Choose a title for notes about that piece.

Sanctus

Premiere

UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus
Melanie Anderson, soprano
Emily Frey, soprano
Chelsea Spangler, mezzo-soprano
Marika Kuzma, conductor

A Cappella Reflections
March 7, 2010
Gallery B, Berkeley Art Museum, UC Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)

Recording

Rehearsal, premiere, and encore versions recorded at the premiere concert by Sean Dougall and Ben Sudduth. Edited by Sean Dougall.

Program Note

(Forthcoming)

Renderings of Things We Couldn't Take Home

Premiere

Berkeley New Music Project
April 4, 2010
Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)

Recording

Forthcoming.

Program Note

Forthcoming.

Orography

Premiere

SoundGEAR:
Toshiya Suzuki, soprano/great bass recorder
Stefan Hussong, accordion
Satoshi Inagaki, piano
Kuniko Kato, percussion

David Milnes, conductor

Berkeley New Music Project
October 12, 2009
Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)

Recording

Recorded at the premiere by Jay Cloidt

Program Note

Like 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.

Interstate/Luminesce

Premiere

Michael Orland, piano

Berkeley New Music Project
April 13, 2009
Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)

Recording

Recorded at the premiere by Jay Cloidt

Program Note

On 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.

Notes

Interstate/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

Premiere (version 1)

Janet McKay, flute/voice

Random Overtones Tour
March 26, 2009
Meridian Arts Gallery (San Francisco, CA)

Notes

Searchlight 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.

The Garden of Forking Paths

Premiere

Lucy Shelton, soprano

Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players:
Stacey Pelinka, flute/piccolo
Peter Josheff, Bb clarinet/bass clarinet
Loren Mach, percussion
Michael Orland, piano
Karen Shinozaki, violin
Leighton Fong, violoncello
David Milnes, conductor

Berkeley New Music Project
April 14, 2008
Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)

Recording

Recorded at the premiere by Cuco Daglio

Program Note

The 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.

Calling

Divergences

Premiere

Del Sol String Quartet

UC Berkeley Music Department Noon Concert Series
April 25, 2007
Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)

Angeles

Premiere

Cristhian Rodriguez, bass clarinet

April 13, 2007
University of Miami (Miami, FL)

Paris la nuit

Premiere

Renée de la Prade, button accordion
Jen Wang, voice

CNMAT Users Group Salon Series
December 6, 2006
The Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, UC Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)

This Empty and Luminous Room

Premiere

The California EAR Unit:
Dorothy Stone, flute
Phil O'Connor, Bb clarinet
Daphne Chen, violin*
Eric Kim. violoncello*
* guest artists

The California EAR Unit Residency at Arcosanti
August 9, 2006
Arcosanti (Meyer, AZ)

Recording

Recorded August 8, 2006 with the California EAR Unit by Dorothy Stone and Keith Kirchoff.

Notes

I 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

Premiere

Megan Schubert, soprano
Janet McKay, flute
Sarah Phillips, bass clarinet
Joe Bergen, marimba
Mike Compitello, vibraphone
Elena Moon Park, violin
Lauren Radnofsky, violoncello
Brad Lubman, conductor

Bang On A Can Summer Institute and Festival
July 21, 2006
Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (North Adams, MA)

Spaces Between

Premiere

NeXT Ens:
Carlos Velez, flute
Timothy O'Neill, violin
Shiau-uen Ding, piano

March 23, 2006
University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA)

Recording

NeXT 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 Note

Spaces 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.

velocity

Premiere

Vox Novus 60x60 Concert (Pacific Rim)
November 20, 2004
Los Angeles Harbor College (Los Angeles, CA)

Program Note

A 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.

Notes

When 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

Premiere

Carlos Velez, alto flute
Jen Wang, sitar

May 20, 2004
University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (Cincinnati, OH)

The Caucus-Race

Premiere

Jacob Rhodebeck, piano

Masters Recital
May 18, 2004
University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (Cincinnati, OH)

Recording

Recorded by Sean Dougall at the premiere.

Notes

The 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

Premiere

Mona Kayhan, voice

NeXT Ens:
Carlos Velez, alto flute
Michael John Mollo, electric guitar
Taryn Cunha, vibraphone
Shiau-uen Ding, piano
Timothy O'Neill, violin
Margaret Anne Schedel, violoncello

Gabriel Ottoson-Deal, tape
Matthew Planchak, conductor

Masters Recital
May 18, 2004
University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (Cincinnati, OH)

Cassiopeia

Premiere

Chin-Ping Tseng, treble viol
Jessica Powell, bass viol
Kivie Cahn-Lipman, bass viol

Masters Recital
May 18, 2004
University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (Cincinnati, OH)

etude with noise

Premiere

Carlos Velez, alto flute
Gabriel Ottoson-Deal, violin

Masters Recital
May 18, 2004
University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (Cincinnati, OH)

unfolding

Premiere

Masters Recital
May 18, 2004
University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (Cincinnati, OH)

String Quartet

Premiere

FAZA String Quartet:
Piotr Szewczyk, violin
Amy Harris, violin
Nick Jeffery, viola
Amanda Blickensderfer, violoncello

Masters Recital
May 18, 2004
University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (Cincinnati, OH)

elegy in seven

Premiere

Carleton College Orchestra
Hector Valdivia, conductor

Senior Comprehensive Exercise Lecture/Performance
May 7, 2002
Carleton College (Northfield, MN)

Now It Is Clear

Premiere

David Lemly, baritone
Sarah Mellander, oboe
Sally Mullikin, viola
Susan Letcher, piano

Junior Recital
May 19, 2001
Carleton College (Northfield, MN)

Siempre Sol, Siempre Luna

Premiere

Megan Rose Orwig, mezzo-soprano
Nathan Gin, violoncello
Susan Letcher, piano

Sophomore Recital
May 27, 2000
Carleton College (Northfield, MN)