Category: Composition

Sonata for Violoncello and Piano in E minor (2023)

This piece was premiered in May 2024 in Spain by Juan Aguilera Cerezo and Santiago Báez and recorded shortly thereafter for release on my debut album. This large-scale sonata represents perhaps my most mature fusion of Romantic and Modern influences into an expressive and individual vision. The first movement revels in winding chromatic harmony while yet making ample space for lyricism, and of course, dialogue between the two instrumental protagonists. The movement’s structure is an individual take on the classical sonata form: a prolonged allegro exposition, already rich in development, and in place of a development, a nested slow movement—something of an eye in the center of the more turbulent and stormy exposition and recapitulation. The movement’s coda retreats to the inner slow movement’s tempo and figuration, but amidst the starkest of textures, sets the main allegro theme in this more tragic context. The second movement is a large theme-and-variations-qua-finale in the tradition of Beethoven’s op. 109 and op. 111 piano sonatas. Based on a simple theme presented in starkest terms, variations 1-3 increase in chromatic complexity and chaotic sense of rhythm. Variation 4 is slow and melancholically expressive—perhaps the emotional heart of the set. Variation 5 picks up the tempo, only to yield to another slow variation, this time more lilting, a lullaby reminiscent of Brahms, and the only variation in major. The final variation ends the work with fitting intensity, and briefly recalls the main theme of the first movement.

Do I Wake or Sleep? Triosatz for Flute, Violin, and Bass clarinet (2023)

Commissioned by the Walden School 2023 Young Musicians Program Faculty Commissioning Project, this trio was written for and premiered by TAK ensemble. The piece is conceived as an ethereal exploration of liminality, portraying, as the title (a quote from Keats) suggests, an in-between state of consciousness. The piece is a simple ternary form: A fast, alternatively delicate and aggressive section gives way to a slower lyrical tune written for violin, sul G. After the winds take up the melody, the flutist is asked to improvise a cadenza, and following this, there is brief recapitulation of the opening fast material before the piece seems to evaporate into nothing.

On Poetry and the Earth: Two Poems for Actor and String Trio (2022)

I wrote this piece for the Elsewhere Ensemble, a group that combines theater and classical music in new, engaging ways. The ensemble’s core group consists of a trio of fantastic string players alongside Broadway veteran actor MacIntyre Dixon.

When, I all too recently discovered Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen’s ode To John Keats, Poet, at Springtime, I felt drawn into conversation with someone who understood me. Like Cullen, I have long been enamored (or obsessed perhaps) with Keats’ poems and fascinated by the myths surrounding his tragically short life. Cullen’s poem is a series of delicately versified reflections on the beauty of a spring day; in it, he reaches out to Keats as a kindred spirit, one who like him could sense the beauty of nature keenly, even to the point of its driving him into a kind of ecstasy. Setting this poem in a musical piece where it could be spoken rather than sung seemed to me a way of elevating a masterpiece–giving it a richly wrought frame, as it were, one that, like Cullen’s work, embodies many traditional aspects of form and rhetoric, but also stylistically reflects the early 20th century. In accompanying this poem with one of Keats’ own, I mean to present Cullen as I hope he would have wanted himself presented—as a successor to Keats’ poetic tradition. Keats’ sonnet On the Grasshopper and Cricket, also shares themes with Cullen’s poem, and, I hope, creates a vital dialogue with it about the relationship between the beauty we create in art, and the beauty of the earth, these being all part of the same thing.