Composer
Abstain Red Hells takes its title from a movement of a forgotten piece of mine for flute and soprano saxophone. The basic idea of a stubborn ostinato and a tense-yet-lyrical melody was played out in the very small scale in this earlier piece and has since been liberated into a bigger and more open musical …
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 …
I was waking up one morning and the title for this piece was stuck in my head. I wasn’t sure why, I didn’t necessarily know what it sounded like, but I knew it was a good title. When Andrew Allen asked me to write a piece for him, I threw this title at him and …
These three short pieces were composed for the Duo Fujin One-Day Composition Challenge in 2011. The “secret ingredient,” made public only 12 hours before the deadline, was the word “REMIX.” Not being much of a remixer, I struggled to ?nd a foothold in composing the piece. I started by making anagrams of the phrase “Duo …
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 …