State (2016)
This is my 35-minute oratorio, premiered by Kate Wakefield, MUSE Women's Choir, and an ensemble of instrumentalists in April at The Sanctuary in Lower Price Hill, Cincinnati. It's a setting of oral histories I collected from Appalachians in Cincinnati.
Excerpt, begins on p. 19 of score.
Full Performance
licorice parikrama (2016)
This piece links an audience with a remote ensemble of people affected by the 2014 Elk River chemical spill via a massive conference call that produces multi-point three-dimensional feedback through the audience's cell phones. A keyboardist (in this case, me on the Fender Rhodes) realizes a multivalent graphic score, dropping in and out of the conference call line.
Excerpt, begins on p. 6 of score.
fun with teeth (2015)
The title comes from my favorite novel, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Patchwork (Noa Even, tenor sax and Stephen Klunk, drum set) plays in this video, shot in a DIY space in Cincinnati.
phenotype (2016)
This string quartet is dedicated to my niece, Fiona, and is inspired by the idea of genetic expression as influenced by phenomena of the environment. Much of the first half is the result of an algorithm that imagines a set of pitches and a set of rhythmic values on a customized staff and permutes them through a series of gradually transposing "intervals" on the staff. Transformations in the texture are composed freely. This recording is the premiere performance by Quartetto Indaco at the highSCORE festival in the gorgeous Chiesa di Santa Maria di Canepanova in Pavia, Italy.
below this line (2016)
This piece for solo percussion was commissioned by Thea Rossen for a recital on the theme of climate change at the Australian National Academy of Music in Melbourne. It features speech samples from victims of flooding in West Virginia, run through a loop between an exciter and a contact mic on either end of a saw blade. These loops are layered and controlled by a Max patch that adjusts the volume and speed but adds no further processing.
mikroetudes for prepared digital piano (2015)
“Circleville” plays with the triggering of preset changes, and “Cygnet” relies on the sustain pedal acting in reverse to create shiny fairy-dust swells. Dan Trueman published these in his Mikroetudes for Prepared Digital Piano and featured this video of Adam Sliwinski playing "Cygnet" in his online course "Reinventing the Piano."
