The composer Alastair Putt took his own life on August 12, 2022, succumbing to a battle with mental illness. The news of Alastair’s death shocked me. I had met Alastair in 2012 at Tanglewood when I was there for the premiere of Pasiphae Verses. He was a Fellow that summer. We became friends, and he offered to let me stay at the “Putt Cottage,” a small brick house in Penge, just outside of London, that had been converted from church property into a residence. I was able to use the Putt Cottage as a base to explore London, and even got some composing done there.

Alastair was witty, gentle, and generous. I was only superficially in touch with him in the last few years and had no sense of his mental health struggle. As I wrestled with my shock at his suicide, I was also working on what to write for a commission for cello quartet, and ended up channeling my sadness and distress into a memorial piece for Alastair.

Prayer Mosaic begins with a quietly grinding pad of sound over which a solitary cello sings. The word “mosaic” reflects the puzzle-like quality of how the celli fit together as the piece goes on. Subsequent sections vary the opening material, intensifying the texture through microtones and glissandi, hinting at mental anguish. The piece ends with a farewell to Alastair, with love.

In 2018 andPlay commissioned me to write a new work for them—they had played my miniature Shift Differential for several years—and now wanted a longer piece. I eventually settled on writing a piece in two unequal parts. In my imagination these parts were like panels that could be hung side by side and viewed simultaneously rather than musical movements, which follow one another in time. I was attracted by the tense polarity that exists between two experiences that comment on one another without a concluding/balancing third part (historically, two movement forms are rare—Beethoven’s Op. 111 is an iconic example, and Op. 54, Op. 78 and Op. 90 are also digressions from the more balanced norm).

The two parts of Diptych are very different from each other in both length and character. Part I is ca. 5 ½ minutes while Part II clocks in at 9 ½ minutes. Part I is about sound, touch, and line, and like Shift Differential, exhibits a range of sonority from light, ethereal touch to intense overpressure (this is enacted in the first 1:15, with a movement from niente to white noise and back again). Subtle glissandi slide over each other and delicate lines sinuously snake upwards. Guttural sounds, anxious whispers and pensive harmonies combine to form a tense, contemplative atmosphere. 

In contrast to Part I, Part II is more dynamic and gestural. The piece uses tetrachords as fundamental building blocks, combining and recombining them into intricate tapestries of sound. These move through different rates of time, as in the opening, which builds and stretches these chords into dense, warm clusters, and later, when they liquify into rapid scales off of which new melodic gestures leap. In the middle of the piece, the instruments chase and tumble over each other, further complexifying the texture. If Part I is a meditation on sound and experience, Part II is a visceral dance, pulling, stretching and pushing outward. 

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.

Happy/Angry Music’s first three minutes are like a rock song that implodes in on itself: the rhythmic, hiccuping repetitions of the opening are eventually pulled apart by cascading, descending figures into ever-elongating resonances and moments of rest. A contrasting middle section reveals a core of inward simplicity, as the the gregarious, rebellious music of the opening has evaporated to reveal music of childlike innocence, articulated by the piano, mbira and bass playing a diatonic, geometric heterophony. Quiet, resonant piano lays the ground over which the bass sings, moving through a kaleidoscope of harmonic colors. The music gradually works towards a roaring apotheosis, with the piano spiraling upwards as the bass moves through increasingly large, jagged leaps, and the tam-tam blooms into fortissimo white noise. A descent, and then rest. The music reawakens and briefly dances into an exuberant ending.

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?

Transient Canvas: Amy Advocat, clarinets; Matt Sharrock, marimba

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.