2023 Horn, Guitar, and Harp [Score]
Nicolee Kuester, Daniel Lippel, Jacqueline Kerrod
Wolfesboro, NH
This piece was inspired by my grandmother who loves Elvis. I have fond memories sitting with her at the piano bench singing and playing songs when I was very young. With "Love Me (Long)," I experimented with creating a gradient of dissonance to consonance. I was surprised to discover the effect this had on me as a listener yearning for the hidden beauty to emerge.
2021 String Quartet and Wind Quartet [Score]
Ensemble LINEA
Strausbourg, FR
"Tresse" employs computer assisted notation. I used Lilypond's Scheme backend to produce infinitely varied permutations of musical motifs.
2020 Vocal Octet [Score]
Erin Bender, Claire Demorest, Megan Ihnen, Kaitlin Sager, CJ Briggs, Chris Givens, Alex Herzog, Conrad Alleman New Orleans, LA
"Total Abstraction" is the central composition in my staged master's thesis, Siddhartha. Scheduled to premier in Spring 2020, due to the pandemic the performance was postponed indefinitely. This piece is organized around cells of repeated material. Held tones and spoken word are synchronized between various combinations of the eight singers. The text is taken from abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman whose philosophy informs the subjectless nature of the composition.
2019 Trumpet and Electronics [Score]
Andy Kozar New Orleans, LA
For "Special Pleading," I developed a computer-assisted composition technique. Using PureData, I explored the quarter-tone pitch space. With a playful guess-and-check method, I searched for interval classes that intuitively sounded consonant. In performance, the solo trumpet constructs these harmonies by looping over itself several times.
2019 String Quartet and Percussion [Score]
Mivos Quartet, Matthew Gold
Dublin, NH
I wrote Astrocasper for the Walden summer music festival in New Hampshire. "Casper" refers to the harmonies of Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit. First, I lull the audience into a noisy romantic daydream. Then I break the spell with theater and irreverent quotations of Radiohead and J-Dilla.
2019 Open-Instrumentation Ensemble and two Audio Technicians [Score]
Nouveau Classical Project (2019), Amorisma Trio (2020) New Orleans (2019), Denton, TX (2020)
This piece was my first application of the devised method of directing which I initially studied in the context of theater. I worked with instrumental musicians in rehearsal to craft an ethereal performance inspired by French astronomer Camille Flammarion's hot-air balloon flight in 1867. The astronomer describes hearing a concert of instrumental music emanating from a region of dense cloud, possibly due to atmospheric diffraction of a performance taking place on the ground.
2018 Piano and Percussion [Score]
Bent Duo
New Orleans, LA
"Soke" was my first composition to premier at Tulane. I followed a through-composed logic inspired by Toshio Hosokowa. I wrote measure to measure, letting each musical idea inspire the next. I aimed to construct a unified 'meta-instrument' between piano and percussion. Tremolos and small subdivisions are passed between instruments as they cooperate to express each gesture.
2018 String Quartet [Score]
Mivos Quartet
Dublin, NH
This is the first piece I wrote for the Walden summer festival. It is also the first piece I wrote while studying with Max Dulaney at Tulane. The violins take on the role of shimmering noise-makers, leaving room for the oft-neglected viola to sing from the middle of the pack. This felt like a profound democratic gesture at the time.
2017 Fixed Media
This is the second of my Orange County fixed media pieces. Three motifs interleave. The piece begins with a radio interview between philosopher Richard Rorty and Michael Krasney on KQED in 2006. Rorty's statements are juxtaposed with a field recording of a Dakota Access Pipeline protest in Chicago that I captured from a Facebook livestream. Synthesizer harmonies invoke pathos as these worldviews converge and diverge.
2016 Fixed Media
"Bác" is one of the many Vietnamese familial pronouns. I wrote this piece while living in Orange County with my uncles. Their walled neighborhood sits within a grid of long straight boulevards. At night, I heard lone cars hum for minutes. I manipulate the cello sample to reflect that So-Cal tempo.
2015 Piano [Score]
Nate Ben-Horin
Berkeley, CA
I wrote this piece for the end-of-semester Undergraduate Composers Club at Berkeley. I fondly remember working out the quirks of the notation with Nate at the pianos in the practice rooms.