Select Recordings
Medusa, 2024 (flute, Bb clarinet, saxophone, bass clarinet, VST grand piano, violin)
Originally proposed as a cue for a short film, I continued this piece for my own purposes. I was not trained on violin, but having recently inherited one, I played it rudimentarily to achieve certain textures in accompaniment to a piano-driven motif. Despite my unfamiliarity with its mechanics, I found a use for it by playing it minimally to add punctuation. I discovered techniques for interaction between violin and piano: coordinating a stack of overdubbed plucks with tails of the same notes drawn out in legato complemented the erratic flurry of ascending piano keys, and foregrounding a harmonic center on piano while foiling the cadence with a background of dissonant motion created an obtrusive but inhabitable tension. This piece is a through-composition gathered from the interplays I found while experimenting on violin and fleshing out those simple gestures with piano, and vice versa.
After I sketched out an initial form of the piece, I composed supporting sections for flute, saxophone, and bass clarinet to bring movement to it. I worked with a friend who played these instruments in a band I led. As with the dichotomies of piano and violin, I found ways within the woodwind section to suggest harmonic destinations, and then interrupt them with competing trajectories. Though this recording was assembled in a DAW, it serves as a model for concert music. I composed with an economy and restraint anticipating a staging of these melodic and textural relationships between real instruments in a performance setting.
Torqued Violin, 2024 (flute, Bb clarinet, bass clarinet, violin, electric guitar, samples)
I began recording simple prompts on violin to explore its relationship to the body, for instance sliding my finger up the neck an octave and then repeating ad infinitum until I exhausted myself. I then overdubbed this action multiple times, creating a stasis through constant ascending movement, a closed circuit imbued with the wavering, respiratory feeling of physical labor. Whereas synthesizers process the signal of an electrical pulse, acoustic instruments like the violin prefigure this ontology through harnessing the amplitude of energy transmitted through the human to produce sound. I utilized the violin as an oscillator rather than a tool for melody.
Over the violins performing octave glissandi, I recorded improvised chords on the guitar and sang. I found the juxtaposition between the readymade nature of the loop and the lyrical improvisation of my guitar and voice—a staple of my music practice—to be moving and frenetic. I had pushed my well-trodden habits of playing guitar and singing into a space I didn’t recognize, producing a thing that was raw and composed at once. I wrote a woodwind section initially to accompany the entire chord progression, and wrote lyrics to the wordless melody that I sang live.
When I listened back, I realized the singing sucked energy from the other elements, and that the section I had written for woodwinds was so much more effective cut down to the final moment of the short piece-a torrential intrusion that leaves as quickly as it enters. I edited the woodwinds and cut the vocals completely. Much like the self-imposed protocol of repeating a loop physically that began this piece, the process of composing through subtraction introduced the conditions for objectivity: untethering my ego from the work; enabling agency for the composition to discover itself.
Using Our Words, 2024 (voice, flute, Bb clarinet, bass clarinet, sampled grand piano, violin, electric guitar, sine waves, processing)
This excerpt is a reprise of a dual clarinet motive emerging in the middle of a song I wrote for an upcoming EP. I took the original line between two clarinets and thought about how I could develop the composition without disrupting the direct dialogue. I wrote melodic cells for additional clarinets and flutes that invert, suspend, and pre-empt the original, emphasizing verticality and immediacy over temporal passage. Once I was satisfied with the tension of the competing melodies, I thought about how additional timbres could be utilized to emphasize certain moments of each cell, highlighting musical phrases like highlighting words in a book to create poetry out of relief from the existing text.
I found by doubling select passages of the cells with other instruments, I not only designed contradictions and expansions of the notation, but did so for the identity of the instruments as well. I doubled some phrases with violin, and others with voice. The augmentation of the original clarinet and flute cells creates a bubbling-over of the textural world within this excerpt, each instrument chasing after the other, like shifting between synonyms, unable to settle on one representative word.
Actor Network, 2024 (sampled voice, sampled grand piano, processing)
Intending to compose for human voices but unable to find a large vocal ensemble to work with, I built a sample bank of my own voice, articulating different vowel sounds across every pitch in my vocal range chromatically. I had home-recorded and composed with large sample banks for earlier projects, but this time, instead of using these sounds towards the ends of consonant harmony, the subtle imperfections in pitch and granularities of each sung note drew me to working with tone clusters and dissonance. This recording is an excerpt of a long experiment of incorporating my vocal samples in this way, and similarly manipulating samples of a grand piano to contract, expand, and scatter tonalities instead of guiding them across prescribed hierarchies.
I was heavily influenced by listening to Tristan Murail and Gerard Grisey’s Spectralist music of the 1970’s, which emphasizes the architecture by which sound is delivered to space. I was interested in how the indexing of acoustic relationships in the context of the concert hall might be translated to the digital space of Ableton Live, and how one might compose to work against the imposed parameters of its tools. In this sense, Actor Network attempts to establish a space within a space.