Large
Ensemble

For orchestra.

Listen to a mockup here!

If there is anything that I have learned about my process for writing music, it is that usually the paths my compositions elect to take do not reveal themselves until after I have already written a large portion of the piece. I certainly have heard of composers mentally conceiving of entire works before setting them down to paper (the name Mozart usually comes to mind), but my process has never been so clairvoyant as that; often my experience with composing is more akin to being led, blindfolded, down an unknown path. There are certainly familiar or comforting moments in this journey, as well as peril and uncertainty, but ultimately I am not in absolute control of my guide’s chosen path, or even my ultimate destination.

Such was the case in the writing of this work; having written the first bar (literally, only the first bar) early in the spring of 2021, I left the piece alone for several months, unsure of exactly what to do with it, where it would end up going, or what kind of world it would create. Then, in the early summer, I started writing, allowing the music to go where it wanted, changing style and texture rapidly between different sections. Ultimately, the piece became a study in contrasts, juxtaposing the serene with the stormy, the consonant with the dissonant, and the consistent with the unpredictable. I decided to name the work Dances and Dreamscapes, to illustrate this contrast; within the composition is both music to dance to and to dream to.

Duration: 10 minutes

Dances and Dreamscapes was completed in August of 2021, and revised in October of 2023.

For 12 solo strings and orchestra.

Listen to a mockup here!

My first thought when set to the task of writing an orchestral piece was to write a tone poem (or at least some variation on that idea); I've spent several years idolizing the highly programmatic works of Richard Strauss and Michael Colgrass (a composer who I consider to be unfortunately underrated), and the idea of contributing my own work to the genre was both a daunting and interesting challenge. The problem I was immediately faced with was the selection of a good story to turn into an abstract tone poem, and I agonized over this choice until the idea was given to me via a younger brother of using "Twelve Angry Men" as the basis of the work, and I immediately took to that idea.

"Twelve Angry Men" is, as some hopefully are aware, a perfect film, but this work of art also consists of an interesting dichotomy of ignorance and anger against thoughtfulness and justice. I chose to represent with contrasting tonality with atonality, particularly representing the ideal of justice with a circle of fifths progression (vi - ii - V - I - etc.), a series of chords that I have always associated with profound purity and spirituality. While the sections of the piece representing ignorance are dense and lugubrious, those representing justice and vindication are clear and light-infused. The piece is a conflict between the two.

This will be the first of three pieces written after "Twelve Angry Men", and it covers the events of the first act, with all the twists and shocks that gradually unfurl before the audience's eyes.

Duration: 5 minutes

Deliberations: Part 1 was completed in June of 2021.

For orchestra.

I took AP Music Theory in my junior year of high school, and, having learned the “rules” of music, I spent the next few years obsessed with breaking all of them, exploring a more dissonant harmonic idiom.  Although I had a handful of good ideas, I had not quite gotten the hand of the craft involved in writing in such a style, and so a lot of the music I wrote (yes, I do still have it, and no, I don’t intend for it to see the light of day) ended up being frankly aimless.  It gradually dawned upon me that whatever I was trying wasn’t working out in the way that I wanted it to.

This work was the first piece that I used to explore a more consonant harmonic tongue.  Originally scored for wind quintet and piano, it was intended to be an homage to another work for the same instrumentation by Francis Poulenc.  However, as I wrote I found (much to my delight) that the piece had developed its own musical voice, and although I did not know it at the time it contained the seeds for what would become my compositional vocabulary as it is today.

In its original form the work was a bit over-written, and so I thought it fitting to flesh out the instrumentation into a small orchestra.  Considering this piece was the earliest version of what my music sounds like now, I might consider it some of my musical juvenilia, however I do not consider it without merit, and it certainly has some moments of optimistic charm.

Duration: 8 minutes

The Sextet for Winds and Piano was completed in January of 2020, and revised and orchestrated as Little Symphony in June of 2024.

For wind ensemble.

In recent years I have found (at least in my own music) that there is not such a strong division between consonance and dissonance. In fact, I have realized that my methods for constructing both seem to be inverses of each other: my dissonances are constructed not out of complex intervals or set complexes but out of contrasting (or at least altered con- sonances. Conversely, my consonances more often than not include carefully selected extensions to enrich the harmonies, some of which can go so far as to grate against the ear in the wrong context. Equally important to my harmonic language is the juxtaposition of these two methods; I find that there is nothing that sweetens a consonance more than hearing it in conjunction with extremem dissonance. Similarly, these consonances make the dissonances themselves appear even more jagged and angular.

It is this idea that serves as the genesis for this work. In fact, one could imagine that this idea is the basis for a somewhat abstract program: the music emerges as a controlled but highly dissonant and angular dance, but throughout the work engages in a back-and-forth with consonance. They enter conflicts and shouting matches, growing in intensity, and periodically overtaking each other until finally they are reconciled. The harsh edges of dissonance are smoothed over, and the consonance is enriched with a complex array of extensions and cross-relations.

Titles are more often than not the last thing to fall into place in my compositional process (I’ve never been particu- larly good at conjuring up snazzy titles that live up to the hype that I hope my music imparts). However, in this case there is conveyed a ritualistic ecstasy that I think matches the music well (although I still think the music is better than the title).

Duration: 12 minutes

Profane Rites was completed in May of 2022, and revised in October of 2023.