the bridge (a well-known technique for representing death in music thanks to Bernard Herrmann, though I do not use it in the same way as he). Against that, simple triadic gestures (the “life-blood” of tonal harmony) begin to pop out of the murk. Eventually, the music breaks into a fast, playful mood completely opposite to the introduction, exploring a variety of moods and colors.

About Piece:

The formal continuity of Proximate Spaces was suggested by competing ideas of the 1990’s surrounding the search for a unified theory to explain the fundamental forces, dimensional composition, and existence of matter in the known universe. Much of the pitch material derives from a two-octave mode (18 pitches in series) and three subset hexachords of that mode. The work develops the tension between mechanistic devotion to this mode and episodes of free chromaticism, between strictly repeating rhythmic patterns and rhythmic variation, between instrumentation according to families and a free exchange of musical ideas regardless of instrumental relation. Initially aligned with the mechanistic paradigms of mode and regular rhythmic patterns, in several places the piano breaks free and attempts to incite revolt against the piece’s system by abandoning strict adherence to these structures. Although some other members of the ensemble briefly depart from the system, ultimately—and especially rhythmically—the machine prevails. 

About Piece:

Burning (2014) for orchestra is inspired by my early musical years playing guitar in heavy metal bands. The aim of the work is to exploit the raw, visceral nature of metal music through driving rhythms, virtuoso string and woodwind writing, melodic hooks, and a hard edge. The opening gesture, resembling the lighting of a fuse, is intended to build over the course of the work ending in a blaze of activity that pushes the envelope to eleven.

Aside from a wealth of practical advice regarding score and part preparation I received through the initial reading, I was finally able to hear the piece after two-and-a-half months of non-stop work! For the next reading, I hope to correct some balance issues, thicken up some orchestration, expand some ideas while cutting others, and compose an ending. I felt that the piece was not heavy metal enough, so I plan to really go for it this time! While the reading in February went really well, I am planning on simplifying some ideas even more to make the rehearsal process go even smoother. I also can't wait to hear how the other composers' works have grown over these last few months!

About Piece:

"Ordway’s Symphony No. 3 was composed between July 2012 and March 2013 in Aspen, Philadelphia, and NYC. It unfolds in a single movement over twenty-two minutes. The first performance was given in 2013 by the Bates College Orchestra with the composer conducting. It has also been recorded by the Curtis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Hayes.

Though the work is abstract, the music is characterized by a sense of open space and gradual unfolding. The symphonic argument traces the distinction between the vast external permanence of natural landscape and the volatile subjectivity of our own inner lives."

About Piece:

Shadows of the Studio for Orchestra is my musical tribute to the glory days of Hollywood's "studio system," a factory-like production setup that allowed for the efficient, speedy creation and distribution of quality motion pictures, thousands of which are now considered cinema classics. This landmark era of filmmaking spanned from the rise of the major studios in the 1920s up until the studio system’s ultimate demise in the 1950s. During that illustrious period, movie moguls like Carl Laemmle at Universal, Daryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox, the Warner Bros., and Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer fame served as helms of production at their respective studios, reigning over a vast filmic empire the likes of which will surely never be seen again. As Shadows of the Studio begins, we walk through an old studio’s massive iron gates and into an abandoned soundstage, dust-filled and full of movie relics from days gone by. Out of this dark, funereal texture, the music suddenly starts to build, the studio roars back to life, and we are transported back to the glory days of Hollywood, circa 1940. Once the ratchety sounds of a film projector click us into full gear, a lush, sweeping theme enters, something akin to what one might have heard in a classic Hollywood film noir score. Our musical flashback is all hustle-and-bustle, in a sonic framework as clean and crisp as a motion picture produced by one of the  “majors.” As the composition continues, we take an evening flight through the Hollywood Hills, with filmmakers below still hard at work on the set, chic bars and nightclubs booming, spotlights flickering outside a premiere at Grauman’s Chinese  theatre, and of course that legendary white sign beaming off in the distance. Eventually the music reaches epic proportions, and Tinseltown is at last restored to its former glory. But this grandiose reimagining of a lost era is little more than a dream, and after an explosive climax the piece gradually fades out to its ghostly conclusion, sending the studio back into the shadows of the past.

About Piece:

Acanto is an architectonic ornamentation inspired by the leaves of a plant native to Mediterranean humid climates (acanthus mollis). In Portuguese or Spanish language it may also be written as a canto meaning as in ‘to sing’. 
The idea for this piece derives from the manipulation of a simple melodic cell, an ornament that travels through the work appearing in different instruments or combination of instruments, registers, and pitch/rhythmic mutations. Thus, the three movements represent varied textural realizations of the same ornament. Sometimes I use particular features of a movement across movement boundaries, resulting in an organic use of the concept of memory and anticipation. The third and last movement, Adagio molto, is modeled after the third movement of Three Places in New England by Charles Ives. Here, the use of ornamentation is expanded to form a simple lullaby played by the vibraphone while the rest of the orchestra plays transformations, mainly textural, of my original cell.

About Piece:

"our bliss, it comes in waves, my first full-length piece for orchestra, explores contrasting musical and thematic elements in hopes of peacefully achieving a sense of compromise.  Conceptually and aesthetically, I found myself reconciling disparate qualities such as: liquid vs. solid, diffused vs. concentrated, transparent vs. translucent (and/or opaque), exposed vs. obscured, rigid vs. flexible, primal (body) vs. transcendental (spirit), and diatonic harmony vs. pentatonic harmony.

The piece begins with pitched percussion, piano and horns attempting to establish themselves as thematic material. Their wave-like patterns are stark, naked and mechanical, and they become an important contrasting element when the other families of instruments finally enter. Through disjunctive, herky-jerky starts and stops that alternate between diatonic and pentatonic melodies, the percussion and horns eventually arrive at the main theme of the piece. As the piece progresses, every repetition of the theme introduces a new family of instruments.

The strings, woodwinds and brass each stretch and pull the flow in a collage-like fashion. These instrumental families move in wave patterns of different rates and virtually eradicate any sense of a constant pulse. Throughout the piece, these families always appear as mass sonorities; their size and depth are controlled by dynamics, register and gesture. Entrances usually appear out of nowhere and either overlap or jump cut with the waves that come before and after.  The overall effect is that of time being bent or sculpted, and the cyclical return of the main theme helps create a non-linear journey.  Harmonically, the strings and brass are often diametrically opposed (diatonic vs. pentatonic) while the woodwinds explore the gray areas in between. The piece climaxes with the synchronization of the different families of instruments, each a tributary in a flowing river of sound.  A sparkling, shimmering brass finale then overtakes this peaceful stream.

This piece is dedicated to Noah Podgursky, the newest member of my family.
"

About Piece:

In Pali, Pubbanimitta can be translated as foreboding. Tis piece uses folk-like material to protray the Erath's atmosphere and, later on, more complex textures depicting climate change and the natural disasters that has caused.

About Piece:

Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky (2016) contrasts moments of delicate sparseness with passages of rich textures and emphatic lyricism.  Throughout the work, the fragments introduced in the sparse, faltering opening gradually coalesce into distinct melodic ideas. The title comes from a poem called “Starlight” by William Meredith. Meredith uses constellations to explore, among other things, our natural fear of randomness and our instinctive desire to find or create meaningful patterns.

About Piece:

The challenge I faced working on this is project has been, primarily, for me to learn how to utilize the “orchestra” with my jazz sensibilities and concepts, which, at the outset,  are not highly revered by the traditionalist.  Breaking any tradition is a daunting task. For me, It has been both daunting and exhilarating to work on this project. I have always appreciated and respected all of the European and American Master Composers for their vast skills and craft. This respect and appreciation has grown enormously, to say the very least.   I have gained immense knowledge, new friendships, and empowerment by participating in the JCOI/ACO workshop.  This priceless opportunity has taught me that I must first become more articulate, efficient, and meticulous in developing my score to convey my musical thoughts. Whether the music is liked or not, isn’t the real issue, but can one convey these ideas clearly to the conductor, which will be clear to the musicians, as well. From there, the music will speak for itself!  I am clearly more smitten with the composition process more than ever.  Below is a brief general statement, per your request.

About Piece:

Composed in the fall of 2007, the music presented in "And After the Dark," often evokes feelings of rage juxtaposed with periods of contentment, elements of frustration relieved by triumph, the calming of the convulsive, and the darkness succumbing to clarity. My goal in this work, was to connect these disparities on levels including the artistic, intellectual and spiritual. And after the dark eplores the interaction among multiple varying figures presented throughout the orchestra. The piece focuses on three distinctly contrasting motives that provide the foundation for the work's harmonic, rhythmic and textural development. These three figures, a rising minor third, a sextuplet comprised of a pattern of 4 consecutive pitches followed by a rest and falling second, and a contrasting lyrical melody, all take on independent roles that aid the contrast of each figure to create a sound world rich in diverse character and color. The result is a work that hinges on the relationships of the contrasting: both evidently presented in the music and the allusive.

About Piece:

Luminis (2015) is a set of fantasy variations on original musical motifs. The latin term ""luminis"" (singular genitive of ""lumen"" in English) represents the possession of Light. Throughout piece, the original motifs remain relatively unchanged. However the surrounding musical environment changes constantly. As the variations develop, they progressively describe the encirclement of light by darkness. Even when describing musically what could be total darkness, the original motifs remain relatively untouched. This is intended to give Light a ubiquitous quality to state that regardless of the conditions surrounding it, the energy emanating from this point—whatever it may symbolize for us individually—reinforces an inextinguishable radiancy and omnipresence.

The tempi markings for the variations are:

Muy brillante (very bright)
Tenue, opaco, débil (Dim, opaque, weak)
Rodeado de sombras (Surrounded by shadows)
Total oscuridad (Total darkness)
Poca luz, tenue, distante (Low light, dim, distant)
Luz absoluta (Absolute Light)

As the two elements of light and darkness are opposite in that one is the absence of the other, the effect of no change on the original motifs despite the constant change of the musical variations might suggest that, although opposite in nature, they conceive their existence within the same vertex. 

About Piece:

"Sombras" in Portuguese means shadows, the conceptual inspiration for the work. Sombras depicts multiple, colored shadows as orchestral textures, motifs, and gestures. Light is represented through time; as the piece progresses, shadows overlap and transform, sculpting the structure of the composition.  The work unfolds in three sections, fast-slow-fast, and the form represents the overall perspective shifts casted by the orchestra evoking the transformation, distortion, expansion or contraction of shadows. Sombras was composed in the fall of 2009 and is 8 minutes in duration.

About Piece:

N.A.S.A. experienced a brief period of deep consternation in December 2004 when scientists discovered a half-mile-wide asteroid on what was then thought to be a collision course with Earth. They named the asteroid “Apophis” after the mythological enemy of the Egyptian sun-god Ra. While N.A.S.A. has since reneged on their prediction that Apophis would collide with our planet within the next 30 years, the possibility of total annihilation still looms over our heads in some way.
I do not often use doom and gloom as inspiration for my music, but when I heard Stephen Hawking recount this harrowing tale on an episode of his Discovery channel miniseries “Into the Universe,” I could not help but conjure a musical reaction in my mind’s ear. The resulting piece is this eight-minute tour-de-force for orchestra in a moto perpetuo style, as the asteroid comes barreling toward its celestial target with immeasurable force.
In an act of artistic denial of this hopeless scenario, I dared to search for hidden joy. I believe I have found some. Perhaps there is a silver lining to knowing that everyone on the planet will suffer the same fate at the same time, together as one human race. If we all received the grim news that there will be no tomorrow for anyone, would there be any time for slander, for injustice, for war?
I would never wish such a dreadful nightmare to come true, and I am happy that N.A.S.A. withdrew their eschatological prediction. However, in a moment of dark imagination, I chose to musically illustrate a global killer hurdling toward Earth, while humanity sings rising melodies in defiance of the force of nature that will never break its spirit. Perhaps we do not need this story to be true to learn from it.

About Piece:

Beyond the Heart is my first work for orchestra, and it draws on the expressive gestures of the Romantic and post-Romantic orchestral works I grew up listening to, seeking to wear its heart on its sleeve. It also moves in the opposite direction, separating the orchestra into small groups or individuals who act almost independently of each other, sometimes with the same goals, at other times opposed. The conflict between the sweeping gestures and these more atomized processes is the central thread of the piece; its title reflects this tension.

About Piece:

As I was walking up Sixth Avenue in Manhattan one day, I couldn't help but think about how many different people would travel over that block of side walk for so many reasons, and yet co-exist, cross and follow in each other's paths. Jqxz explores the concept of multiplicity of musical ideas that share the same frame. Some develope, some are static, some relate, some conflict, and some do it all. -not unlike the marvelous cacophony of that block in Manhattan. 

About Piece:

ploy, pivot (2014) is the first work in a series of pieces of mine that attempt to create a narratological structure using the superposition of music with completely different characters. This is clear, for instance, in the harp solo music, which is always punctuated and interrupted by other abrasive, stubborn gestures. Other instances of interruption govern and organize most of the rhetoric in the music – either by cancelling or triggering different textures, layers and affects. The piece was originally written for a reading session at the University of Chicago, under conductor Cliff Colnot.

About Piece:

rite. apotheosis. is an experiment in (melo-?) drama.  The frenetic and exaggerated gestures in the work are typical of my recent music, and some have termed me an “expressionist.”  I frequently dabble in humor, but this work seems to have little of it – although the sparse “cha-cha-cha” sections are light and tiptoed; maybe they will make some in the audience smile.  The musical material is drawn from and moves across a special set of seven-note scales (major, harmonic minor, melodic minor, and quasi-octatonic).  But my building materials are less relevant than the emotional import of the music.  There is no plot to this music per se, but the title reflects the general narrative progression and shift of mood that takes place

About Piece:

Two Variations on Ascent into the Empyrean is a pair of short orchestral movements inspired by my children’s artwork entitled “Rainbow for Mama, with Door”(Thora, at age 3 yrs. 9 mos.) and  “Rocketship and Blast-off Fire” (Otto, at age 3 yrs. 11 mos. The drawings, for me, reflect the children’s fascination with the immensity of our world and provide a glimpse into the immensity of the worlds inside their minds.  Both transport us into the heavens – the Empyrean – and beyond.  But while Thora enters this realm via a small golden portal, Otto is propelled skyward by the colossal power of a rocket, leaving in his wake a spectacular rush of fire and smoke.  Two Variations on Ascent into the Empyrean was composed for and premiered by conductor Glenn Block and the Illinois State University Symphony Orchestra. 

About Piece:

Grosse Concerto began as my personal struggle with the symphonic genre, and specifically the overwhelming body of work that is the German symphonic tradition. Given this genre’s de facto—and seemingly never-ending—status as the “pinnacle” of “Classical music,” I felt it was important to confront it head-on. The title alludes to the Baroque form of “concerto grosso” and serves as a metaphor for the entire piece, which is a kind of “big concerto” or “concerto for orchestra."

The work features a broad array of styles that waft in and out, as if having a conversation through time; I wish to explore the ways in which these seemingly disparate styles interact and form a cohesive musical narrative. A main theme in the full orchestra alternates with musical episodes played by subsections, in which are embedded solos for various instruments, creating a “concerto within a concerto”. Each of the episodes features music echoing a past time period, such as Baroque, jazz, and modernist pointillism. This adds up to what are often very sharp contrasts—there are several rapid shifts in the music, from one texture to another without any transition, like an abrupt cut between scenes in a film or a sudden change of lighting in a play.

About Piece:

When the world of tennis lost Arthur Ashe to AIDS in February of 1993, it lost not only one of the sport’s finest players, but also a role model for African-Americans, a man who publicly fought racism and other obstacles to achieve his goal in his chosen profession. Moved by his untimely passing, I decided to compose a work in remembrance of his participation in tennis, as well as his role in the civil rights movement, his quiet dignity and his internal struggle with the disease that took his life.

Scored for an augmented chamber orchestra of winds in pairs, three horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, two percussionists, harp, piano and strings, A point served... opens with a solo xylophone that serves as a figurative representation of the game, which is soon joined by the vibraphone, harp and piano, its pointillistic musings underpinned by a long elegiac line in the strings spelling out Ashe’s name. This theme undulates into a metamorphic transformation within the orchestra, subtly manipulating and infusing the thematic material with chromatic and modal elements, while the winds and brass sections take up their own interpretation of a tennis game, their forces representing the strife and conflict that occurred during Ashe’s lifetime, building up to a climax before subsiding into a brief segment for string choir representing Ashe’s quiet personality in private, which is represented by the cello section and solo viola, before the final conflicts of his life return, sometimes heroic, sometimes tragic until the entire orchestra thunders in a fanfare-like section in which the song “We Shall Overcome” is alluded to in the brass, building to a climax before being abruptly cut off into silence, resuming with the xylophone playing the game, a final heroic sound from muted trumpets and a brief line of reflective eloquence from the English Horn and French Horn, subsiding into silence as the ball drops on the tennis court.

About Piece:

As the son of a preacher, I grew up hearing the exciting stories of the Bible. Plagues of Egypt is the ?rst of several pieces that will be apart of a larger work entitled, Bible Stories. The goal of this piece is to recount the tale from the point of view of the Pharaoh, who stubbornly holds the freedom of the Jewish people. With the entrance of each plague, light metallic sounds of the harp, celeste and percussion are coupled with static strings depicting the spirit of God. From the frogs and boils to the swarm of pestilence, Pharaoh refuses let the Jewish people go. Two heavy jabs are used in the orchestra throughout the entirety of the piece to show Pharaoh’s “hardened heart”. It is only with the “Angel of Death” which takes the life of Pharaoh’s ?rst born child that these motions are climaxed with his despair. The jabs are eventually broken down to single instruments by the conclusion as his stubbornness is brought to a desperate whimper.

About Piece:

Eastern Point is a short orchestral study based on the late seascapes of Winslow Homer. Though there were many of these twelve or so paintings which inspired this piece in some way, I focused specifically on two – one called West Point, Prout’s Neck and the one which gave this piece it’s title, Eastern Point.
The piece evokes both the somber mood of the latter, all the while on an inexorable trajectory towards an ecstatic burst of spray – suggested by the cycle of visual activity in the former painting – a central gulf into which the viewer feels “pulled”, and then flung out in one of Homer’s characteristic powerful crashing waves.

About Piece:

My piece is entitled The Wyoming Matter, named after a bizarre and widely unknown incident in the ports of New York during the 1940’s. My goal in writing this piece is to both experiment with the musical ideas and techniques discussed during the summer intensive, and to write for this new unfamiliar instrumentation while attempting to maintain my own voice and style. The first minute begins with great intensity and dissonance and is very densely orchestrated and establishes most of the harmonic and melodic material that will be used in the entire composition. The main theme appears in different duet groupings after this exposition and the piece mellows. The middle section of the composition will feature much lighter orchestration, but will eventually return to the intensity of the beginning. At the end a slower tempo begins. My plan is to continue with similar melodic material using the juxtaposition of duple and triple meters to set up a groove. 

About Piece:

A calanque is like an inlet, a land mass that juts out into a body of water. Frequent hikes among these formations in Southern France gave rise to a strange phenomenological effect: I was often flattened by a vertigo-inducing view of dizzying cliffs careening lines the more I stared. Entre les Calanques is, in part, an attempt to record this pull and push of space and the simultaneous perceptions of rushing movement and static tableau. More abstractly, it is an orchestral excercise in growth - upwards and downwards, outwards and inwards 0 and collapse.

About Piece:

Brittle Fracture attempts to depict this type of structural failure in musical terms.  Inspired by modulation and temporal manipulation techniques commonly employed in pop music production, the piece is based on a simple four-note piano theme that is performed as if it were being processed through an echo unit.  The piano’s resulting spectral content is selectively captured, extended, and transformed by the orchestral instruments, effectuating a long-range rhythmic, melodic, registral, articulative, and dynamic intensification.  Throughout this textural crescendo, the music undergoes various types and degrees of stress that attempt to disrupt the constant musical flow.  At the peak of the process the music finally buckles under its own weight, causing an abrupt rupture in the structure. A series of these fractures occurs, slicing between two contrasting musical surfaces until the inevitable and complete dissolution of their constituent materials.
This work was originally composed as a work for chamber orchestra (18 players) in 2013 as part of a residency with the CUNY Graduate Center’s Contemporary Music Ensemble. It received its premiere in that form on May 8, 2013 in Elebash Hall, New York, with Whitney E. George conducting. Brittle Fracture has been awarded a 2013 Sir Ernest MacMillan Award by the SOCAN Foundation.

About Piece:

Ignatian Exercises is a reference to two things: first, the famous Catholic Spiritual Exercises penned by the basque saint and founder of the Society of Jesus, Ignacio de Loyola, and second, the town of my birth, St. Ignatius, Montana. I stumbled upon the Spiritual Exercises while I was researching the early cultures of western Montana. From this research, I discovered the long and dark history of St. Ignatius, and more specifically, the heartbreaking and disgraceful conflict between the early Catholic settlers and the Bitterroot Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d'Oreilles tribes.
Inspired to think more deeply about this conflict, I decided to write a work drawing inspiration from my memories of St. Ignatius, my Catholic upbringing, and the pan-tribal culture of the Flathead Indian Reservation. The music acts as a descent into these memories and moves quickly from idea to idea, as if trying to conjure up these distant impressions. Some of the ideas are murky, some are crystalline, but all try to represent a distinct memory from my youth. These memories are continually interrupted by an antagonistic D-natural, which slowly bends in and out of tune. This is meant to represent the idea of inevitability: the inevitable loss of memory, the inevitable destruction of the western landscape, and the inevitable loss of the native cultures.

About Piece:

Polychrome literally means “being of many or various colors” – in this work, I wanted to explore this idea in a dramatic context.  The “colors” of the work are bold and bright, and often come together in explosive combinations.  In a formal sense, I fashioned the work out of shifting blocks of music.  The first half of Polychrome features the alternation of two contrasting colors: the first is dazzling and bright, while the second is coarse and dark.  With each return, the “color” of the music is shaded differently, like it is being viewed through a prism.  After one final flash of brilliance, a shrieking chord in the woodwinds and strings signifies the beginning of the second half of the work.  There are two “primary” colors in this section as well: bold, dramatic chords, which gradually migrate from the woodwinds to the whole orchestra; and a softer hue introduced by the lyrical oboe solo and hushed string chords.  Gradually, these colors are brought together, and the climax of the work occurs where the roles become reversed – the music of the oboe solo is exploded into cacophonous bursts of woodwinds and strings, and the whole orchestra collapses onto a single note.  After these incredibly violent collisions, the music fades away into slow, sustained echoes of earlier sounds.

About Piece:

The underlying impetus behind “Convergence” comes from the incredible diversity of sounds and musical styles with which we are surrounded in the 21st century. The “convergence” of these diverse musical genres results in the breaking down of seemingly artificial stylistic barriers that tend to inhibit interdisciplinary compositional experimentation. Through this coalescence of  disparate elements, “Convergence” seeks to bring a sense of the spontaneity, energy, and rhythmic drive of jazz improvisation and urban pop music to the orchestra.

About Piece:

In one Chinese tradition of painting, the artists intentionally leave large blank spaces in their renditions of natural landscapes. The blank spaces are intended to grant the viewers more room in using their imaginations. Now I know what you're thinking - but don't worry - I didn't compose this piece with large, silent spaces, leaving the listeners to imagine their own music. The title, Leaving White, refers instead to my own experience writing this piece. As a composer, I have found inspiration for my music in a variety of places: photography, life experiences, traffic signs, the periodic table of elements, and even internet search engines. But with this piece my compositional process was much different. I consciously tried to remove all extra-musical associations from my mind in order to leave my mind blank; thus leaving white.