Program Notes

“My heart cannot speak”—of course it can’t, and it requires melting, but death. 

I. Heart 

But let’s be optimistic for a change.
Let us pray to the sacrifice of the Snowmaiden
for that spring has arrived....
But am I to pray to the sun or the snow? 

II. Memory 

If the heart is frozen, perhaps let it remain so,
and at least one goes on living,
without paying the price (far too much)
of forgetting. 

III. Speech 

Going forward, what is so wrong with finding
some of the wrong words on the path toward the right ones
(other than the ballet becomes transiently undanceable,
and a hyperseason subtending winter and spring is achieved)? 

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden, based on the play by Alexander Ostrovsky, expresses the story of a young woman whose heart is made of ice.  Because of this, 1) she cannot love, and 2) her region is condemned to an endless winter.  Any arrival of spring requires the melting of her heart, which, while allowing love, also effects her annihilation.   

After I first saw this piece, I found myself describing in a journal entry “a hyperseason subtending winter and spring.”  The hyperseason as a symbolic entity is that which carries the attributes of one time into another, which through a dereliction or void erases the attributes of any time, and of which the end brings both abundance and senescence. 

The first section of this piece sets winter and spring motifs from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons—the canonic seasonal work—as a double cantus firmus around which isorhythmic harmony is created.  In this way, winter and spring are subtended by a composite harmony, erasing the surface identity of the hyemal and vernal themes.  Isorhythm as an intractable dedication to the music of the spheres imprisons these themes in their superpositional structure, whereby neither is adequately expressed, yet the result may be beautiful. 

The second section takes the Winter theme and rearranges the notes of each subphrase through a systematic spiral motion (identical to that of sestina poetry), eventually landing on the familiar (Vivaldi’s) arrangement while the Spring theme soars in the cello, both above and beneath, drawn out in time to the point of melody becoming harmony. 

The third section quotes The Snow Maiden (Act IV: Scene of Snow Maiden with Spring Beauty, Chorus of Flowers), parallelling the Snow Maiden’s dangerous but vital search for expressive words. The incipits of the Spring and Winter themes then appear as compressed vertical units, columns out of time. Their superposition returns us to the beginning and the question of how, if ever, these seasons might be reconciled. 

Each section is headed by fragments from my journal entries concerning The Snow Maiden and the hyperseason. These create a snapshot of a certain way of thinking that was useful compositionally, and are intended only to evoke atmospheric considerations. 

This piece is inspired by the idea that the superposition of two relatively simple things can create a single more complex thing.  I was very inspired by Steve Reich’s work, especially his piano phase music, which makes similar use of this kind of superposition between hands.  I don’t see this piece as fully complete, but I am happy with this particular exploration of the ideas. 

Question one: In what ways do you resemble your mother?

Original poetry by Cole Depuy.

Written for Lex Bonner.

Two interlocutors discuss the construction of a piece which emerges in real time, changing in accordance with their decisions.  They are aware of their own involvement, but are incapable of escaping from it (and from the trajectory of time), creating tension between their metafictional power and the inevitable consequences of their compositional decisions, which begin to affect their speech as well, circling back to manipulate every part of the soundscape.  Various reordering algorithms are employed to manipulate musical material originating from simple impulses, experimenting with structure and arrangement.  In the end, the interlocutors struggle to find accordance, because their piece is at cross-purposes with itself.  What is most interesting for the composition is the maximum deployment of ordering algorithms.  What is most interesting for the listener is the development of beautiful material.  The matter of what constitutes a productive operation versus an arbitrarily complex operation remains an open question. 

For hundreds of years, timpani have been strongly associated with puncuating orchestral cadences.  However, a significant and underrepresented repertoire of unique and expressive solo timpani works exists in the modern day.  This piece imagines a timpanist's training program, a dialogue between electronic coach and live performer.  It begins with the most prototypical, cadential figures, and moves into increasingly challenging and experimental performance techniques.  At the same time, harmonies evolve from functional authentic cadences into Neo-Riemannian, Renaissance, and contemporary progressions.  It is my hope not only to demonstrate how versatile and expressive timpani can be, but to find a unification between conventional and unconventional techniques.

Written for and premiered by Jenna Manalastas.

Print this if performed as an Experiment:

Relevance Realization is the process by which human beings recognize relevance of salient objects (patterns) in the environment.  Perception is an impossible problem requiring billions of years of evolution for even the barest partial solution.  The Frame Problem—whereby salience can neither be projected (“I say that this is salient when I see it”) nor detected (“I see an object implicitly salient”)—is transcended only by perceptual and cognitive opponent-processing mechanisms negotiating the dynamical emergence of a salience landscape across space and time in conjunction with both the affordances (in the Gibsonian sense) presented by objects (patterns) in the world and the concepts and aims of an embodied perception-cognition.  But none of this is strictly important. 

Also print this if performed as a Meta-Experiment:

Here’s a question: how does musical salience emerge? 

Human beings are attracted to music because it allows a genuine ‘playing’ with fundamental neurological mechanisms undergirding relevance realization via shifts of salience landscapes; this occurs simultaneously at many levels of analysis.  Even a flat piece of music is marked by a beginning and conclusion that demarcate the landscape of shifting salience in the same way that a painting’s frame prevents beauty from escaping the canvas and seeping out into the world.  It is by no means a new idea to obfuscate musical beginnings and ends, but my aim is to empirically model—individually, for each listener in their own experiences—the process of relevance realization as it pertains to the development of ordered and intentional musical ideas (primarily rhythmic) out of chaotic and unintentional noise. 

This piece uses chance operations determined by Ancient Greek oracle knucklebones known as astragaloi (αστράγαλοι) to inform musical decisions made in real time.  The characteristics of each throw and the corresponding prophecies given in the Main Oracle Text create the score.

A precise interlocking of parts.

A lively and fast-paced dance for stirring quartet, given a hint of darkness by its combination of Lydian and Aeolian modes.

A piece of seven continuous sections:

I. Antechamber
II. Deeper
III. Artifacts
IV. Exploration & Awe
V. Uncovering
VI. Sarcophagus
VII. Heart

An original piano solo inspired by Bach's “Courante” from the French Suite in G Major (BWV 816).  Playing “Courante,” I found it fairly boring but for a single line, so I decided to extrapolate that one pleasant motif into an entire piece.  Some of the best music is made accidentally. 

What if Theseus had never killed the minotaur?  What if it were still around, and one day, the Cretans get tired of things and take bull dozers and excavators to the labyrinth and flatten it?  What happens to the minotaur then, just standing around in the open, going from one kind of chaos to another?  In some sense, that’s the idea at the heart of this piece: the monster bereft of its domain.

In six continuous sections:

I. Labyrinth at Night
II. Arborescence
III. Convalescence
IV. Wrecking
V. Wretched (Without Kin)
VI. Fiend in the Field 

Written for YARN/WIRE.

This piece is composed (and improvised) live from nothing but a sample of white noise.  Through the use of various techniques—including filtering, equalization, looping, and resampling—an abrasive noise is transformed into a complete melodic composition. 

A witness to train derailment and environmental catastrophe.

Original poetry by AJ White.

Written for Lex Bonner.

Short Version:

The Ancient Greek word mimnēskō (μιμνήσκω) means to remember, but when used in the middle voice specifically means to give heed to something, in the way that a grieving person eventually gives heed to food and water.  Zēteō (ζητέω) refers to to the second stage of the Eleusinian dromena, or reenactment of the foundational myth of Demeter and Persephone, the Search preceded by the Descent into the underworld and followed by the Ascent out of it.

Long Version:

The Ancient Greek word mimnēskō (μιμνήσκω) means to remember, but when used in the middle voice (between the active and passive voices) specifically means to give heed to something, in the way that a grieving person eventually gives heed to food and water.[1]  While grammatical voice is basically a construct to describe the relationships between the subject and object and agent and patient in a sentence, Cornelia Vismann notes that while an active verb form indicates the initiation of an action, the middle voice shows a continuously realized process.[2]  The notion of memory (not to mention search) as a continuously realized process is intriguing, and psychologically apt.

The Eleusinian Mysteries were annual initiations of the cult of Demeter and Persephone (known especially in Doric Greek as Matēr kai Kora (Μάτηρ και Κόρα; literally Mother and Girl), which likely included a reenactment of the cult’s foundational myth.[3]  This was perhaps performed in three parts: the descent (kathodos; κάθοδος) of Persephone into the underworld, the search (zētēsis; ζήτησις[4]) by Demeter for her daughter, and the ascent (anodos; άνοδος) of Persephone once found.

During the protracted and grief-stricken period of her search, Demeter ends up involved in the story of Tantalus.  Tantalus intends to test the gods’ omniscience by killing, cooking, and serving them his own son.  During the feast, Demeter, so distracted by her grief, is the only one who does not see through the horrible ruse and thus consumes the boy’s shoulder.  This otherwise out-of-place episode can perhaps be seen as a Jungian confrontation with the shadow—and furthermore an integration with the shadow—which enables Demeter to become the kind of person capable of making (and delivering on) her ultimatum to Zeus, her son, and the father and rapist of their daughter Persephone.  Either Zeus will reveal Persephone’s whereabouts, or Demeter will annihilate humanity by destroying all grain.  Zeus capitulates, and Demeter discovers that her daughter has been abducted by Hades and taken to the underworld.  She is able to return, but only transiently, coming to embody the passage of time and the seasons, as well as resurrection and the personal salvation of the soul, represented by the Corinthian Order (as Demeter and Zeus correspond to the Ionic and Doric, respectively).[5]

[1] Julia Scarborough, personal communication, 4 November 2024.
[2] Cornelia Vismann, “Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty,” Theory, Culture & Society 303 (2013): 83–93.
[3] Mara Lynn Keller, “The Ritual Path of Initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries,” Rosicrucian Digest 87, no. 2 (2009): 28–42.
[4] This is the noun form; the verb form is used in the title.
[5] Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column (MIT Press, 1996).

This open score piece uses principles of hypertext fiction to present players with small chunks of indeterminate musical material, from which they can choose how to advance to the next material.  In this way, the piece presents various strata of musical material, each with their own characteristics, but only one instantiation (of several possible variations) is presented by each player at a time.  Thus, a large musical space exists, with numerous possible paths through it. 

I am obsessed with Picforth, whose only known work is an astonishing isorhythmic in nomine from around 1578.  This piece is one of five isorhythmic in nomines I’ve written so far, and is most directly inspired by Picforth’s, using the same cantus firmus that he did (though I’ve put it in the Alto II rather than the Tenor), but constructing new harmonies from it. 

Kintsugi, meaning “golden joinery,” is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery by sealing breaks and fractures with a mix of lacquer and powdered gold.  In this way, imperfections are highlighted and their artful repair is embraced.  In the same way, one’s own imperfections may be accepted and embraced.  This piece expresses both moments of disunity and accord at various levels, on a journey toward personal kintsugi.

Written for Katherine Yu.

In his Ten Books on Architecture (ca. 30-20 BC), Vitruvius outlines the alleged mythological derivation of the Corinthian order, the most intricate of the Classical orders: 

“It is related that the original discovery of this form of capital was as follows.  A free-born maiden of Corinth, just of marriageable age, was attacked by an illness and passed away.  After her burial, her nurse, collecting a few little things which used to give the girl pleasure while she was alive, put them in a basket, carried it to the tomb, and laid it on top thereof, covering it with a roof-tile so that the things might last longer in the open air.  This basket happened to be placed just above the root of an acanthus.  The acanthus root, pressed down meanwhile though it was by the weight, when springme came round put forth leaves and stalks in the middle, and the stalks, growing up along the sides of the basket, and pressed out by the corners of the tile through the compulsion of its weight, were forced to bend into volutes at the outer edges.  Just then Callimachus, whom the Athenians called κατατηξἱτεχνος for the refinement and delicacy of his artistic work, passed by this tomb and observed the basket with the tender young leaves growing round it.  Delighted with the novel style and form, he built some columns after that pattern for the Corinthians, determined their symmetrical proportions, and established from that time forth the rules to be followed in finished works of the Corinthian order.” (IV.I.9-10) 

This unusual but touching story serves as the basis for this piece. The double title (Κόρη/ Κορινθιακός [Cora/Corinthian]) references the alternative name for Persephone (Kore/Cora), an important figure in Ancient Greek mythology, particularly in the Orphic tradition, who is symbolically representated by the Corinthian order, imbuing the beauty of the order and the tragedy of its origin with motifs of salvation and resurrection. 

Written for for Natalka Pasicznyk, Sam Finch, and Ceci Keiffer, with thanks.

The Londronic Tapestry is a hybrid graphic score exploring visual and musical landscapes through collage.  Every part of the tapestry was assembled physically from materials I found or which were given to me while I lived in London from 2023–2025.  In this way, it forms a kind of scrapbook of concert and museum flyers, tube maps, and other ephemera chronicling this time and place.  In addition, the tapestry intends to embody the essence of collage both materially and metaphorically: the coherence of different parts never designed to come together but curated in such a way as to work harmoniously.  The digital tapestry allows for interactive immersion and the voluntary exploration of this visual-musical landscape.  An almost limitless number of musical combinations can be triggered as participants navigate through various sites of interest and determine for themselves what sub-collage they would like to create and explore.  The tapestry may be approached musically or artistically in various ways, but broadly presents three main sections from left to right: the Architectural (melodic and harmonic),  the Human (vocal), and the Natural (rhythmic).  Each of these regions affords certain themes and includes various sites of potential interest.  Ultimately, the tapestry aims to present an experience of joyful exploration and experimentation, in which play becomes inseparable from its music and art. 

A graphic score is little without its performers, and I am grateful to all those who contributed toward realizing the premier of this project at the Royal College of Music, London, 31 March 2025.

Performers:

• Jess Bull Anderson – Trombone

• Johanna Bernard – Violin

• Tom Bradbury – Electric Guitar

• Leif Haley – Piano

• Alina Maries-Reim – Cello

• Erica Paterson – Soprano

Technical:

• Photography: Maria Tróchez

• Tapestry video: Danny Holland

• Lighting: Colin Eversdijk

• Digital Tapestry programming: Benson Haley

Digital Tapestry sounds:

• Violin: Zosia Herlihy-O’Brien

• Cello: Alina Maries-Reim

• Singing: Erica Paterson

• Nun chanting: Julia Scarborough

• Fencing: Goodenough College Fencing Society

• Other sounds: Leif Haley

Other assistance:

• Grace Cattell

• RCM Studios and Facilities

“we live in squares, we [play] in triangles”
(Bloomsbury Group)

An uplifting piece loosely inspired by Gregorian chant, using the Kyrie Cunctipotens Genitor as a cantus firmus and spiralling into both activity and stasis.

Original poetry by Josh Grosse.  

This piece takes a small motif on a wintery journey through systematic changes of various musical parameters over time.

As a percussionist I am especially interested in rhythm, and this piece explores rhythmic synchrony and diachrony across transformations of density, tempo, and timbre.  Mathematically, parallel lines are said to converge at infinity, and this forms the conceptual framework of the piece as reflected in its title.  There are two central transformations at play: 1) permutations of the “infinitely converging” yet “parallel” motifs in the antiphonal marimbas, and 2) a gradual transition from primarily wooden to primarily metallic sounds.  (I am not necessarily suggesting that infinity sounds metallic, though there is an undeniable satisfaction to the metaphor of a wooden [cf. Greek hylē; both the word for “wood” and “matter”] reality, and an indestructible and shining and ringing [i.e., metallic] infinity.)  

Much of the piece involves parallels of stasis and movement, density and sparseness, timbre, and rhythm.  I do not think these musical lines terminally “collide” in the timeframe of the piece (and that is to be expected; it is not infinite), but I hope that their movements in and out of proximity afford the suggestion of an eventual (infinite) unity. 

Written for PERC’M: Isaac Harari, Kian Hsu, Murray Sedgwick, Stan Talman.

This piece, for historical quartet, unites contemporary harmonic and rhythmic techniques with Renaissance isorhythm.

I wrote the first Peace of Advice in 2019 for a much smaller ensemble of two winds, three strings, and piano, but it never saw a performance.  Six years later, these seven short episodes stuck with me, and I decided to reconfigure the piece for the HELIX! ensemble.  Though fairly continuous, the composition is divided into the following short movements which inform the musical material and which I envision as open-ended maxims: Go Gently, Go Peacefully, Go Curiously, Go Resolutely, Go Deeply, Go Courageously, Go Together. 

In Greek mythology, Charybdis is a sea monster (or sometimes a whirlpool) who, along with the sea monster Scylla, poses great danger to seafarers traveling through a region often associated with the Strait of Messina.  It has come to be associated, particularly in the context of the saying “to be between Scylla and Charybdis,” with an intractable obstacle.

The Precipitous Charybdis, then, is not only an obstacle, but one that becomes increasingly difficult to fight the larger or worse it becomes—but perhaps one that can still be overcome.

Scenes:

Act I

1. Opening Scene

2. Abduction

3. Time Passes, Beauty Grows

4. Contrast

5. The First Trial

6. The Second Trial

7. The Third Trial

8. Bensiabel’s Instructions

Intermission

Act II

9. Prunella Enters the Forest

10. Confrontation

11. Return

12. Reminiscence

13. The Fourth Trial

14. Aftermath

Synopsis:

Prunella earns her name from the plums she picks daily from a roadside orchard on her way to school.  However, this orchard is kept by a witch, who one day notices Prunella’s naïve thieving, and resolves to punish her.  The witch lies in wait and captures Prunella, abducting the girl to her home.  Years pass and Prunella grows up; the witch notices Prunella’s growing moral and physical beauty, which puts her own darkness in stark contrast.  The witch resolves to kill Prunella, though she intends to do so by a series of trials, perhaps to dispense with her own internal qualms.  Over the course of several days, Prunella is made to draw water up from a well in a shoddy basket, bake bread from scratch in a matter of hours, fetch a casket from the witch’s even more wicked sibling, and guess the colors of roosters crowing in the middle of the night.  Throughout all these tasks, Prunella meets the witch’s son, Bensiabel, who aids her with the hope that she will give him a kiss if he does; Prunella refuses him each time, in spite of his help.  In the end, Prunella is emboldened by her successful liberation of the slaves of the witch’s sister, and Bensiabel grows hopeful that he can overcome his identity as nothing but a witch’s son; he helps Prunella in the final trial and throws the witch down the stairs, killing her, just before she moves to attack (or devour) Prunella.  Prunella, now liberated and touched by Bensiabel’s continual kindness, marries him, and they live happily ever after in newfound freedom and self-assurance.

Text adapted from Andrew Lang’s “Prunella” (The Grey Fairy Book, 1900), from Domenico Comparetti and Alessandro d’Ancona’s “Prezzemolina” (Canti e Racconti del Popolo Italiano, vol. 7, 1879).

Funding provided by grants from:

• The Binghamton University Summer Scholars and Artists Program

• The Binghamton Music Department’s Student Performance Project Fund

Inspired by McArthur Binion’s painting of the same name, this piece is constructed around the rhythm of speaking the title aloud.

Something about birds.

Written for HUB New Music.

Staggering Fidelity presents a simple musical motif that undergoes various transformations of increasing absurdity over the course of the piece.  The motif is represented in the ensemble and electronics at different times and with quite different degrees of “fidelity” to the original.  Sometimes these different fidelities are juxtaposed or superimposed with each other—staggered in time—to create composite melodies and textures. 

A layering of musical materials, constructed around a central rhythmic motif.

What is the thanatochoros (i.e., death-space(ing)/death-dance(ing))?  It is the superposition of space and action that affords both beauty and danger.  It is the chain of concatenation of cause and effect that produces both wonder and terror.  It is the history of the labyrinth that begins as a dance, becomes inscribed on the ground to become a structure and place, and thereafter informs again a volume of allowable movement within it.  It is uncertainty and polysemy and pluripotentiality. 

What is the serious unnatural covenant (i.e., rainbow of gravity)?  Perhaps it is the promise of the sanctity of the labyrinth.  The Palace at Knossos is a hospital, a sanctuary, an embrace; in the way that the landscape of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is an embrace of absurdity, of every twist and turn.  Labyrinth as safety and delight and confusion and horror: Slothrop, who exists as the product of violation, paranoiding through the labyrinth, trying both to embrace and evacuate it as all around him the mechanisms of an absolute and instantaneous violence (beyond the zero) advance; Asterion, who exists as the product of violation, sheltering in a house of complexity, a sanctuary built for him, as the Hellenic world’s most infamous psychopathic serial killer and rapist, Theseus, comes for him.  Both the assault of Theseus (Athens vs. Crete) and the A4 rocket development (Axis vs. Allies) transpire in a long chain of volleyed brutality, catching innocent people in its constriction.  Just as Slothrop was never supposed to surive the war, Asterion was never supposed to have survived infancy.  The mystery of the Schwarzgerät and the Labyrinth are essential to their powers both real and symbolic; both embody the fundamental mystery of architecture (cf. Goethe, crystal music): that at any given moment only a limited percept is available; the whole remains eternally out of each.  A reality that is both dangerous and beautiful.

[IMPORTANT NOTE: I request that you please print the full title; I am not trying to be difficult, but the psychological effect of this is vital to the piece (not to mention it constitutes the text of the Exordium).  If an abridged title is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY, it should appear exactly like this: "Θανατο(χορός|χώρος)"]

Though often known as an artist, Henry Darger was a prolific writer, with a magnum opus—The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion—of over 15,000 pages.  I became fascinated by different accounts of what must ostensibly be understood as the same event—the Battle of Dolorine and Costellio—across two sources: accounts which bear nothing other than the names of two towns in common with each other.  In order to create the above text, I transcribed portions of each account and studied them.  I then spent a little over a week trying to remember what I could from the texts, once a day.  Certain lines stuck with me indelibly (“time  is as nothing in this awful war”) while others changed across various recollections.  This process of iterative remembering (cf. Borges’s hrönir) produced not only a third unique account of this dittological battle, but a blurring of the two source texts, amalgamating what on the surface seems like two distinct events into the unified signifier presented to us by Darger in the six different forms shown on the title page.  To the annals of the Glandeco-Angelinian War, I thus add my own account of the distantly and uncertainly recalled Battle of Dolorine and Costellio.

Written for Ryan Kalin.

Fear is like a tree; fear is a hierarchy.  At the bottom is the highest level of analysis, the most fundamental, overarching fear; the fear that is at the root of all fears, from which the other fears grow.  Fear moves up the stem, the trunk, and branches and ends at leaves: these are the fears that manifest themselves to us most openly and specifically in our lives, the lowest level of analysis.  And at the base of the tree, interred in the soil, lies the greatest fear, the greatest comprehendible fear: the fear of misunderstanding the universe we have no choice of existing in.

Written for Charley Jennings in collaboration with the English National Ballet School.

Based on two paintings by François Boucher at the Wallace Collection, London:

The Rising of the Sun (1753)
The Setting of the Sun (1752)

This work is ordered by the date of the original paintings, tracking the passage from evening to morning rather than the way in which they were originally displayed.

The setting of the sun is represented by Apollo’s meeting with the nymph Tethys, surrounded by her nymphs and tritons, following his successful solar journey across the heavens.  Descending from far above, he is welcomed into the sea, sinking beneath the waves while overhead the cloth of dusk is drawn across the sky by Night, preceded by the Evening Star.

The rising of the sun is represented by Apollo’s ascent once more from the water, rising toward his chariot and the open heavens as the cloth of night is whisked away by Aurora and the Morning Star.  Soon, he will leave the earth far behind and bring day across the land.

(For further detail, see: Ingamells, J., The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Pictures III: French before 1815, London: The Trustees of The Wallace Collection 1985, pp. 68–72.)

This piece is based on the eponymous fairytale, sometimes called “The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces,” taking inspiration from various scenes in the story, including:

I. Illicit Dance
The twelve sibling princesses secretly escape to an underground magical kingdom every night to dance in an enchanted castle.

II. Proclamation
The king proclaims that whoever can discover the mysterious goings-on of the princesses will be rewarded.

III. Landscape with Invisibility Cloak
An ex-soldier, our hero, journeys toward the castle and acquires an invisibility cloak.

IV. Discovery & Descent
The hero discovers the secret voyages of the princesses and follows them into the underground kingdom. 

V. River to the Castle
A river crossing almost reveals the invisible hero as he and the princesses traverse the enchanted terrain.

VI. Three Nights of Dance
For three nights the princesses and hero dance in the underground kingdom, while the latter gathers evidence on the actions of the former.

VII. Evidence & Memories
The hero reports to the king on the actions of the princesses and marries one of them; the underground kingdom is ignored but perhaps never forgotten.

The events of the tale are simultaneously wonderful and sinister, and this piece aims to capture both aspects.

“This is not Predetermined” is a piece about the line between determinism and predeterminism, a line often neglected in the consideration of free will.  There are many things that point toward the deterministic nature of our universe, primarily the fact of causality and the continual observation that we partake in a fundamentally causal existence.  If everything is bounded by cause and effect, then, by definition, everything is determined.  However, this is not to say that everything is predetermined.  The most obvious and substantial refutation of predeterminism is the fact that, if everything were predetermined, the origin of the universe would have to contain infinite information in a finite space.  Given that information has been shown to have energy and take up space, it cannot be encoded with infinite degrees of precision in a finite space; the universe’s initial conditions do not allow predeterminism.  Furthermore, the phenomenon of nuclear decay is widely believed to be completely random, as is thermal noise, and various quantum phenomena (e.g. there will never be two photons with identical emission or reflection).  Of course, these things don’t preclude us wondering about determinism, anyway, which is just as well.  There’s nothing trivial about approaching existence with the assumption free will, regardless of whether it truly exists.  Perhaps its mere concept is just as powerful.  Perhaps, as you might find from performing this piece, this is not predetermined.

Written for Fifth House Ensemble.

The Three In Nomines were inspired by Picforth’s In Nomine (c. 1578)—an incredible piece that is the sole known work by Picforth.  While each of my in nomines do not strictly adhere to that Renaissance form, they take Picforth’s use of cantus firmus and isorhythm as a starting point for compositional exploration. 

Written for HUB New Music.

This piece for solo classical guitar is constructed around the idea of decorative tiles—such as those used in Spanish architecture, or in the work of M. C. Escher—which undergo various rotations in order to create a pleasing geometric mosaic.  In this case, the design of the tile represents the stylization of two superimposed melodic contours that are heard in the first two measures of the piece, and which undergo various transformations as this ‘tile’ is rotated to create a resultant mosaic.  In a sense, this becomes a theme and variations, but one structurally determined by the tiles’ geometry.  As the piece moves through different orbits of the sequence of tile rotations, the material becomes increasingly elaborated upon and distant from its initial state (in the outermost ring, a kind of prolation or rhythmic augmentation happens between the two themes, offsetting them from each other), eventually coalescing in the centre of the mosaic where it becomes densest and most dramatic.  Throughout, the mosaic’s corners offer departures from the rigidity of these structural permutations, with free timing and timbrally distinct harmonics.

Written for Cameron Murray, whom I thank for his helpful insights into writing for classical guitar, and for his suggestions that have greatly improved this piece.

This is a somewhat absurdist piano solo making central use of phasing and polyrhythms to create a bizarre and shifting (sometimes rapidly, sometimes gradually) landscape.  Ultimately, I see this piece as a technical exploration grounded in an interesting topography of differentially contrasting and repeated sounds—I want it both to be technically and experientially satisfying.  Hence both calculated and natural variation across rhythm, meter, harmony, register, articulation, dynamics, phrasing, tempo, and freedom (e.g., in mechanical vs. rubato and improvisatory sections). 

Unfolding is a piano solo in two sections (1. Folding In; 2. Folding Out) that explores both the unfoldings of musical ideas in performance and the unfolding of conceptual understandings of the piece throughout the process of its composition.  I am a huge fan of Hania Rani’s music, and was inspired by some of her piano pieces (namely Hawaii Oslo and Landscapes) making use of a repeated note drone. 

Voice of the Desert is a reworking of an early (2017) composition of mine for open score.  There can be a kind of awe elicited even from very inhospitable places, and it was my aim to capture the diversity of desert ecosystems, from the empty frigidity of night to the blazing heat of day.