Project Type: Chamber Ensemble

Sphinx of Black Quartz, Judge My Vow

Instrumentation: Flute, Oboe, Trumpet, and Two Percussionists

Duration: ca. 7:00

Program Note:

Pangrams (sentences which use every letter of an alphabet at least once) are useful tools for the development of typography and graphic designs. These sentences offer typeface designers, calligraphers, and others means to show off their technical skills in a way that features each glyph for closer inspection. However, pangrams also pose wonderful creative and linguistic challenges.

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Visible Mending

Instrumentation: Piano Trio (singing and speaking)

Duration: ca. 6:30

Program Note:

A number of my close friends practice the art of visible mending – a technique in which the tears in a garment are repaired in a manner that overtly draws attention to the repair itself. These repairs are often highly ornamented and stylized, using eye-catching patches of fabric or elaborate and colorful embroidered figures that highlight the place of damage and the work that was done to reconstruct the garment. Visible mending is a pragmatic practice that also elevates the labor of repair into an act of artistic expression.

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Scablands

Instrumentation: SATBar Saxophone Quartet, Electronics, and Video

Duration: ca. 8:30

Program Note:

Scablands takes inspiration from my home in Eastern Washington which (along with parts of Montana, Idaho, and Oregon) was shaped by the cataclysmic Missoula Floods of the most recent ice age.

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Quiver and Quench

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Instrumentation: Flute Quartet (speaking and singing)

Duration: ca. 7:30

Program Note:

Quiver and Quench was written for an outdoor performance of the Duende Flute Quartet at Edisto Beach State Park in South Carolina. The work explores the relationship between the ocean, the creatures that inhabit the waters & shores, and the role that these marine ecosystems play in the lives of human beings.

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Consider the Cedar

Instrumentation: Flute Quartet

Duration: ca. 4:00

Program Note:

Consider the Cedar was commissioned by the Duende flute quartet for an outdoor performance at Congaree National Park during the Spring of 2021. The group requested that I construct a piece of “data-driven music” in which the elements of a data set (in this case the flood level of Cedar Creek in Congaree National Park) is used as a basis for creating musical material.

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Slapdash

Instrumentation: Flute, Trumpet in C, Double Bass, Percussion, Piano

Duration: ca. 15:00

Program Note:

Slapdash was written as an exploration of all things anxious, agitated, erratic, hasty, and hurried. The piece opens with an explosive gesture that contrasts a quick impulse and a prolonged reverberation. This basic motion generates the opening rhythmically-charged material which works into a frenzy, giving way to a searching, contemplative reflection. After a brief apotheosis, the rhythmic material slowly and insidiously returns before violently propelling forward towards the brutal conclusion.

Slapdash was commissioned by the University of South Carolina Spark Collective and was given the John and Lucretia Herr Award by the UofSC composition faculty.

Three Patterns for Twenty-Four Tones

Instrumentation:  Piano and bitKlavier tuned a quarter-tone apart

Duration:  ca. 4:00

Program Note:

The idea for this work came after listening to Charles Ives’ Three Quarter-Tone Pieces, which employs two pianos tuned a quarter-step apart; this difference in tuning allows keyboardists to play some of the notes “between the keys” on a traditional piano. As I have explored the sounds of the bitKlavier (a virtual instrument that runs on a computer), I’ve realized that this software can offer an easy way to write for two keyboards in such a microtonal tuning system, (though two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart is always preferred).

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