Commissioned by the Johnstone Fund for Contemporary Music, happy/angry music was composed between May and August of 2017 for Bearthoven, who premiered the work at the Short North Stage in Columbus, Ohio.

The title, which occurred to me while composing, is like the music—direct yet baffling. “Happy” and “angry” are iconic words a child knows…juxtaposing them gets at how simple labels can combine into complex, zen-koan-like experience. This dichotomy seemed a fitting one for music that is at times punchy, raucous, roaring and delicate.

I would like to thank Phillip Nangle for building an mbira for this piece which is made to accommodate the specific pitches needed to perform this work.

Also thanks to Matt Evans, Pat Swoboda, and Karl Larson for lovingly putting the work together.

My Oboe Quartet was commissioned by the Society for Chamber Music Rochester for its 40th Anniversary Season. I knew at the outset that my piece would be programmed alongside the Mozart Oboe Quartet, a fact which influenced my process from the beginning. I structured the outline of the form as an homage to Mozart’s piece—it’s in three movements that follow a fast-slow-fast structure. The materials of my piece are wholly my own, however, creating a dialogue with Mozart’s sound world. The first movement, for example, features a section where scratchy sul ponticello string harmonics and oboe multiphonics meld together to create a distorted texture, dissolving into “pure sound”.

A few other references to capital-C classical music entered the piece: the second movement is titled “lament: hommage á J.S. Bach”, and features a descending bass line that repeats in a chaconne-like manner, and the third movement includes a quotation of part of the first movement of Beethoven’s Harp Quartet, Op. 74.

I am very grateful to the SCMR for commissioning this piece and to its members for their generous spirit, support, and for beautifully premiering the work in April 2017.

I wrote Dark Matter  for the one-of-a-kind duo, Ums ‘n Jip (http://umsnjip.ch/umsnjip.htm). I met Ulrike and Javier while I was teaching in Istanbul, as they had connected with the Center for Advanced Studies in Music at Istanbul Technical University when they were in residence for the Turkey chapter of their international commissioning project. While I didn’t write for them at this time, I had a chance to observe Ulrike’s nuanced playing on her many different recorders and to hear Javier’s extraordinary range of vocal sounds and utterances.

Later, when they did commission me, I was faced with the task of deciding what to write for this duo who can do anything. I finally decided that I needed a text (I had considered writing an extended contemporary vocalise) and began the hunt for a poet I could set. I was looking for something current that would spark my imagination, but was not sure beyond that where to look or what I would find.

Sitting one day in the basement poetry section at McNally’s in Soho, I pulled Rae Armantrout’s Dark Matter off the shelf and was immediately floored by the work. I can’t claim to have understood it, but I was drawn into the quick and often contrasting images that flit between observations of the world around her, mass media, somber reflection, existential philosophy, and random interjection. I had my muse.

I ended up setting ten poems from this work. Though Rae was not in attendance at the premiere (nor was I, as it was in Switzerland and I  could not attend), the three of us (Rae, Ums n’ Jip and myself) were in attendance for a poetry reading of Rae’s at the Zinc Bar downtown, during which Rae and Ums n’ Jip alternated reading an performing five poems from the set. I wish to thank Rae for allowing me to set her words, and for Ums ‘n Jip for commissioning the work and performing it so beautifully.

 

 

 

I wrote Nostalgia Variations for the Boston-based clarinet/marimba duo Transient Canvas. I first worked with the excellent Amy Advocat in the context of my chamber opera, Giver of Light. 

Nostalgia Variations engages with the tradition of theme and variation. The title refers to the emotional quality of the opening tema. “Nostalgia” is a wrought-emotion in contemporary art, bordered on one end by saccharin expression, and on the other end of the spectrum by irony and rejection of emotion. The piece is about finding a way to engage with such emotions in, as a Buddhist would say, the middle path.

The piece has eleven short variations, some more obviously based on the Tema, some less. The piece asks the question of how different can a variation be and still connect to a beginning idea?

 

I wrote Flight Patterns for the MIAM Modern Music Ensemble, an ensemble based at MIAM (or the Center for Advanced Studies in Music) at Istanbul Technical University. Though I was on faculty at MIAM for four years, from 2010-2014, I wrote this piece in New York City, where I lived for the summer of 2014 in a small studio in Harlem. I composed the work for an exchange between MIAM and Humboldt University in Berlin that celebrated Turkish culture. The concert that included the premiere of Flight Patterns also included the premieres of other faculty composers, as well as traditional Turkish music.

This seven-minute piece is in two parts, similar to and different from each other. The two halves begin in similar ways, with delicate material that coalesces into firmer gestures, though each half follows its own trajectory. The second half is not a variation of the first, per se; rather, the piece is like a day lived twice, with similar conditions, but different choices and outcomes. The piece is about both narrative and texture, and plays with different qualities of touch as the story unfolds.

I conducted the premiere. The ensemble consisted of Filiz Kirapinar on flute, Amy Salsgiver on percussion, Jerfi Aji on piano, Aida Pulake on violin, and Yelda Ozgen on cello.