Representative Works
mine but for its sublimation is a concert-length piano solo about resonance, register, and touch. The piece is largely played on the keys, with the addition of piano harmonics about halfway through, and then the addition of ebows about three quarters of the way through. As being a composer for whom the mechanism of an instrument (and the corporeal physicality of producing sound on an instrument) is always the access point for a new composition, I wanted to (finally, after years of avoiding such a provocation) embrace the piano’s mechanism and its responsivity to nuances of touch and attack. The piece spends about half of its duration confined to specific registers: first the middle, then the upper register, and eventually the low and lowest registers. Within each register I have developed chords and harmonies that, I feel, only work within those registers (due to the specificities of resonance, balance, and timbre in each distinct register). There is no passage work in the piece; nearly every attack, every event, is a joint event between the two hands. Formally, the piece hinges on specific pivot moments to create connection through while granting sudden passage into the next formal swathe:
repeated, emphatically-attacked high C’s activate the cold echoey resonance of the highest register pivots the piece from the first section into the icy second;
uninflected repetitions of a mid-register G# clears the harmonic air for a sudden drop into the low registers;
a minutes-long emergence of a strategically-placed E-flat Major chord (which Alex Ross described as “a spiritual event” in a column in the New Yorker) acts as both a formal discovery for the piece while also initiating the second half which makes heavy use of harmonics;
a sounding G4 is gradually clarified in a process in which it pivots from being the 14th to the 2nd harmonic, so as to resound indefinitely as the entrance pitch for the ebows;
and finally, the ending of the piece itself is a devastating pivot into sudden silence and the cessation of the viscous harmonies of the ebows and constant resonance of the piece we’ve been living in for the past hour of the piece.
mine but for its sublimation is more than the sum of its formal and material parts. The piece is strangely and deeply affecting, as it quietly teaches listeners how to listen to it while establishing how sonic objects, behaviors, and relationships are imbued with meaning within the hermetic expressive and perceptual experience it offers. The compositional process was also a great learning experience for me, as I felt I was in reciprocity with the piece itself. I grew as a composer in writing this piece, and my music has been forever altered. Before writing this piece, I had nothing quite like it in my output; however, mine but for its sublimation is also, somehow, the most-me piece I had ever written up to that point. The piece, while not anticipated, felt absolutely inevitable.
Additional Information:
Recording on Another Timbre available here.
Read an interview about the piece with Simon Reynell, director of the label Another Timbre, here.
Read a longform review/mediatation on the piece and its recording on MusicWebInternational here.
More information (past performances, program notes, live video, etc…) here.
a vapor (no body, no image)
baritone voice & orchestra [2025]
written for the Tectonics Festival, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Ilan Volkov, and Ty Bouque
a vapor (no body, no image) is a work for solo baritone voice and symphony orchestra, commissioned by the Tectonics Festival for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Ilan Volkov, cond.). The piece is a meditation on the emotional complexities and ambiguities of an individual's mourning-of an unknown collective absence. Specifically, the work articulates and reckons with how queer individuals of the composer's generation (and younger) learn of, reconcile, grieve, and hold space for the lost generation of queer and gay individuals who died during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980's and '90's. What is the grief that one feels towards an unimaginable, lost collective community which the griever was not alive or cognizant of during the time of their loss? What is the source of grief when lived experience was not shared with the dead? How is mourning enacted when taking place decades after the death-event? The piece continues my work’s focus on queerness and infection, while using the journals of AIDS victim Hervé Guibert (from whom the title is constructed) as a starting point in articulating the peculiar, estranged, but devastating mode of mourning felt by today's queer generation for those lost to the AIDS epidemic decades ago. How do we grieve a ghost?
More information (past performances, program notes, text, etc…) here.
yours in the process of being absorbed
baritone & ensemble [2023]
[voice; b.clarinet; piano; violin; cello; bass; percussion]
Commissioned by the Schallfeld Ensemble with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.
yours in the process of being absorbed orbits the piano solo mine but for its sublimation. While they are quite distinct pieces, they speak to each other in certain formal and experiential ways. This ensemble piece ‘teaches itself to sing’ throughout its somewhat labyrinthine structure: dispersed over its 40 minutes, an archipelago of three threadbare, extended solos (first for violin, then for piano, finally for voice) bloom and give passage into subtly verdant ensemble “songs.” The cumulative impact is one of constant slow expansion and contraction of the sonic, experiential, and affective spaces. While composing, my focus was to fine tune my orchestration of tone, harmony, and noise. My goal was to create a sonic ecology in which both the noise within tone production as well as the tones encrusted within noise production were both amplified and the balances therein could be modulated over time. Just as the piano solo, these formal and acoustic priorities are ultimately at service to what I believe is a deeply affecting experience: slowly but urgently, the listener is induced into the emotional core of the piece. The text, written by myself (with some input in Song III from my vocalist collaborator, Ty Bouque) is a quite personal confrontation and articulation of the intersection between identity, queerness, and incurable disease, namely HIV. This has been a central concern of my work for the past ten or so years, but it wasn’t until yours in the process of being absorbed that this subject, and its implications, were so fully and vulnerably expressed.
More information (past performances, program notes, text, video, interview, etc…) here.