Stray Birds (2025)
vocal sextet and string quartet
Stray Birds was written in the Fall and Summer of 2025 for Ekmeles vocal ensemble and Mivos quartet. This work sets adapted writings of Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). Stapledon and Tagore were polymaths, pacists, and universalists. I bring them together in celebration of their shared optimism and overlapping philosophies as well as for their contrasting writing styles. Tagore will often represent his ideas through intimate, personal relationships, while Stapledon describes societies and large groups, often never mentioning a single individual.
The Stapledon text originates from his 1930 novel, Last and First Men, which explores the possiblities of humanity in the near and distant future, written like an ethnographic report. I set excerpts of a chapter describing an humanity obsessed with sound and music, which shapes religion, social structures, and leads to eventual societal collapse. The Tagore texts are derived from of four poems from his 1916 collection, Stray Birds, which Tagore himself translated from Bengali into English (the original Bengali poems are often quite different and date back to years earlier and come from a variety of sources). These poems I have translated once again from English into pseudoproto-Indo-European, which is a hypothesized language derived from Indo-European languages, a kind of missing linguistic link. By doing so, I am attempting to create a sense of cultural distance, while maintaining some strange familiarity. I conceived of these Tagore sections as the music being created in Stapledon's hypothetical society obsessed with sound.
The music alternates between Tagore and Stapledon three times during the piece, and is written in an extended just intonation system the centers on the note D and has 27 notes per octave. One string on each of the string instruments is retuned to t with this harmonic system and bring out the extreme consonance and dissonance that the harmonic system was designed for through the resonance of the instruments.
Industry and the Arts (2023)
voice and electronics
"Industry and the Arts" is a set of five short songs for alto voice with MUGIC controller and electronics. This piece was written for Heather Byford in 2022. Industry and the Arts explores the relationship between industry and art. The initial inspiration for this piece was a passage that describes a newly-opened Parisian Arcade from the opening pages of Walter Benjamiun’s unfinished Arcades Project:
De ces palais les colonnes magiques
À l’amateur montrent de toutes parts,
Dans les objets qu’étalent leurs portiques,
Que l’industrie est rivale des arts.
-Nouveaux Tableaux de Paris (paris, 1828), vol. 1, p. 27
Benjamin describes the 19th-century arcades of Paris as the birthplace of modern consumerism, and in this piece, I connect this idea with current technology of the Internet and machine learning as the focal point of industries incursion into our lives and art. While writing this piece, I met with vocalist Heather Byford to create a corpus of recordings that were used to create the electronic elements of this piece. This electronic part takes the form of a motion controller (MUGIC) that is attached to the performers hand, triggering electronic sound.
Motorman Sextet (2013)
soprano, alto, countertenor, tenor, baritone, bass
Motorman Sextet is a work for six vocalists and was written for ekmeles vocal ensemble and is dedicated to Jeffrey Gavett.
This vocal sextet sets the text of 11 chapters in 9 movements from David Ohle’s classic cult science fiction novel Motorman. This piece is part of a larger work that will eventualy set the entire novel. The particular chapters used in Motorman Sextet are all descriptions of past events from the point-of-view of the central character, Moldenke, which together have a generally nostalgic mood.
Motorman Fragments (2011)
soprano, alto, tenor, bass, percussion, cello, guitar, and clarinet
Motorman Fragments was written in the Fall of 2011 and early 2012 for Ek'meles vocal ensemble through Columbia Composers. It is a setting of twelve chapters from David Ohle's Motorman. One chapter corresponds with one movement with the exception of chapters 41-45, which are all grouped together in the eighth and final movement:
solo soprano
Knowledge believes memory was written as part of the “Young Artist Overture” in connection with Soundstreams Education and Outreach programme. An excerpt from Light in August by William Faulkner, the text is a poetic description of how memories are transformed and continue to affect a person’s life long after the memories fade. The text is sung with only the vowels the first time through, then with only the liquid consonants that do not demand a break in the tone, and finally the text is sung in its entirety the third and final time. By following this sequence, the text takes form as a memory sinking into one’s mind. As well, it draws the listener into making a greater effort to comprehend the text in performance. The melismas that follow the chanted text unfold the melody in the way the text unfolds, where the complete melody is not heard until the very end of the work.