Glistening Darkness
Written for Quartetto Noûs, 2022.
Washed in Summers Rains
Written for the icarus Quartet, 2022.
Program notes:
Music is, for me, not necessarily the act of performance, or the act of listening, but the ability to let go. It is a similar experience to being in nature. Walking through a forest or a desert, or really any set of surroundings, we focus on so many external inputs from the sound of small animals rustling in leaves, or the smell of far off rain. All too often in life, we focus too much on the inevitabilities of tomorrow, or the day after, without giving credence to ourselves. In life, we will experience love, kindness, laughter and so many things that create joy. Yet we far too often carry only the experiences of endless pain, heartbreak and loss. We carry these things with us until we can no longer see or experience the care and love in our lives. I for one can find comfort in Summers Rains. In nature releasing what it has held so deep, even in the most beautiful time of year. I feel that music, sound, and nature can help to ease oneself of pain and sadness. This piece centers around the idea of creating sounds which wash the listener just as thousands of tears falling amidst a beautiful summer can help us to see more joy, and more kindness among not only our world, but those around us.
Fragments
Written for the Atlantic Music Festival, 2021.
Program notes:
Nothing that we hold on to is ever complete. We are constantly failed by a multitude of human incapabilities. Our memory, our speech, our thoughts, they are never anything but an amalgamation of fragments. In recalling an event or an experience, we are most often drawn to miniscule moments that have captured our thoughts months and years later. On the precipice of so much collective exuberance there lay now endless fragments behind us. Fragments of smiles and tears, of love and hatred, and of new life and unrelenting death. Looking back now upon moments which we, at the time, perceived as inconceivable, we do not remember the way we felt, but rather the way we feel now as influenced by the broken fragments of recollection that we see strewn across this time. Some of our happiest and saddest moments are defined by the words or actions present in a tiny fragment of our memory that just so happen to influence the way we view entire swaths of our lives. In this piece I have tried to take this idea of fragmentation and abstract it into musical ideas. Small fragments that grow into ideas which slowly influence each other over time before slowly homogenizing to become one musical texture before falling back into the monotonous motion of our lives.
Frozen Movement in Silent Nothingness
Written for Karen Ouzounian, 2021.
Excerpt from the program notes:
“…listening to the lone voice of a singer in a concert hall may seem like the purest form of sonorical appreciation, yet it is not until you sit quietly, unable to hear the sounds of that singer’s voice that you gain an appreciation for its existence in the first place. It is not until you need the music and it is not there that you begin to gain an appreciation for it. In just this same way we do not appreciate the ability to speak with someone until we cannot speak with them again. We do not appreciate the ability to love someone until we cannot love them again. We might not even appreciate feeling loved until we need to feel loved, and there is nobody there to love us…”
* full program notes available upon request
Restless
Written for Ashley Jackson, 2020.
Excerpt from the program notes:
“It has, in today's day and age, become ever-increasingly difficult to work alone. This permanently isolated and permanently exhausted state of being is the exact antithesis of a calming, creative world. In spite of all of this, I still find myself requiring some sort of creative meaning. This requirement of myself to expel those feelings of absent creativity leaves me endlessly tired of my environment, my loneliness, and my work, and yet endlessly working on some, eventually meaningless task. I can only describe this feeling as restlessness. Endlessly searching for some kind of fulfillment or any sort of interaction, yet failing at every step.”
* full program notes available upon request
Ripples on Water
Written for Yukiko Oba at the Boston Conservatory of Music, 2019.
Excerpt from the program notes:
“…this piece details a moment of discovery, of clarity and of a final understanding of what you must do, in order to find your own calm. Ripples can show you something, teach you something…”
* full program notes available upon request
Lights in the Distance
written for Mary O'Keefe (ob), Gleb Kanasevich (cl), Daniel Bielman (bsn) at the Boston Conservatory of Music, 2019.
Inspired by the painting Nocturne in Blue and Silver by James Abbott McNeill Whistler
*full program notes available upon request.
On the Origin of Friendship
Written for the Semiosis Quartet at the Boston Conservatory of Music, 2019.
Excerpt from the program notes:
”It is in those roots of friendship, and the friendship that comes after that gives us the chance to branch out and experience so many new things, so many things that we may not see or think of beforehand. Yet, through this, in the end, we must always move on”
*program notes available upon request. Both German and English versions are available.
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