TO STARBOARD, STAR-BOUND (2017)

solo organ

Commissioned by Clara Gerdes

The work takes place in an ambiguous dream world somewhere between undersea and outer space. The music is at times languid and watery, at others sharp and volcanic. A melody found glowing faintly out of the surrounding harmony at the beginning of the piece returns again and again until it is finally transformed into something magnificent by the end, and we are caught up in a sense of perpetual rising into the stars.

10’30

TRAGICO TECTI SYRMATE (CLOTHED IN TRAGIC ROBES, 2019)

brass quintet

For the 2019 Aspen Music Festival

The apocalyptic text which inspired this work, “Chorus of the Angels” from Christus Judex, Stefano Tucci, 1569, is 450 years old, but it could easily describe the present day or near future. The eerie timelessness of the text is echoed in a musical representation of the Heavenly Ones that sounds at once ancient, futuristic, familiar, and otherworldly, and which has an air of something too vast for translation, like a lament filtered down to us from a higher dimension.

8’30

APPARITION CÉLESTE (2018)

vibraphone and bowed crotales

A Cortona Sessions Distinguished Alumni Commission

A dreamy, mysterious vision frozen in time and filled with French Romantic style jazz harmonies. Inspired by Messiaen.

10’

CAUDA PAVONIS (2020)

10 Musicians (woodwinds, strings, percussion)

Commissioned by the National Orchestral Institute + Festival

Musical representation of the resurrection stage Cauda Pavonis (Tail of the Peacock) in ancient alchemy. Quarter-tone Fibonacci chords and other mathematical sequence harmonies blend with elements of Gregorian chant and 19th-century decadence in a piece that is both mind-bending and dripping with romanticism.

8’

LE BASSIN LUMINEUX (The luminous pool, 2017)

violin, cello, piano

For the 2017 Festival des Ecoles d’Art Américaines de Fontainebleau

Mysterious portrait of a fantasyscape: a pool of water glows in the bowels of a great stone cathedral. A theme for the luminous water weaves languidly throughout, accompanied by musical representations of stone columns and the strange glowing lifeform’s origins in an ancient sea. French Romantic and Symbolist musical allusions tie the piece to its place of premiere: the famous music academy in the Château de Fontainebleau, France, to where many American composers throughout history once travelled to study with Nadia Boulanger.

10’

TERRIBILIS EST LOCUS ISTE (AWESOME IS THIS PLACE, 2018)

soprano, string quartet, electronics

For the Zorá Quartet

A dreamlike retelling of the Jacob’s Ladder story in Latin. The original Gregorian chant melody for Jacob’s famous words (“Awesome is this place. This is none other than the House of God, and the Gate of Heaven”) frames the piece with echoey, lush writing in the strings. In the center of the work lies the narrative, set in its own new, haunting music.

7’

MOON AND MOSS (2019)

TENOR, clarinet, piano

Commissioned by Erinn Komschlies

A dreamlike, wet, writhing forest at night. The singer’s simple text and square rhythms sound like a children’s folk rhyme, but uncanny visual descriptions lend the piece a dark quality, rife with the scent of rich, wet earth and slow decay by fungal bodies. The piano undulates in damp arabesques and gong-like repetitive figures while the clarinet bursts out of the texture with quarter-tone inflected special effects. Faux folk melodies have been left to decay on the forest floor, becoming transformed and strange.

6’