Browse Items (868 total)

• Amphora

• Wind Chimes Clatter through the Mist and Fog

• This, I Cannot Escape

  Audio component of a collaboration with choreographer Morganne Mazeika and digital projection artist Michael Krauss.
  
  The main theme of our collaboration is dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder and the constant feelings of mental and emotional unrest that accompany PTSD.

• Cross-threaded

• The Mind is its Own Beautiful Prisoner

  This piece was inspired by an e.e. cummings poem of the same name. The poem is told through the voice of a man who has lost his lover and covers various themes such as loss, betrayal, paradoxical dichotomy and mental self-imprisonment. I wanted to explore some of these ideas in my own music and set out to do so using the wind quintet. The piece consists of a harmonic progression that is presented roughly five times throughout the piece with the ultimate goal being to present it as a clear homogeneous unit, however, it is only heard clearly in the final section of the work. The wind players present the progression through angular, jagged melodic figures throughout the rest of the piece, sometimes working together and other times working against one another. The electronics act as a constant antagonist, always adding layers to disrupt the wind players or add a distant layer of complexity that serves to disrupt their motion toward group singularity. The quintet represents the idea of self-imprisonment – a single unit that is constantly seeking solidarity and individuality of the component parts – while the electronics represent the idea of the lost lover – a distant and completely autonomous entity within the framework which remains completely unaffected by the acoustic element. It is simultaneously a self-contained voice and an interacting medium that only serves to disrupt any attempts the quintet makes toward their ultimate goal.

• Dissociation Sequences (C23H28O8)

  Brutal cello and electronics piece.
  
  Dissociation Sequences (C23H28O8) tells a narrative of being caught in the middle of a hallucination (or series of hallucinations) on Salvinorin A and the cognitive effects the chemical has on the brain. The hallucinations from Salvinorin A (from the salvia divinorum plant) cause various dissociative effects such as distortions of time, space, memory and motor function. In this piece the cellist is battling with these dissociations through the realization of the score and the interaction with the live electronics.
  
  This piece was written for James Burch and is dedicated to Franklin Cox.

• Bellowing Thunder, Crimson Sky

  With Bellowing Thunder, Crimson Sky I was trying to capture a feeling I had in the summer of 2013 while walking home just a storm was rolling in over my southeast Ohio town. The sun had not fully set so the sky was an eerie dark red and I could hear thunder rolling in the distance and see brief flashes of lightning. I was on my way home from an evening walk and I started to worry that I was going to get caught in a nasty storm; I made it home just before a massive cloudburst of rain and thunder. I wanted to recreate that sense of the “calm before the storm” that can arouse conflicting feelings of serenity and unease all at the same time.
  
  Bellowing Thunder, Crimson Sky was commissioned by Patchwork Duo (Noa Even and Stephen Klunk) and was premiered in spring 2014.

• Vous l'Inaccessible

  Vous l’Inaccessible is for soprano and electronics, and was inspired by the Guillaume de Machaut virelai “Douce Dame Jolie.” Machaut’s melody and text are presented in a variety of forms, as a chant, spoken word, and a direct quotation of the melody. As the piece unfolds, the voice becomes more free and independent of the original melody, creating a process of development followed by deconstruction and finally reconstruction into completely new material free from the original melody. The final spoken text is a modern text, related to the theme of unattainable love (like the Machaut text), but presented in modern French as opposed to Medieval French text of “Douce Dame Jolie.”

• Fractured Memories

  Fractured Memories is a piece that explores some thoughts I’ve had on my own perception of memory and thinking about the past. The piece presents and opening idea (the memory) and the rest of the piece a reworking of that idea in a dialog between the oboe and electronics. At times the memory is retold with refined accuracy, sometimes it is distorted, sometimes it’s made out to be more exciting than it actually was. The final section of the piece acts as the final retelling of the memory with fragments of each distorted re-imagining making their way into the musical fabric. Is it a true account of what originally took place? Maybe not, but the importance is more with the journey from beginning to end.

• Bowing to the Roaring Storm, Their Songs Never Cease