Browse Items (868 total)

• Ghosts of Cluny

  The Benedictine Abbey of Cluny, established in 910 by William I of Aquitaine, was the leading center of monasticism in the Middle Ages and boasted the largest church in Christendom prior to the 16^th-century reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.  Today only the bell tower of the church and a fraction of the great abbey remain, having been devastated by plundering during the French Revolution.  Otherworldly echoes of the millennium-old ruins resound in Ghosts of Cluny, a piece which evokes both the sacredness and the immense acoustic space of the former monastery.

  The work was realized in the IMPACT Center at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and was named a Finalist in the International Composition Competition “Città di Udine,” ninth edition.

• Wunderkind

  “Wunderkind” is a well-known German term historically applied to a person who possesses an extraordinary talent or brilliance (particularly musical) at an early age.  The creative impetus for this work was the desire to explore the intellectual workings of a developing child prodigy, the electronic component used to expand the palette of such a restricted instrument while representing the mind’s ear of the child.  The opening cadenza begins clumsily as the “child” seemingly explores the instrument for the first time.  Musical ideas begin to mature, congeal, and find meaning.  The fixed media playback begins after two minutes of solo, and a complex and harmonically-saturated sound world emerges from and interacts with performed gestures, meant to be perceived as imagined musical structures, astonishingly advanced for a mere child.  All of the sounds in the fixed media were created by recording and processing my own toy piano.

  Wunderkind was awarded First Prize in the 2013 Prix Destellos competition, mixed media category.

• Behind the Back

  Work for pipa (traditional Chinese lute) and electronics (triggered fixed media and some live processing). Commissioned by The Little Giant Chinese Chamber Orchestra for Su Yun-Han.
  
  The musical inspiration for this piece comes from my fascination with the murals of the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, China. The artwork famously depicts musicians performing while dancing and flying though the air. One image – that of a woman playing pipa behind her back – is so iconic that many Chinese dancers train in order to recreate her graceful pose. Behind the Back alludes to the ceremonial atmosphere of the Mogao murals while imagining the sort of music provided by the acrobatic women depicted within – a music which incorporates passages suggestive of dance and aerial maneuvers. At all times, the virtuosity and lyricism of the pipa is the focal point.

• Surveillance State for soprano, alto saxophone and live electronics

  A 19-minute work in three movements examining the impact of the National Security Agency's (NSA) massive surveillance programs on the condition of Americans' Fourth Amendment right to privacy.
  
  

  In early June 2013, security infrastructure analyst Edward Snowden leaked numerous classified documents detailing the comprehensive global surveillance programs and tactics carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA) in the U.S. and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the U.K.  This revelation prompted widespread and heated concern over U.S. and British governmental policies in the bulk collection of private communications and internet data of citizens and foreign nationals as a means to counteract terrorist activities at home and abroad.  Surveillance State for soprano, alto saxophone and live electronics, op. 10, takes as its subject the impact of massive government surveillance on the condition of American Idealism, specifically in matters of the individual’s right to personal freedom and privacy, in the years following the events of 9/11.

  Part 1: Snowden / Interlude: Sacrifice Liberty / Part 2: Scherzo – The Fourth Amendment / Epilogue: The Leviathan

• Driftwood Box Puzzle

  Structured improvisatory musical figures with strictly notated sections create contrasting textures juxtaposed with one another.
  
  Driftwood Box Puzzle mixes structured improvisatory musical figures with strictly notated sections to create contrasting textures juxtaposed with one another. The resulting form of such interactions may be analogous to a labyrinthine kind of musical game in which the instruments and electronics wind around each other in order to find a “way out.”

• Monochrome Variations

  Spectral work that uses color notation to indicate gradual shifts in timbre.
  
  Commissioned by cellist Craig Hultgren, this work takes on the idea of developing simultaneously two separate pieces juxtaposed side by side. The two disparate pieces (one dealing with high, fast microtonal passages; the other dealing with slow timbral transitions) are unified by similar pitch materials based around a C- fundamental harmonic series that transforms into an E-fundamental harmonic series). Electronics are used to twist and transform the timbral shadings that occur in both compositional streams. A notational system of colored lines is used to indicate specific elements of timbre control throughout the score.

• Piano Roll

  Vidéomusique
  
  Piano Roll takes inspiration from Conlon Nancarrow and his studies for the player piano. While composing the work, I was interested in convergent and divergent distributions and different ontological problems that emerge when visualising and sonifying them. While the eye can be used to survey histories of consequence, the ear is only concerned with the immediate. Thus, I wanted to draw attention to the ear via the eye. To do so, I generated different distributions from a statistical feedback model and used them to sequence material, playing with ideas of ratio and space. Piano Roll was commissioned by the Laboratoire Musique et Informatique de Marseille.

• Hallelujah

• Armor+2

  a piece inspired by classic synthesis techniques and RPG games
  
  In Armor+2, the interactive computer part acts as an extension of the clarinet. it adds harmony, extends melodic phrase, and creates rhythmic accompaniment that are difficult/impossible for a human accompaniment. The computer part’s role is similar to that of a rare enchanted item in a role-playing game.

• Coelacanth

  For Bass Trombone, Amplified Octet, and Responsive Electroacoustic Environment
  
  The bass trombone, in the foreground in Coelacanth, snakes through a landscape populated with brittle noise, buzzing tin foil, homemade rubber-band instruments, and bouncing Ping-Pong balls. Exploring extreme juxtapositions of noise versus pitch, density versus sparsity, and synchrony versus asynchrony, the piece is pervaded by a feeling of tension and disquiet. Like an oscillating spring–mass system, Coelacanth constantly seems to be losing energy, in danger of grinding to a halt, only to receive another push just in time to continue on a bit further. Central to the aesthetic of the work is an eight-foot suspended walnut-wood plank. The sound of this instrument, referred to by Greek composer Iannis Xenakis as a “simantra” in reference to an instrument of Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox providence, is rich in noise and high harmonic partials. These pitches, untangled from recordings of the instrument with the help of software, form the basis for the harmonic language of Coelacanth. Equally important to the work is the timbre of another unusual instrument, the bullroarer. Consisting of an airfoil swung around the head to produce an eerie buzzing noise, examples of suspected bullroarers have been found in caves in France dating from the Palaeolithic Era. The timbre of this instrument is explored in Coelacanth through software algorithms that translate the unmistakable pulsing drone of the bullroarer into chords that slowly transform as they disperse throughout the ensemble. Like the work’s namesake, Coelacanth is bony and awkward, but among all the sharp teeth and superfluous fins, a fearful beauty seems imminent.