Composer
I started off writing a different piece. I was trying to write a quirky and fast polyrhythmic thing for solo marimba. It was terrible; it didn’t sound like me. I started again found this piece hiding inside. It is the right piece; it is the real me. Composed for Laura Jordan and Sarah Carrier’s “Fifteen Minutes …
Throb is an improvisational piece inspired by the complex rhythmic figures which can emerge from simple steady pulses. The players are given a basic framework of how to perform the piece, sometimes coordinating with each other but, for the most part, they are off in their own rhythmic worlds. While the players are often uncoordinated …
This piece started with the scale made to highlight some of the quirky pitch omissions in the hammer dulcimer. After grooving on that scale pattern for a while, the piece breaks it down to reveal a more gentle harmonic underpinning. A long, slow marimba melody emerges with a few mbira punctuations. Finally, the scale erupts …
Each of the five movements in this suite were inspired by various pop songs from the early 1980s. I decided to take short, memorable, and in some cases iconic, licks and hooks from these songs and abstract them, mutate them, hide them, and embrace them. For a while in my musical development, I shunned and …