Chamber
and Solo

For reed quintet.

Often when composing (or simply listening to) music, I find myself bobbing my head along with the beats. Even in music with uneven meters and changing patterns (I became an avid fan of compound beats and mixed meters when I was in high school) I find myself moving - or at least trying to move - with the ever-changing beats, trying to predict the next meter change. It is because of this that I must often resist the urge to simply name much of my faster music "dance" (there are at least three pieces of mine that began with that word as the working title). My solution was to call the piece Ballet, which is both a less-than-clever workaround for my titling problem as well as an acknowledgement of the skill that is required to perform these funky rhythms, just as the extreme sport that is professional ballet.

Especially over the last couple of years, my sense of rhythm in my own compositions has become gradually fragmented, thinking less in meters but more in cells of rhythmic patterns. Sometimes they are predictable, other times not.

Dance to that, motherfucker.

Duration: 8 minutes

Ballet was completed in December of 2022. It is dedicated to Fivemind Reeds, who premiered the work on July 27, 2023 in Petoskey, Michigan.

Listen to a mockup here!

I. Dizzy Scherzo (for Flute and Oboe)
II. Shostakovich 5 as Digested by Francis Bacon (With Ligeti in the Background) (for Clarinet and Bassoon)
III. Interlude - Variations on Bach's "Verleih' uns Frieden gnadilgich" (for Woodwind Quintet)
IV. It's Still a Fugue (for Alto Saxophone and Trumpet)
V. Fanfare (for Horn and Trombone)
VI. Interlude - One More Variation (for Brass Quintet)
VII. Breakneck Rehearsal (for Violin and Cello)
VIII. Empty (for Viola and Double Bass)
IX. Finale - Colgrass and Ligeti Have a Pleasant Conversation (for Mixed Ensemble)

Duration: 20 minutes

Originally a set of compositional exercises for an orchestration class, these duets vary greatly as a sort of musical variety show. Book of Duets was completed in December of 2020.

Download the second movement cadenza here!

For tenor, flute, clarinet (doubling bass clarinet), violin, cello, and piano.

(Text by James Joyce)

I. “Strings in the earth and air”
II. “Lean out of the window”
III. Midday Dance (instrumental)
IV. “The twilight turns from amethyst”
V. “At that hour when all things have repose”

Duration: 16 minutes

Chamber Music was completed in August of 2023.

Although I have loved and studied the depths of contemporary classical music for most of my musical life (and long to some day write an austere modernist masterpiece in the vein of Berg’s Wozzeck or Berio’s Sinfonia), at the end of the day I’m a sentimental sap. I realized this as I furthered my studies in college; I learned a ton about Ligeti and Penderecki and all manner of staunch avant-garde artists (and loved them all), but I realized that I am also a sucker for a good Strauss waltz, or a tender and sincere Mozart aria.

After a phase of writing some particularly dense (and, frankly, aimless) atonal music, my compositions very suddenly turned in a very different direction than they had been heading in past years. As I wrote, I began to reorient my concept of harmony and voice leading, drawing from what I had learned in my many years of schooling in common-practice theory while also infusing it with a harmonic tongue more associated with jazz than anything else. I spent a particularly significant amount of time looking at reductions and transcriptions others had made of songs by Jacob Collier or Hiromi Uehara, or the wonderfully funky compositions of Nikolai Kapustin. As I looked through these, I “discovered” major sevenths, minor ninths, sharp elevenths; all manner of extensions and colorations that I unhesitatingly and gleefully added to my vocabulary.

Though the Dance for Oboe and Piano is not the first piece I wrote after turning to this particular brand of harmony, I feel it is the work that cauterized this aspect of my style; classically oriented and formally-driven yet decidedly funky and schmaltzy, with rapidly changing rhythmic schemes and wild contrasts between the smooth and the spiky, the sonorous and the discordant, the dainty and the boisterous.

Duration: 7 minutes

Dance for Oboe and Piano is an expanded version of the first movement of the Sonata for Oboe and Piano. It was completed in January 2023.

Having been given the prompt in a “Composition for Non-Majors” class to compose a piece of music inspired by the night sky, my thoughts first landed on the French painter Henri Rousseau, whose paintings, some of which include the night sky as one of many subjects, I find to be deeply evocative and at times even soothing to look at. His night skies are always calm, almost empty of stars, with a single luminous moon casting a silvery glow over the whole scene. There are many paintings of his that make use of this motif, such as A Carnival Evening or The Sleeping Gypsy, but my favorite painting in this category is The Dream, a lush, dense, dark-toned image. I won’t burden this program note with a lengthy description of the painting, but there is a poem written by Rousseau to accompany it which I find equally evocative and atmospheric:

Yadwigha dans un beau rêve
S’étant endormie doucement
Entendait les sons d’une musette
Dont jouait un charmeur bien pensant.
Pendant que la lune reflète
Sur les fleurs, les arbres verdoyants,
Les fauves serpents prêtent l’oreille
Aux airs gais de l’instrument.

“Yadwigha in a beautiful dream
Having fallen gently to sleep
Heard the sounds of a reed instrument
Played by a well-intentioned snake
charmer. As the moon reflected
On the flowers, the verdant trees,
The wild snakes lend an ear
To the joyous tunes of the instrument.”

I endeavored in writing this short solo to try and discover what sounds might be found in the world that this painting and poem depict. What results is a musical portrait of the jungle, and the sounds that it hears at night.

Duration: 4 minutes.

Moon Song was completed in February of 2024.

For string quartet.

Passacaglia and Fugue was completed in September 2024. It was written for Quatuor Diotima.

Duration: 3 minutes.

Rondo for Two Bassoons was written in February of 2024. It is dedicated to Matthew Rasmussen and Finch Marquez.

Listen to a recording here!

I. Groove
II. Song
III. Play

Although I have loved and studied the depths of contemporary classical music for most of my musical life (and long to some day write an austere modernist masterpiece in the vein of Berg’s Wozzeck or Berio’s Sinfonia), at the end of the day I’m a sentimental sap. I realized this as I furthered my studies in college; I learned a ton about Ligeti and Penderecki and all manner of staunch avant-garde artists (and loved them all), but I realized that I am also a sucker for a good Strauss waltz, or a tender and sincere Mozart aria.

After a phase of writing some particularly dense (and, frankly, aimless) atonal music, my compositions very suddenly turned in a very different direction than they had been heading in past years. As I wrote, I began to reorient my concept of harmony and voice leading, drawing from what I had learned in my many years of schooling in common-practice theory while also infusing it with a harmonic tongue more associated with jazz than anything else. I spent a particularly significant amount of time looking at reductions and transcriptions others had made of songs by Jacob Collier or Hiromi Uehara, or the wonderfully funky compositions of Nikolai Kapustin. As I looked through these, I “discovered” major sevenths, minor ninths, sharp elevenths; all manner of extensions and colorations that I unhesitatingly and gleefully added to my vocabulary.

Though the Sonata for Oboe and Piano is not the first piece I wrote after turning to this particular brand of harmony, I feel it is the work that cauterized this aspect of my style; classically oriented and formally-driven yet decidedly funky and schmaltzy, with rapidly changing rhythmic schemes and wild contrasts between the smooth and the spiky, the sonorous and the discordant, the dainty and the boisterous.

Duration: 16 minutes

Sonata for Oboe and Piano was completed in June of 2023. It was premiered by Thacher Schreiber and James Brandfonbrener on April 20th, 2024 in New York, New York.

The Sonata is also available as an arrangement for soprano saxophone.

I. Animato
II. Languidly - Con fuoco
III. Adagio
IV. Con Brio

Trio for Two Oboes and English Horn is a series of short compositional exercises that I wrote in September of 2023 in order to take a break from a larger project in which I had reached a temporary impasse. They were a welcome and refreshing distraction, a divertimento in its most literal sense.

Duration: 8 minutes.

The Trio for Two Oboes and English Horn is also available as an arrangement for three clarinets.