Music
| Year | 2011 |
| Time | 2:45 |
| Size | 3.79 MB |
Circles was written in collaboration with flutist Teresa Sandragorsian and dancer Nina Guerra. Ms. Guerra produced choreography for a small dance ensemble to be performed alongside the piece, some of which precedes the music and is executed in silence. It was premiered on December 14, 2011 with Teresa Sandragorsian on flute, the composer on piano, and dancers Tracy Boothby, Nina Guerra, Tina Miskinis, and Orlando Moreno.
| Year | 2011 |
| Time | 10:07 |
| Size | 13.8 MB |
Tracing Arcs is my largest project to date in terms of duration, instrumentation, and structural scope. It’s my first piece for a full orchestra, and it’s been the central focus for my first three semesters of graduate school. It could best be described as a symphonic poem, a single movement divided in this case into four disparate sections. First, a lush, neo-romantic introduction that establishes the primary motive; next, a brisk, rhythmic postminimalist section; third, a tuba cadenza; and finally, a sweeping conclusion that ends in a whisper.
| Year | 2011 |
| Time | 1:05 |
| Size | 1.47 MB |
My latest electronic music project involved selecting a movie clip, erasing the audio, and writing my own score for it, similar to Drift. This time, my target was a one-minute excerpt (9:20-10:23) from Alex Roman’s breathtaking short film, The Third & The Seventh. The video features Roman’s CG renderings of architecture, including the Phillips Exeter Academy Library and the Quadracci Pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The realism of his work is made more impressive by the fact that every aspect of the video, including sound and music production (except the composition itself) is solely Roman’s doing. With his approval, I may soon be able to provide the excerpt accompanied by the music I’ve written for it.
| Year | 2011 |
| Time | 3:22 |
| Size | 4.64 MB |
| Ozymandias
I met a traveler from an antique land |
“Ozymandias” is one of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most famous and enduring poems. Published in 1818, the sonnet masterfully evokes a poignant image of foolish hubris and wryly comments on the futility of human endeavor. Incidentally, its structure – with the long build to the climax at the tenth line – lends itself well to being set to music, in this case as an art song for tenor and piano.
| Year | 2009 |
| Time | ~1:47 |
| Size | 1.75 MB |
One of the most frustrating aspects of video game music is its repetitive nature. Players must typically spend an extended amount of time in one area of the game before moving on, and each area has traditionally contained a single track that loops continuously. Listening to the same music over and over becomes irritating, especially if the player fails at the task necessary to continue and is further delayed in unlocking a new level and its music.
| Year | 2009 |
| Time | 2:12 |
| Size | 3.03 MB |
For this project, I selected a segment of video from a BBC documentary called Galápagos: The Islands that Changed the World, stripped the audio, and composed my own. It depicted sea turtles eating algae underwater, then swimming on the surface; by the end, it had zoomed out to an aerial view of the archipelago. Unfortunately, I don’t have the rights to distribute the video, but here’s the music to it.
| Year | 2009 |
| Time | 2:59 |
| Size | 4.11 MB |
Good texts for art songs are difficult to find. I was playing around with some Percy Shelley poems, but then, as I was looking through Brandon Bird‘s website, I found the Letters to Walken. “An Acquaintance?” Year 2 caught my eye, and the rest, as they say, is awesome.
| Year | 2009 |
| Time | 1:06 |
| Size | 4.61 MB |
This was a project for my Electronic Music course. We were required to write a soundtrack for any of several provided videos in the public domain. I selected footage of someone’s vacation to the Grand Canyon. The music consists of polychords and extended tertian chords in piano and strings, a solo cello, a subtle synth, and my voice, all slathered in reverb and/or delay. The sounds come from a Kurzweil K2000. The video? Who knows.
| Year | 2008-2010 |
De Rerum Natura is an epic poem written by the Roman philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus (ca. 99-55 BCE). We know little about Lucretius’s life beyond the fact that he was an adherent of Epicurus, a Greek philosopher who had lived two centuries before him. The poem, written for and dedicated to Lucretius’s friend Gaius Memmius, sets forth and expounds upon many of the ideas of Epicureanism – that the universe is governed by the motion of atoms, that we must conquer fear (particularly that of death), and that humanity must achieve its own salvation rather than petitioning it from the gods.
| Year | 2008 |
| Time | 4:41 |
| Size | 6.44 MB |
Animus is an experiment in rhythm. The beats are divided unevenly, a feature which is exploited to change the tempo with mathematical precision. The harmony, while comprised of simple chords, moves in unorthodox ways. Overall, however, the atmosphere or emotions evoked by the piece are of primary importance. The modernistic techniques described above are used to add an element of unpredictability to this atmosphere.