Video and audio
Featured works from my composition days at the University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music.
Admonition
Admonition is a work for fixed format electronics inspired by a poem by Sylvia Plath. In fact, the recorded recitation of the poem is the only source used to create all of the sounds in this piece.
Admonition
by Sylvia PlathIf you dissect a bird
To diagram the tongue
You’ll cut the chord
Articulating song.If you flay a beast
To marvel at the mane
You’ll wreck the rest
From which the fur began.If you pluck out the heart
To find what makes it move,
You’ll halt the clock
That syncopates our love.
Jillian
This composition explores temporal structures generated by layering fibonacci sequence pairs. The smallest structural movement in the piece occurs at the sixteenth note level alternating between a pair of notes (1:1). Next, a layer alternates between an eighth note and sixteenth pair (2:1), a layer alternates between a dotted eighth and eighth (3:2), etc. This process continues, cascading from high to low pitch material, ultimately governing the formal progression of the music.
As the pitch oscillations transition through harmonies the layers alternate between staccato and sustained notes—shifting the focus through innumerable details in the composite texture.
A particularly interesting result of this monolithic rhythmic and formal approach is that the structural units of the piece converge on the golden ratio as they get larger and larger.
Selected works
- A degenerate game, for ensemble
- The Library of Babel, for piano
- EX NIHILO, for two horns and fixed format electronics
- Admonition, for fixed format electronics
- Ezh, for horn and trombone
- HARM, for fixed format electronics
- Jillian, for fixed format electronics
- Morph, for fixed format electronics
- Theme for Corruption, for fixed format electronics
- Resonáre, for fixed format electronics (with choreography by Elizabeth Smith)