Composition

My friend Claudia Chapman is a writer and illustrator, and each year she challenges herself to write or draw something on each day of Advent. On 4 December 2020, she wrote a poem reflecting on the coronavirus pandemic, and it seemed to cry out to be set to music.

I wrote this setting as a message of comfort and hope as we left a difficult year behind; Katie O’Reilly, for whom I also composed the Nine Haiku of Ryōkan, learned it in record time and recorded it with me (modulo social isolation).

Written for the excellent Adelante Winds of San Antonio, Texas, and performed at the 2016 Imani Winds Chamber Music Festival, this is a fugal work of about 8 minutes, displaying the varied colors of the woodwind quintet.

This is a brief work exploring the harmonic language encouraged by the the tuning of the guitar, as well as the passacaglia form. My approach to the passacaglia form is inspired not only by classic passacaglias such as the famous one of J.S. Bach for organ, but also by modern treatments such as those of Ernő Dohnányi and even Ronald Stevenson.

I composed this work for the 2018 highSCORE Festival in Pavia, Italy, where it was performed by unassisted fold.

This is an anthem in the Anglo-Italian Renaissance madrigal tradition, written for Queen Isabella of the East Kingdom of the SCA. The text is a sonnet by Ana Areces (known in the SCA as Ana Ravaya de Guzmán) which was read at Queen Isabella's coronation. This piece tied for first place in the musical composition category in the Northern Lights A&S Pentathlon in 2004.

I wrote this piece for the amazing Katie O’Reilly and myself to perform on a recital that also included Samuel Barber’s famous Hermit Songs. Barber used texts by medieval Irish hermits, so my texts here were poetry from another hermit in another part of the world: the 18th-century Japanese monk Ryōkan Taigu (良寛大愚, 1758–1831). The music derives some pitch set concepts from traditional Japanese music, though they’re often used in nontraditional ways.

I wrote this piece for the Somers (New York) Women’s Chorale when I was serving as their pianist. It’s an arrangement of a familiar English folk song, perhaps a little quirky but still accessible for nonprofessional singers.

I composed this piece in 2017 for the NorthStar Duo (fellow Bostonians!) to perform at the Imani Winds Chamber Music Festival. Getting the flute and baritone saxophone to blend well turned out to be quite a compositional challenge, since the two instruments have such different characters and dynamic ranges; however, the result was very much worth it!

The titles of the movements are as follows:

1. Intrada
2. Berceuse
3. Minuet
4. Tarantella

When my teacher Ran Blake asked me to write a solo piano piece that I'd consider typical of my style, the first of these three études was the result. The other two were written as companion pieces. These are fun character pieces for piano, flashy and interesting but not too difficult to play. I greatly enjoy performing them, and I hope others will too!

This piece was composed, rehearsed, and performed all in the space of about 4 days at the wonderfully intense Choral Composers Forum directed by Steven Sametz at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Thanks to Steven, Ēriks Ešenvalds, and the Princeton Singers for running such an amazing, fast-paced workshop!

The text is a poem by Stephen Crane (1871–1900) about the enigmatic nature of truth.

This is something of a character sketch, inspired by Aunt Line from Claude Chabrol's film The Flower of Evil (La Fleur du mal). She's a complex character with a lot to hide in her past, yet she's extremely sympathetic.