Composer
One day I was walking back to my office when my colleague John Nichol (whose office was right next door to mine at the time) stopped me and said “Look at this. Isn’t this kind of nice?” and he pointed to the arrangement of thumbtacks on my bulletin board. There wasn’t a particular pattern or …
Two Shorter Songs was originally composed for countertenor Jerry Hui and saxophonist Aaron Durst. Whenever a composer is given the opportunity to write for a countertenor with perfect pitch, we are honor-bound to do so! I am thrilled that Jerry and Aaron were open to me writing for them. Texts by Dora Sigerson Shorter Beware …
Composed for the Central Michigan University New Music Ensemble, both movements are typical of my current compositional output. Harmonies are based on the repetition of a simple interval pattern and long lyrical melodies weave their way through these chaconnes. The rhythms and colors are rather plain, unadorned, and far from ornate. The directness and simplicity …
This composition is a single movement that continually spins out from the opening spiky punctuations. The entire quartet has an organic sense of growth as it takes different motives from the beginning and winds through various incarnations of that material. This material is reinterpreted, recombined, twisted, stretched, and generally toyed with until everything coalesces again …
This composition is about a blocked melody. A simple lyrical line is trapped within clouds of shattered fragments and textures. As the composition unfolds, the disintegrated fragments which encumber the melodic line begin to fall away until only the melody remains. The title is, as you probably know, a quotation of Darth Vader’s instructions to …