solo instrumental
Arqueología de la razón de los sueños: Homenaje a Federico Mompou (2014)
Commissioned by Pierre Arnaud Dablemont, piano, for the 2015 York Spring Festival for New Music. Premiered by James Iman on May 2016.
Inspired by the piano music of Federico Mompou and loosely inspired by Spanish surrealism of Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca, "The Archeology of the Reason(ing) of Dreams" juxtaposes different gestures at times unexpectedly, at others layering and others subtly sliding between gestures. The piece is dreamlike and evocative.
Performances: James Iman (May 2016)
Songs of the Sephardim, cello solo (2009)
Commissioned by Jakub Omsky, premiered at the Polish Consulate’s Residence in New York, NY.
Songs of the Sephardim is a suite of songs without words, in which each movement is a setting of a Medieval Iberian Jewish poet. Each poem is set in the original Hebrew, using the Sephardic pronunciation system which places the accent of each word on the last syllable. The Sephardic speech rhythms changed my approach to text setting in subtle ways. For instance, many of the poetic lines were set to music that ascends, where in English and Spanish settings, my melodies tend to descend.
My approach was to first set the text as a bare melody, and then cast it with complementary materials. In The Garden of Song, the original melody is offset by short sul ponticello interjections, meant to give a distressed and dolorous counterpart to the increasingly radiant melody. Because the text of The Laundress is very simply constructed, I wanted to use simple musical means. I intended the tune to evoke a folk song, and then arranged it for the cello using the baroque technique of bariolage, initially alternating melody notes with open strings, but later interspersed with both open strings and their natural harmonics. For Take Heart, I wrote it as a duet for the cello with itself to create a kind of reinforced and reinforcing music, only breaking into solo, lyric melodies for the more heartening images of the candle and the wounded lion.
Performances: Jakub Omsky: Wichita, KS (Mar 2008), New York City (April 2008)
The Garden of Song, cello solo (2008)
Later incorporated into Songs of the Sephardim.
Performances: Jakob Omsky: Madison, WI (Jan 2009)
Kai-‘r / xhqt(i)s, for bassoon solo (2008)
Review: Double Reed, Vol. 32, No. 3 [2009] “If you are looking for a new challenge, you might want to tackle this composition.” Published by TrevCo Music.
These are a diptych of pieces, a pairing of irrational and rational, conceptually drawing on baroque practice of pairing free pieces with tightly conceived pieces, like a toccata and fugue. Kai-'r was written "irrationally"—not subconsciously, or chaotically, but every choice was "from the gut." xhqt(i)s was composed using a repeating cycle of five pitches, with an additional pitch (or two) in each repetition. The repetitive architecture is not heard, though it is somehow felt.
They can be played in either order, though the tessitura of xhqt(i)s makes it likely it will usually follow Kai-'r.
Performances: Marc Vallon (April 2007); David Wells (November 2012); Ashley Myall (rarescale) at The Forge, (Camden, UK 2016)
Sonetos, for solo guitar (2007)
A diptych inspired by two sonnets by Neruda: “Es hoy: todo el ayer se fue cayendo”and “No te amo como si fueras.”
In No te amo como si fueras, I sought to convey the simple intimacy of Neruda's beloved sonnet, but to also capture the strange and unexpected images and metaphors in the poem—a "salt rose," "certain dark things," "a plant that doesn't flower." The harmonies and melodies are both intimate and alienated to capture the dual nature of the poem.
Es hoy: todo el ayer se fue cayendo is a luminous and ecstatic poem. In this I sought to convey a sense of sensuousness and disorientation—the poem describes a present moment that eliminates a the sense of future or past, the timelessness "now" and luminosity of ecstasy.
Performances: Doug Rubio (SUNY Potsdam, Crane School of Music, March 2012); Lynn McGrath (XIX Festival Internacional de Guitarra, Lima, Peru, March 2008)
Hammer, for marimba solo (2007)
The wooden bars of the marimba have a familiar rich sound, a natural rate of decay. Hammer is an exploration of simulations of other rates of decay on the marimba--slower rates, artificial rates. These simulations are created by using an atypical roll on the marimba--simultaneously striking a pair of bars instead of the conventional rapid alternation between them. (The title comes from the almost exclusive use of this technique throughout the piece.) There are only a few instances of the natural decay in the piece, which suddenly stand in strong contrast to artificial decays the audience has become acclimated to. This comes from a period of works I wrote to be very rich and engaging in relatively short spaces.
Performances: Nathaniel Bartlett: Madison, WI: Oklahoma City, OK: Houston, TX: Scottsdale, AZ: Los Angeles, CA: Berkeley, CA: Austin, TX: Manhattan, KS (Winter 2007-2008)
pierce, for solo piccolo (2001)
A short piece that delivers on its title.
Performances: Elizabeth Marshall (2007); Alan Berquist (2002); Melinda Russo (2001)
Dance Variations on a Theme by Persichetti, for piano solo (1999)
Eighteen variations on a theme taken from the second movement of Vincent Persichetti's Sonata for Solo Cello, with an original harmonization. There are six 'dances' in the piece—minuet, an arabesque, a mazurka, a habanera, a zortziko and a sarabande—and the remaining variations are free and connective variations, derived in diverse ways from the theme, though less clearly than the dance variations.
The piece contains many hommages to classic piano variations. Every third variation is a 'dance' form, just as every third of Bach's Goldbergs are a canon. A variations of long tones recalls the 'Sphinxes' from Schumann's Carnaval, a tumultuous variation is reminiscent of Rzewski's The People United variations, and the last variation has completely transformed the theme into an elegant Sarabande that recalls Beethoven's transformation of Diabelli's theme into an elegant aria.
Performances: Jess Salek (November 2002); Christopher Taylor (agevolmente, Albany Records, 2011); Sung Hu Nam (March 2011)