CLASSICAL
Featured Work
A Fine Is A price (2022)
Large Ensemble, Live Mixing, and Pre-recorded Material
Live vocals: Justin Friello, Elyse Brown, Alexa Flinker, and Cheryl Russell
A Fine Is A Price was inspired by an episode of the psychology/economics podcast No Stupid Questions in which they discuss a study in behavioral economics about the effects of fines on parents when they arrive late to pick up their kids from daycare. The unexpected result that once parents understood and accepted the small monetary price, they increased this behavior rather than reducing it was a revelatory moment for me. I started to reflect on my own past behaviors in romantic relationships, how I’d seemingly accepted all possible fines—undesirable outcomes—without changing.
The piece uses large chunks of text for the original study plus additional texts from my correspondences as well as personal archival recordings. Not quite an opera, A Fine Is A Break is a collage of heartbreaks and epiphanies.
Click here to view the score.
Click here to read the original study.
The Interrogative mood (2020)
Solo Voice
What feels essentially human to me is the attempt to make sense of things. In this piece, I broke up the text of first ten pages of the eponymous, all-questions novel by Padgett Powell into 24 discreet categories, giving each its own vocal technique. Through aural correlation, the piece draws connections between sections of the text which may have otherwise gone unnoticed. This technique does not attempt to analyze or impose meaning on the text, but rather, strives to make sense of the text’s overall structure.
Click here to view the score.
I want to say a few words about the music (2020)
Solo Performer (Alto Sax, Soprano Sax, Rap Vocals) with effects pedals
Demo Version (heard here): Solo Vocals with pre-recorded tracks
In late 2019, saxophonist Joshua Mlodzianowski commissioned a work from me involving live sax looping. Through extensive conversations, we decided that the piece, through the use of rap vocals, should itself be a critique of the way academia deals with Rap music and race relations. The resulting work takes musical ideas from three famous rap songs with sax samples (“They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)”, by Pete Rock & C.L.Smooth; “Don’t Sweat The Technique”, by Eric B. & Rakim; and “Show Me What You Got”, by Jay-Z) and turns them into their own beats using loop and effects pedals. The verses first break down how academia looks at Rap, then shows how Rap’s musical techniques are nearly identical to accepted Classical techniques, and finally offers a broader look at why Rap may be regarded as inferior.
I Want… has been a collaboration between me, Joshua, and engineer Olivia Canavan, who has selected specific loop and effects pedals which will allow the performer to execute the piece live. However, due to difficulties rehearsing and performing this piece stemming from COVID safety regulations, I’m presenting a re-worked version of this piece (with the exception of the vocal parts). Rather than give you bad MIDI saxophone, I’ve recorded a version that uses full on hip-hop beats created by me (which demonstrates better attention to instrumental timbre and orchestration). It should be noted that there are significant discrepancies between this demo recording and the score. I made significant changes based on the opportunities afforded by the recording studio which are not possible in live performance. That being said, the spirit of the piece remains the same. Ultimately, I believe this piece could be performed by anyone (or any group) on any instrument(s), and I hope that this new kind of performance will spawn others like it.
The piece has taken on a new significance for me since the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery and the Black Lives Matter protests that arose out of those deaths in 2020.
Click here to read all the lyrics.
Click here to view the score.
Five Poems for a pianist (2020)
Speaking Pianist
Five Poems for a Pianist is a simple song cycle using the poetry of E. E. Cummings. Here, the loose dramatic arc finds the protagonist shying away from his initial grand public ambitions, finding more comfort in the private realm of the home. In this final movement, the scene is coming to a close.
Click here to view the full score.
Click here to watch another excerpt.
my eyes are fond of the east side (2018)
Male Voice, 3 Piccolos, 3 B-flat Trumpets, Percussion, 2 Harps, Piano, Harpsichord, Violin, 3 Cellos
my eyes are fond of the east side is a polystylistic ode to a city which itself is an amalgamation of tastes, sounds, and people. My approach to this work was heavily influenced by the music of Earle Brown. The Open Form style which he pioneered is particularly suited to this work about New York City because the individual contributions of the performers and conductor to the work’s overall composition and form allude to the contributions of New York’s 8 million inhabitants to the city’s functioning, albeit on a much smaller scale.
The piece features the entire text from the eponymous E. E. Cummings poem. I have a lifelong goal of setting all of his published poetry to music. Fifteen years into the project and I’m about a third of the way through.
This excerpt (Section R) finds the entire ensemble having broken into 5 smaller groups, each with their own materials, tempi, and conductor.
Click here to view the full score.
An Artistic Statement
I am a composer of vocal music. And there are two defining yet opposing characteristics to my work: Logic and Theatre.
If 2020 has shown us anything, it’s that the world is highly unpredictable. When I write music, I’m trying to make sense of this reality where so many things happen without obvious causes. The root of this unpredictability is, of course, the illogicality built into human nature, and that nature is what ultimately leads to the representation of the opposing forces of Logic and Theatre in my work.
I think people are the most interesting things in the universe. Despite all our collective knowledge, we have no real ideas about why we do the things we do. We often do not act in our best interests. We certainly don’t know what we want most of the time. We believe all sorts of things that make us feel good but which only hurt us more. We are the most illogical things. That’s why I try bring a sense of order to all my work: because if life is—if people are—going to be this illogical, my music surely won’t be. I spend an inordinate amount of time doing pre-compositional planning. There are a few systems I return to time and again, but often I am guided to create new systems for each piece based on the texts I’ve chosen to use (including my own) and the human characteristics I’m trying to bring out of these texts. I could talk about what these systems are, but ultimately they’re not important, not to the audience anyway. They’re highly personal and I don’t need them to mean anything to anyone else but me. They are a means to an end, and that end is Theatricality.
Ultimately, my obsession with people and making sense of their wildly fluctuating desires leads me to Theatre. In every sense of the word, my work is theatrical. Sometimes that means literal theatre: musicals, scores for stage plays, or opera. Other times it’s an art song or monodrama or a whole singer/songwriter album. What these different media have in common is the reliance on the conveyance of human emotions. That’s why I write for Voice. It’s the drama, the human impulse, the necessity that people have to express themselves in which I am interested and included. The full range of human emotion, the endless set of possibilities for who a person can be: I want to put that on stage, no matter the method of presentation. I want people to really feel like themselves, feel like they’re really human when they hear my work, however cacophonous or abstract or simple or overwhelming or it may be.
Every note is written in service of that goal. That’s why every piece is so different. Because each person is so different. Each piece is a different person. When you look at my work, I hope you see not a composer who can’t decide what he wants to sound like, but rather a composer who knows exactly what he’s doing and has fully embraced a polystylistic creative practice in order to achieve a singular objective in every one of his works. All the elaborate pre-compositional systems, the incredibly specific performance notes, and the wrangling of indeterminate materials into highly concrete forms; all that mixed with the dichotomy of allowing performers to make sweeping interpretations and to have fun with serious music and my regular abandonment of enforcing my own preferences in performance: these are the byproducts of taking all of humankind’s illogicality and earnestness and ecstasies and silliness and terrors and hopes and loves and losses and sublimating them into something more orderly and beautiful for you to listen to and hopefully—for however long the piece lasts—making you marvel at the fact that we’re alive.
CURRICULUM VITAE
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WRITING SAMPLE
A Coding and Analysis of Trends Found In Billboard Top Ten Rap Flows, 2007-2009
This research paper was borne out of my shared love for Rap music and music theory and a desire to bring anti-racist practices to my music-making. Recognizing that there is comparatively little research being done in the way of applying music theory to Rap, I set out to transcribe and perform analyses on vocal melodies and structures in all Top Ten Rap songs from 2007-2009. The resulting paper (which was purposely written in a fun, accessible manner) exposes unexpected patterns and attempts to elucidate the reasons for which more research in this area has not been carried out.
Click here to download.
performamce
