• a loose abstract narrative about a craw sh who attempts to change its fate of being eaten as a part of a New Orleans backyard boil.
• a continuation of my journey to compose works that give performers agency to showcase their artistry and personality within a clear framework of my creative voice.

The Great Boil Escape was commissioned by and written for Quartetto Obrigado for the inaugural Batture Contemporary new music festival. Its creation was in part thanks to a residency at the Sitka Center for Ecology and Arts faciliated by Licity Collins and the SynchroLicity Collective.

Unfolding was written as:

• a meditative aural puzzle box
• a gradual shift from chaotic tension to chaotic relaxation

Extended notes:

I have an unhealthy obsession with multiple iterations of the same idea happening at different rates. Unfolding puts this front and center with a 28-note “sine-wavey” sequence that the violin is playing in quarter notes while the cello is playing it in half-note triplets. This sine-wavey sequence starts off with close intervals with the intent of creating some gnarly dissonances before expanding its intervals gradually to create more beautiful consonances. These traveling sequences are supported by the piano in two ways: rhythmically by playing rhythmic ostinatos at both rates, and harmonically by slowly constructing a chaconne underneath the sequences’ evolving harmonies.

1. An offhand conversation I had with Megan Ihnen where she expressed the desire to have a work written for her that was light-hearted in nature.
2. My desire to explore and craft a piece written specifically for multiple performers during the COVID-19 pandemic that could be successfully performed over a video teleconferencing platform regardless of latency.
3. My desire to view the composition as a framework only, acting as a conduit to pass a majority of the creative freedom, expression, and ownership of the work to the performer.

It is my hope that the collaborative and flexible nature of the work fosters a sensibility of ensemble and community that can be expressed even with the strictest of social distancing protocols, something that was sorely missed during the height of the global pandemic.

The performance text are recipes that I’ve collected for my own cooking adventures. While most of them are strict copies of recipes from outside sources, a few are my own creation, developed by tweaking recipes over time. The recipes chosen are meant to be achievable to the average home cook, in celebration of the craft of cooking and the joy of food.

The piece is heavily influenced by the concept that in the hustle of our every day lives that rapidly moves from one moment to the next, we forget to take a step back and enjoy the spaces between those moments, that the journey itself is as important if not more important than the journey’s beginning and end.

The Spaces Between has been featured on New Music on the Bayou, Central Washington University New Music Festival, NPN Artist Showcase, Indiana State University Music Now, and ASCAP New Music Fridays. It is also featured on the album “Patterns and Forms” by the Portland Percussion Group released on New Focus Recordings.

The Spaces Between was commissioned by the Portland Percussion Group.

During my graduate composition studies at the University of Oregon, I became great friends with a lot of the percussion department and its members, performing as a guest member in some of the concerts and recitals.  It was after one of these concerts that the percussion department head at the time, Charles Dowd, gave me an open invite to write a piece for his ensemble.  I started sketching a piece soon after, but it went unfinished as I had to focus on my studies and my thesis.

Even though I had only written the opening gesture in that sketch, something about what I was trying to achieve with it continued to resonate with me even as my musical voice continued to evolve, and ten years later when the Portland Percussion Group asked me to write them a piece in which three members were my colleagues during my time at the University of Oregon, it felt like the right opportunity to take that initial unfinished sketch and offer them a complete rendition as a tribute to our time and history together.

Moon of Eris is a representation of the subtle and gradual rise and fall of chaos coupled with the instability and imperfection of memory.