“False Starts/Thought Knots” is a brash, chunky piece for solo violin, commissioned by Chloe Johnson for her 2023 special degree violin recital. It’s somehow my first publically released solo piece? I was very happy to be prompted to write for violin, which is a perfect instrument on which to express some more synthesis of my typical music interests with classical ideas. As a result, the piece flits between harmonically saturated violin material and aggressive, angular material reminiscent of electric guitars in metal music. The primitive, intimate personality of the material is compounded by the evocation ritual of a rehearsal environment to begin the piece.

A few notable influences here are György Ligeti (as always), John Petrucci’s unmatched electric guitar technique which continually draws me further into studying guitar and stringed instrument playing, and the band Intronaut who I’ve integrated a specific technique from. A gargantuan thanks as well to Chloe Johnson for commissioning this solo and truly elevating it with her deft performance!

If you’d like sheet music for any reason, feel free to contact me via email or wherever.

"Vines Don't Reach" is a short 12-tone duet about the retroactivity of historical narratives. This is the world premiere at Doug Howard's retirement concert at Southern Methodist University. Deep thanks to Steve Merrill & Nathaniel Collins for performing this, especially on such short notice!

About the composition process:

I wrote this over a couple months for the occasion, as I'd been wanting to write some more 12-tone for a while, and a relatively short piece, so I ended up doing both. I really wanted to write some 12-tone that was melody-driven, and well, on the plain & accessible side.

Under the hood, Vines Don’t Reach essentially works by moving around a 12-tone matrix one cell at a time, kind of like the old game Snake. The first 12 notes are just the row. I’ve added the first page of the sheet music on this page so you can follow along and/or reconstruct the matrix if you want to follow the movement of the piece’s notes in detail. As I was finishing up composition I laxed up on strict movement around the matrix, but the vast majority is restricted to cell-by-cell up-down-left-right.

The most direct influence would be the band Behold the Arctopus/composer Colin Marston, and the album "The Animation of Entomology" by Blotted Science, though I didn’t directly model this piece on anything in particular. Highly recommend both of those, though.

Also, if you’d like to see a more up close performance, here’s a 🎥 video from the dress rehearsal.

When I decided to do a podcast, I knew that I wanted to compose its theme song. I love composing jazz and music-for-purpose so I decided to go with something that would represent the podcast tonally: cute, melodic, and colorful. I had just woken up from a nap and recorded myself singing a little head on my phone, and frankly, I just put it into Garageband from there with some minor alterations and built the harmony behind it. Being a percussionist I felt the vibraphone would be a great timbre to open up with every week - it's programmed, but Garageband has enough fidelity to sound great, I think, and I made sure to add little flourishes and timing/dynamic shaping. I modeled much of the piano solo on Snarky Puppy solos - none I can remember specifically, but Cory Henry's influence is always present when I am writing for keyboard. Drums were engineered, recorded, and mastered by myself. I would love to redo this at some point with real instruments (and thus fix the vibraphone solo panning to the left for no reason by the end of its solo - whoops).

♫ MIDI realization of piece

written 2016

In the fall semester of 2015, I was requested to write a brass quintet piece by my composition instructor Kevin Hanlon. Having spent quite a bit of time on long pieces prior to that, I wanted to write something short and to the point. I ended up spending roughly the same amount of time on this piece but... c'est la vie. György Ligeti's bagatelles for Wind Quintet from his Musica Ricercata were a major inspiration as they always are.

The title of the piece is a satirical reference to the flow of discourse and the overeagerness of many to focus on labels and nominal progressivism without actually investigating behaviors or realizing intersectional feminism as a lens to be applied for analysis rather than a permanent decal (and don't misinterpret me, I am 110% supportive of feminism on every level and plane). To that end, the piece features motives stated and restated, interrupted and resumed, with all voices frantically shouting over each other amounting to nothing. Compositionally, I used a lot of ideas from metal (what else is new) and tried to realize the same energy and primality with a brass ensemble while exploring all the layering and density options I could get 5 single-line instruments to perform - a good bridge to something much denser and with more instrumentation in the future, perhaps!