Category: Composition

Tone Poem: “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense” (2016)

Keat’s poem “Ode to a Nightingale” served as the inspiration for this piece. Rather than text painting, the piece follows the poem’s progression of mood: a vague, existential longing, a fantastical nighttime journey away from reality, and a sudden return to the melancholic real world. Marking a significant departure from the musical styles I usually employ, this piece is a fun compositional challenge that incorporates stylistic currents of the early 20th century, drawing from composers as wide-ranging as Stravinsky, Debussy, Mahler, Weill, and Lehar.
The form of the piece is episodic, juxtaposing disparate styles in the tradition of Mahler. We first hear the unusual low growling of four solo double basses, on top of which a solo bassoon sings a plaintive rhapsody, a la Stravinsky’s Firebird. This is contrasted with diaphanous, impressionistic passages for full orchestra, culminating in a thunderous tutti. The tutti fades as the register falls, and the music seems to burrow itself into the earth in an abrupt stop. Then suddenly we find ourselves in the “realm of the night”—a solo cello plays a sort of Weimar era Cabaret tune reminiscent of Kurt Weill, which is accompanied by timpani and flutes and ironic commentary in the muted brass. The party is enlivened, as the entire orchestra plunges into a somewhat distorted Viennese Waltz suggestive of Lehar’s The Merry Widow. As this climaxes, an eerie sound, that of the cymbal played on timpani with pedal glissando, takes as back to the musical world of the opening.

Symphonic Movement in A major, Op. 7 (2014)

Adagio – Allegro con spirito

This movement cultivates that radiant joy expressed in many classical symphonies by Mozart and Haydn. The slow introduction begins with a high, angelic chorale for divisi violins. This becomes darker and more Romantic in color than the following Allegro, which opens with a gentle song that contrasts with the bustling energy of the following orchestral tuttis and the sprightly playfulness of the secondary theme. The limited selection of winds gives the piece a characteristic sound world: an emphasis on double reeds brightens, while the lack of heavy trumpets and timpani, with their martial connotations, has a lightening effect. A classical sense of inevitability permeates the piece, with one thing flowing naturally and logically from the next.

Song for Chamber Orchestra, Op. 6 (2014)

Song, for chamber orchestra, was written for Bard College’s Conductors Institute and was premiered as part of the composer-conductor program. An intriguing orchestration puzzle was presented by the  chamber orchestra, with its solo strings and full wind sections: how to create a unified orchestral sound without full strings, and how to enable the solo strings to be prominent over the louder wind and brass choirs. I addressed the challenge by orchestrating contrapuntally in the style of Wagner and took specific inspiration from his Siegfried Idyll, also for chamber orchestra.

The title “Song” refers two things: firstly, the direct, songlike nature of the themes, and secondly, the structure of the piece, which is rather more complicated – three song-like ternary forms nested  in one larger ternary form, if you don’t include the brief fugal interlude. The first “song” is sung to a loved one, the second to one’s self. After a fugal interlude, the two song melodies and the fugue subject are combined together in one  final song.