Solos
Instrumental & Vocal Music
Music for Solo Instruments, With Accompaniment or Electronics
Clarinet
Clarinet & Piano - Choreographies XCIV
This piece blends embodied movement with musical expression, inspired by the Amaretto Sour cocktail. The first section captures the sparkling light reflections through delicate, fast rhythms, while the second section shifts to dissonance and complexity, evoking a more introspective mood. The left-hand piano mimics the repetitive motion of raising a glass. This composition explores the connection between physical gestures and musicality, translating a cocktail experience into sound.
Woodwinds
Flute
To The Table for Amplified Flute
As I worked my way through Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, I repeatedly returned to her use of Husserl’s “table,”as the vehicle by which we are taught the ideas of orientation and the relationship between the tactile and the ephemeral. In this piece, I seek to examine the relationship between the tactile (or kinesthetic, through the use of unvoiced sounds, clicks, and other means of representing a tactile sensation) but also the ephemeral or ideological (which I represent through an emerging folk-like). I am interested in how bodies in space are oriented towards each other, and how the artifice of tactility can inhibit the ways we experience connection with others. If we cannot feel it, how can it be real?
Diminishing Returns for Unaccompanied Flute
Clarinet in Bb - Victor Frankenstein in the Arctic
a short work commissioned by Thomas Piercy
Saxophone
Irradiation - Solo Saxophone
Irradiation is an unusual piece in the repertoire. The work is handwritten and was originally composed for Eugene Ryoo. Eugene holds the physical copy of the score and therefore it is up to him to share or distribute the physical copy of the score. The idea behind this is to reflect the ways that radiation breaks things down and disperses them over time. In this case, the fractals created as a result of a dissected hymn tune (which makes up the musical content of this piece) is distributed and taught by the practitioner with Eugene acting as a sort of Patient Zero. However, any saxophonist may perform the work using the pdf scan of the manuscript. If you would like a copy of the pdf, please contact me!
Mono//Logic IV -
Baritone Saxophone and Piano
Mono//Logic IV: In This House is a rare piece in that it was initially written for Tubax as part of a commission by Yo-Yo Su. While other works for Tubax include ripping lines that demonstrate the virtuosic capabilities of such a low-sounding instrument, Mono//Logic IV was written to explore the extreme quietness of the instrument. This piece engages with subtones, percussive effects, and rich lyricism to play with the concept of single-mindedness as it relates to a relationship with religion. Mono//Logic blends the exploratory nature of composition for unusual instruments with the traditional romantic harmonies and colors, creating a sensory experience that can best be described as "divine."
Oboe
Sun Grown: How We Call Home -
Oboe & Accompanying Instrument(s)
In composing Sun Grown: How We Call Home, I have been thinking about the idealization of “home.” I think of sayings like “home is where the heart is” which asserts that the “home” is not a place of permanence, but one that is ephemeral and experiential, while the motto commonly seen when adopting pets reads, “forever home,” indicating a finality to a fixed position (which is proximity to their owners). I have lived alone, in various cities throughout the Midwest, for more than a decade now, but I still call the place I grew up (and the house my parents still live in) home. I feel I am greatly lucky to still have both the physical landmark and the relationship with my family to call this place my home, but I often wrestle with a part of myself that feels less fortunate to have grown up in a rural midwestern area that isn’t always kind to people like me. Sun Grown, for me, is a musical question about ephemerality of the “home” and how we can return to a spot that is simultaneously joyous and bleak. My intention is to mix traditional and non-traditional modes of performance, aleatory, and compositional diversions to weave through these questions, and ultimately ruminate on what “home” means to me.
Binary Games No. 2 -
Alto Saxophone and Piano
Binary Game No. 2 comes from a set of compositions that embrace the connections between players by mimicking dynamic computing processes. The goal of this composition was to play with the idea of delays in responsiveness. Throughout the composition, there are few moments of alignment between the saxophonist and the pianist with melodies, harmonies, and phrases being continuously offset creating a canon-like effect as if the two players are processing the same information at different times. I was inspired by the way in which rehearsals on digital communications platforms would be delayed and the ways in which that latency could be played with to create interesting musical textures.
Digital Download includes Score & Parts.
Brass
French Horn
Leyline: The Importance of Place
Ley lines are imaginary lines drawn between significant or historic locations and have served as pathways between important areas. Though cultural significance to ley lines have developed due to beliefs of spirituality or mystic influence, I focus on the purpose they served in guiding people from one important area of their life to another. I wanted, in this piece, to explore the ways we move from one area to the next, what obstacles are faced, and how we overcome those obstacles. This influenced the composition through the use of many grace notes, which I view as bumps in the road to the next important location. Sometimes these obstacles can delay or mislead us, but it is through our connection with others and our history that we find our way back on the correct path.
Trombone
Wounded for Trombone Solo
This visceral piece deals with the way animals respond to harm. It materializes the sense of fear, pain, and anger that is so often repressed in humans. Wounded is a serious work about what it means to be hurt.
Three Shipwrecks
This collection of three pieces for unaccompanied trombone tell the story of three famous shipwrecks: The USS Narcissus, The Water Witch, and the General Sherman.
Trumpet
Delay Piece No. 1
This work for Trumpet and Live Electronics is purely a "play" piece, composed as a study for Trumpet with delay pedals and other intermediating technologies. While originally composed for trumpet, the piece can easily be performed on any treble instrument.
Tuba
Kosmonaught
Kosmonaught blends comic soundscapes with serious virtuosity and dexterity. This work is inspired by 1950s/60s Science Fiction films, creating visuals of expansive space landscapes, asteroid fields, rockets burning up on re-entry, and all manner of 1960s fanaticism. One of my key inspirations is the film Abbott & Costello Go To Mars (1953) and the image of two comedians taking in the terrifying yet wondrous expanse of space.
Adagio & Romanze
This work is much more traditional, being described as "if Sondheim wrote music for tuba." It's colorful harmonies and romantic lyricism harken back to bygone days of traditional concert music.
Strings
Take Me from The River
Viola
Suite in A Minor
A baroque dance suite, using traditional movements and rhythms, with an updated harmony.
Concerto for Viola and Live Electronics
This work is currently in progress as a collaboration with Traci Huff. It blends viola playing with live electronic processing and modular synthesis in an innovative new genre of electro-acoustic music.
This work is available with orchestral accompaniment or piano reduction.
Y'all Better Quiet Down
The title of this piece is taken from Sylvia Rivera’s 1973 Pride NYC speech, in which she emphasizes the important role those trans men and women played in the fight for equal rights and the fight for intersectionality in the queer liberation movement. I take inspiration and wisdom from Sylvia Rivera and look to this video as a reminder that it is our responsibility to uplift and recognize voices working for the rights of all queer people and to work just as hard for those whose queerness does not look like ours.
Violin
Take Me to The River
Conditional Linearity
An exploration of performer choice.
Cello
Stress Fractures
Stress Fractures explores five types of stress: compression, tension, torsion, bending, and shear, by expanding the Harmonic Fluctuation diagram outlined in Hindemith’s Unterweisung im Tonsatz to include microtonal pitch spaces and drawing inspiration from Newton’s concepts on loss of energy and conservation of momentum for the rhythmic underpinnings, where increased harmonic dissonances directly correspond to the rebounding consonances via agogic stress, dynamics, and speed. The works’ form is dependent on boundaries made by broad strumming gestures and trills.
Though scientific in its influences and construction, Stress Fractures should not be divorced of the psychological definition of stress.
Looking for something?
If you are interested in purchasing a specific score and you don't see it on the store page; if you are interested in commissioning a solo for your instrument; if you are interested in an arrangement for your instrument - contact me using the form!