Selected Works
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Audio player unavailable - please download Flash! Sanctus (2010)for eight-voice choir (SSAATTBB) and three soloists (SSA)[Show/Hide Details] PremiereUC Berkeley Chamber Chorus A Cappella ReflectionsMarch 7, 2010 RecordingRehearsal, premiere, and encore versions recorded at the premiere concert by Sean Dougall and Ben Sudduth. Edited by Sean Dougall. Program Note(Forthcoming) |
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Audio player unavailable - please download Flash! Renderings Of Things We Couldn't Take Home (2009)for percussion quartet[Show/Hide Details] PremierePercussion quartet: Berkeley New Music ProjectApril 4, 2010 RecordingRecorded at the premiere by Jay Cloidt. Program NoteAt summer camp, we made crayon rubbings of things we'd found in the forest instead of taking those things home. Placing translucent paper over a leaf or on the surface of a boulder and rubbing crayon over the paper, the shape of the leaf or the texture of the stone would gradually take shape, emerging from the blankness of the sheet as thin lines of white in a field of color. NotesI got the idea for Renderings while at the Wellesley Composers Conference (essentially, summer camp for composers). At a master class/demonstration about writing for percussion, given by Stephen Paysen and Dominic Donato, I watched Dom demonstrate a bowed tremolo on the edge of a tam-tam. Like a single bowstroke on the edge of a tam, the bowed tremolo draws out harmonics from the instrument. But, unlike the single bowstrokes, it has the ability to sustain, to intensify, and develop in richness. The title came to me after the piece was completed, both because the sound was (in my mind) a "souvenir" brought home from summer camp, and because the physical act of the bowed tremolo—the insistent, repetitive motion required to make a sound take form—reminded me of the physical act of making a rubbing. That sound "is the piece", essentially, and I thought of the rest of the work as constructing a way to present that sound. Over the course of the piece, the sound world of the bowed tremolo harmonics (played on the medium and large tam-tams) is accentuated and expanded by sounds that emphasize the "noise" component of the tremolo (mallets on the tam-tams, the addition of small tam-tam and suspended cymbal), and by sounds that emphasize the "pitch" component (the use of a vibraphone—with gradually increasing motor speed—that uses the pitches of the sustained harmonics as a starting point for each phrase). Aside: One question that came up after the premiere was whether the vibraphone part is derived from spectral analysis of the tam-tams. Nope. The vibraphone's part is notated relative to the harmonics of the tam-tams ("unison with Perc. II", "M3 above Perc. III", etc.). Matching pitch can be tricky, since different tams vary in terms of how consistently they reproduce the same harmonics, so it may be necessary for the vibraphone player to match pitch during the performance. On this recording, the Perc. II harmonics were determined before performance, but the Perc. III harmonics had to be determined on the fly. |
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Audio player unavailable - please download Flash! Orography (2009)for soprano/great bass recorder, accordion, piano, and percussion[Show/Hide Details] PremiereSoundGEAR: Berkeley New Music ProjectOctober 12, 2009 RecordingRecorded at the premiere by Jay Cloidt Program NoteLike some of my earlier pieces, Orography deals with an initial musical idea that germinates into a different phrase with each repetition, experimenting with and exploring various possible outcomes in a series of successive waves. It draws its name from a subfield of geomorphology, the study of how mountains take shape. |
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Audio player unavailable - please download Flash! Interstate/Luminesce (2009)for piano and electronics[Show/Hide Details] PremiereMichael Orland, piano Berkeley New Music ProjectApril 13, 2009 RecordingRecorded at the premiere by Jay Cloidt Program NoteOn foggy nights, where the interstate flows to the ocean, light from the pier and the city hangs suspended in the air as bright, diffuse, constellations. The Ferris Wheel and the funhouse are closed, and the children have all gone home, but the light remains: murky and distorted, vibrant with the city's latent, pulsing, energy. NotesInterstate/Luminesce is a piece with a simple program, and a more stripped-down, expansive musical language than what I've been accustomed to using. There's a slow development of a single idea in the piano, over a soundscape of traffic sounds and sustained pitches drawn from the piano part, created by shifting and sustaining samples (using Ableton Live and IRCAM's phase vocoder for Max/MSP) of pianos, percussion instruments, and synthesized instruments (using the Sculpture plug-in in Logic). For me, the piece was an experiment in patience and stretching ideas out over time; some of my earlier pieces feel hasty to me, and I wanted to see what it would be like to push in the other direction. It was surprisingly difficult, and a really useful challenge. In many ways, the piece is a return to my fascination with Los Angeles, and its weird and beautiful dystopian mystique. It (and my love of traffic sounds) began in earnest back with velocity. My sense of the city is inextricable from my memories of night drives, and my sense of the city's beauty is connected to a restless urge to leave it. |
Searchlight Songs (2009)for flutist (flute and voice)[Show/Hide Details] Premiere (version 1)Janet McKay, flute/voice Random Overtones Tour NotesSearchlight Songs is a work-in-progress. The piece, requested by Janet McKay, is inspired by her lovely, clear singing voice. The initial version deals primarily with possible interactions between the voice and flute, treating the combination of the two as a hybrid instrument. An extended version further exploring this material (and possibly adding electronics) is in progress now. |
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Audio player unavailable - please download Flash! The Garden of Forking Paths (2008)for flute/piccolo, Bb clarinet/bass clarinet, percussion, piano, soprano, violin, and violoncello[Show/Hide Details] PremiereLucy Shelton, soprano Berkeley New Music Project RecordingRecorded at the premiere by Cuco Daglio Program NoteThe Garden of Forking Paths is inspired by the Jorge Luis Borges short story of the same name. Central to the story is a legend involving a learned man who retired near the end of his life, announcing that he had two goals: to create a labyrinth so intricate and vast that all people would lose their way within it; and to write a novel. Only the novel was found: a series of contradictory events and unresolved tangents, of outcomes disconnected from causes, baffling and seemingly incoherent. As the story progresses, however, it is revealed that the novel is the labyrinth, a fractured work that simultaneously depict all possible outcomes of every moment. The text of the work is the note left behind by the labyrinth's architect and author: "I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths." I became fascinated by the image of the novel: of a work that seemed on its surface to be fractured and irresolute, but in fact was organically and intricately derived from a now-subterranean structure. Throughout the work, materials splinter and divide into component elements that each become unique ideas in their own right, but that narrative is rearranged into a disrupted, fragmentary form that confuses cause with outcome, derivation with source. |
The Calling Under the Breath (2007)for choir (SATB) |
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Audio player unavailable - please download Flash! Divergences (2007)for string quartet[Show/Hide Details] PremiereDel Sol String Quartet UC Berkeley Music Department Noon Concert Series |
Angeles (2007)for bass clarinet and tape[Show/Hide Details] |
Paris la nuit (2006)for button accordion and voice[Show/Hide Details] PremiereRenée de la Prade, button accordion CNMAT Users Group Salon Series |
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Audio player unavailable - please download Flash! This Empty and Luminous Room (2006)for flute, Bb clarinet, violin, and violoncello[Show/Hide Details] PremiereThe California EAR Unit: The California EAR Unit Residency at Arcosanti RecordingRecorded August 8, 2006 with the California EAR Unit by Dorothy Stone and Keith Kirchoff. NotesI wrote this piece for the California EAR Unit Composer Seminar, held in August each year at Arcosanti. I began work earlier in the summer, while at the Bang On A Can Summer Institute. During that program, all the composition fellows got to work the founders of BOAC, and something David Lang said got me started on this piece. We were talking about composition lessons. "Here's a thing that might be interesting to try, just as an experiment," he said. "Every time you try something with your music because of someone else's suggestion, try the complete opposite too, and see if you like it better." This piece began as my first experiment along that vein, taking ideas I'd been having about simplicity, quiet, and space to a comparative extreme. It employs an (even more) tonal language than my norm, along with a deliberately simple (almost crude) form, with no transitions. The idea with the "empty and luminous room" is that it's a deliberate oxymoron: the supposedly empty room is full of light, and resonances both of the past and of the person viewing it. |
The Memory Gardens (2006)for flute, Bb clarinet, vibraphone, marimba, piano, soprano, violin, and violoncello[Show/Hide Details] Premiere
Megan Schubert, soprano Bang On A Can Summer Institute and Festival |
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Audio player unavailable - please download Flash! Spaces Between (2005)for flute, violin, piano, and tape[Show/Hide Details] PremiereNeXT Ens: March 23, 2006 RecordingNeXT Ens recorded November 3, 2005 at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music by Sean Dougall. Instruments were mixed with electronics December 14-15, 2005 in Monrovia, CA by Sean Dougall. Program NoteSpaces Between began as an exploration of time and the use of silence. When I began work on the piece, I had recently started studying tai chi, and had become fascinated by the slow, meditative pacing of the form and the significance and subtlety that movement achieves as a result. The piece, therefore, explores similar issues of time and silence, in an attempt to create a relationship between sound and silence, positive and negative space, that highlights the content of the former while imbuing the latter with significance and substance. The sound world of the piece is derived from samples of a decrepit wooden harp, prepared and played with knitting needles. |
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Audio player unavailable - please download Flash! velocity (2004)for tape[Show/Hide Details] PremiereVox Novus 60x60 Concert (Pacific Rim) Program NoteA few years ago, I went walking through my hometown at night. Part of the vast Los Angeles urban sprawl, it's an ugly town by day. But at 2 AM, it takes on an odd gritty beauty. Rows of orange streetlamps turn the hazy sky a deep purple and cast houses and people in a murky monochrome. Broken glass glitters on the asphalt, and wilting trees cast wild, twisted shadows. It's quiet, except for the sound of cars, but the city seems to hum with latent energy. In the night, it is magical, full of possibility and mystery. NotesWhen I wrote velocity, I had really just been introduced to electronic music as a genre, and I was still trying to wrap my head around what it meant to compose using sounds that weren't conventionally "musical". I didn't really begin to gain traction in terms of approaching it until I decided to begin with a sound that I found strongly evocative and interesting. It also helped to work with a small amount of initial material (a single 3-minute recording of traffic); with all the possibilities electronics offer, my big danger was (and is) getting overwhelmed by possibilities and trying to throw in everything but the kitchen sink. The sounds used in the piece were processed using RTCmix, an open-source DSP (digital signal processing) language. I relied mostly on comb filters, convolution, and a window-based pitch/time shifting instrument called gravy. It seems pretty old-school now, to remember working with TextEdit and a Terminal window, but it was really useful as an introduction to DSP at the time. |
Song for the Coming Evening (2004)for alto flute and sitar[Show/Hide Details] PremiereCarlos Velez, alto flute May 20, 2004 |
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Audio player unavailable - please download Flash! The Caucus-Race (2004)for piano[Show/Hide Details] PremiereJacob Rhodebeck, piano Masters Recital RecordingRecorded by Sean Dougall at the premiere. NotesThe Caucus-Race was written as part of The Alice Project, a series of pieces commissioned by then-student Jacob Rhodebeck of the composers in CCM's composition department. We each laid claim to a section of Alice in Wonderland to use as inspiration for a piece, and the resulting series of pieces was performed as a concert-length set. The Caucus-race takes place after Alice and her companions have been washed through a door into Wonderland on a sea of her own tears. It's a frantic, silly, anarchic, circular race whose only purpose is to dry off its runners. The piece is a theme with variations (marked at the end of each variation by a triplet with two heavy, clunky chords and a "sting"), where each variation is faster and takes more liberties with the theme than the last. The little variation-ending marker also takes on more and more prominence as the proportions spiral out of control and the whole thing comes careening to a finish. It's not very similar to the way I write now, but I keep it around in the audio samples because I still think it's funny. |
wind in her hair (2004)for alto flute, electric guitar, vibraphone, piano, vocalist, violin, violoncello, and tape[Show/Hide Details] PremiereMona Kayhan, voice NeXT Ens: Gabriel Ottoson-Deal, tape Masters Recital |
Cassiopeia (2004)for viol consort (treble, tenor, bass)[Show/Hide Details] PremiereChin-Ping Tseng, treble viol Masters Recital |
etude with noise (2004)for alto flute and violin[Show/Hide Details] PremiereCarlos Velez, alto flute Masters Recital |
unfolding (2003)for tape[Show/Hide Details] PremiereMasters Recital |
String Quartet (2003)[Show/Hide Details]PremiereFAZA String Quartet: Masters Recital |
elegy in seven (2002)for orchestra[Show/Hide Details] PremiereCarleton College Orchestra Senior Comprehensive Exercise Lecture/Performance |
Now It Is Clear (2001)for baritone, oboe, viola, and piano[Show/Hide Details] PremiereDavid Lemly, baritone Junior Recital |
Siempre Sol, Siempre Luna (2000)for mezzo-soprano, violoncello, and piano[Show/Hide Details] PremiereMegan Rose Orwig, mezzo-soprano Sophomore Recital |