work list

was commissioned by David Constantine, the Assistant Principal Percussionist of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, who requested that I write him solo timpani literature that placed more emphasis on melodic and lyrical content rather than percussive and rhythmic virtuosity.

The piece is dedicated to Charles Dowd in honor of his legacy, for all he did for percussion in the Pacific Northwest and for granting me numerous performing and compositional opportunities with the University of Oregon percussion department.

Timpani Forces was world premiered by David Constantine in April 2011 in New Orleans, LA. It was also accepted into the 9th Annual Festival of Contemporary Music in the summer of 2011.

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Movements 1 and 2:

Movements 3 and 4:

was written for the Hundredth Monkey Ensemble in Eugene, Oregon. The piece was written to capture a moment in life when one must choose to deviate from a seemingly fixed path to an alternative one. It’s meant to be a statement that alternate paths which may seem destabilizing can still be made into a positive life change if the mind stays open, flexible and adaptable.

was written during my graduate tenure at the University of Oregon. The text was taken from the show Farscape; it’s an eulogy that was written for one of the main characters that had died.

is a four movement work that was commissioned by Hannah Walthier whilst she was an undergrad at West Chester University. It has since been performed several times in Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Louisiana.

was commissioned by The Concert Singers under the direction of Jenni Brandon. When trying to find an inspiring text to set music to, i found that most of the stuff that i liked that was free of copyright issues were very bland or overdone, so i requested my good friend Amanda Regan Lighthiser compose a text for me for this piece. When asked for topic ideas, i suggested that she write about her (then) current state of pregnancy with her first child. The text that she gave me was so well crafted that the music practically wrote itself.

The poem Honeysuckle Juice was accepted into the April 2012 publication of The Mom Egg.

Honeysuckle Juice was world premiered by The Concert Singers in March of 2012 in Los Angeles, CA.

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The concept for Shifting Signals came about when I was in a Google Hangout with two other people who were participating in the Hangout on separate computers in the same room. Google Hangouts determines which computer should occupy the main video screen by whoever has the loudest audio signal. When one person in the Hangout tried to speak, the microphones from both computers in the same room picked up the audio simultaneously and Google Hangouts ended up swapping back and forth between the two video cameras in rapid succession, unsure of which audio signal was the loudest. I wanted to replicate this phenomenon as the basis for a series of musical pieces.

I consider Shifting Signals Zero to be the beginnings of exploration and experimentation of how best to interweave this phenomenon into live performance. I tried to create a musical journey about aural and visual space – the main musical motive is split into three chords, each of which are assigned a particular aural space, and the performer initially plays and moves in parallel to that designated aural space. As the separate spaces come together and more elements get added to the musical picture, the physical and visual space also becomes combined and culminates into a central focus that by the nature of the Google Hangout represents a simultaneous sense of unity and separation.

Shifting Signals Zero was world premiered by the nienteForte ensemble in April of 2012 in New Orleans, LA.

Live Performance:

Backing Track:

is a solo electronic work that was written in honor of one of my good friends who informed me that her parents had collectively committed suicide. It was originally written to serve as a backdrop for live performance with the band Martian Luther.

is a solo audio work for the Future Music Oregon concert series at the University of Oregon. The source material came from a house party near my place of residence at the time that got out of control and turned into a massive shouting fest, bottle throwing, and fight between various attendees of the party and other passersby. The material was then heavily manipulated in Kyma and ProTools to create a work meant to capture and amplify the uninhibited negative energy of the confrontations.

is an audio installation for two infrared ‘cone’ sensors and Max/MSP. The sensors were placed in the entrance of the performance hall and tracked various types of movement data of audience members entering and exiting and used that data to manipulate the music that was played prior to the concert and during the intermission.

was written for the Hermiston Marching Band. It was my first gig writing both the music and the drill as a creative package.

was written for the Hermiston Marching Band for their 2010 fall season.

was written for the Hermiston Marching Band for their 2009 fall season. It was written following the release of the newest Star Trek movie, encompassing themes from the new soundtrack as well as paying tribute to themes from various shows of the Star Trek television franchise. The show earned the HMB placement in their championship finals for the first time in the program’s history.

was co-written with Mark Lighthiser for the Destrehan High School Winter Percussion Ensemble for their Spring 2008 season. The show was toured in various competitions in the Louisiana Colorguard and Percussion Circuit and Winter Guard International.

is a promotional video i created for the Tulane University Marching Band. The video currently plays on the jumbotron of the Mercedes-Benz Superdome prior to our pregame performance.

is a video composition of a personal run of the game Chain Factor with heavy visual manipulation. Originally the video was just supposed to be a gameplay run to show my personal gameplay style and strategy, but for various reasons it evolved into a full fledged creative project that involved heavy manipulation influenced and driven by the music used for the video. Read about my creative process.