Southern Songs

Southern Songs is a set of six short caricatures for solo guitar. Each movement is loosely based around either the political or musical culture of places below the equator. Throughout the work, I freely interject the rhythms and melodic contours of music from South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. The bluesy final movement depicts the fate of Sir Humphrey Gilbert whose ship capsized in 1583 while aimlessly drifting south of Newfoundland.
 

Sir Humphrey Gilbert (lines 37-44)

Southward through day and dark,
They drift in cold embrace,
With mist and rain, o'er the open main;
Yet there seems no change of place.

Southward, forever southward,
They drift through dark and day;
And like a dream, in the Gulf-Stream
Sinking, vanish all away.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

Any Questions

Sound poet Chris Mann's work explores the texts and gestures of Australian speech, a unique essence that is captured in this work. The resulting material is rich in rhythm and qualities of color, pitch, intonation and emphasis. Any Questions uses snippets of these gestures and elaborates upon them by using various reverberation, pitch-shift, delay, and other transformations available through digital processing.

Violin Sonata, Tango

The third movement of the Violin Sonata entitled "Tango" is the composer's sentimental response to the simultaneous joy and anguish he feels for the tango social scene - a place where people make love at one moment and betray each other the next, where marital affairs are enacted on the dance floor as wives dance cheek to cheek with her husband's mistress in bitter embrace. With red wine and high heels people laugh and love and hate ecstatically in the boughs of passionate tension, legs intertwined with their lovers and bitter rivals.

A la Luz de los Oropesantes-Luceros

The text for A la Luz de los Oropesantes-Luceros is a passage from Guatemalan Nobel Laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias' poem Clarivigilia Primaveral, first published in 1965. A surreal evocation of the creation, destruction, and subsequent rebirth of artists by the Mayan gods, the text deals with the perpetual struggle to express the sublime, and reminds us that art is wrought from our humanity - and is likewise wounded, imperfect, profound, and infinite.

His Branches Run Over the Wall

I composed this piece after reading the heart-throbbing account of Joseph, the son of Jacob and ancient ruler of Egypt before the time of Moses. Joseph was given the gift of dream interpretation, a gift that not only drove his envious brothers to sell him into slavery, but also led to his inheriting of vast fertile lands in Egypt. The gift was a curse and a blessing all at once. It divided him and prospered him. The title of the piece is taken from Genesis 49:22, where Jacob invokes a blessing for Joseph from his death-bed after being reunited with his long lost son. With this story in mind, it was my aim to create a musical "dreamscape" by using the piano as a resonator box, and create an entanglement of "branches" through both linear and harmonic development. Timbral and textural choices are also given priority at times to aid in this realization of the ideas aforementioned.

Quartet for Four Xylophones
 

Yeo-Wool-Mok

There are many precipitous valleys and ravines in Korea, and often whirlpools occur further upstream. Yeo-Wool-Mok can be translated as "rapids," but it contains a poetic meaning referring to the visual images. In his poem "Yeo-Wool-Mok," Dol Han, a Korean lyric poet, describes the rapids as the point at which the stream of water loses its dream. In the sentimentalism found in the poem, mankind seems to experience unavoidable turning points in their lives. Before the transition, we might feel that our dreams are clearer and more feasible; however, through many unexpected events, our lives can be modified, changed, or matured. The piece starts with very calm introduction and develops more actively to describe the water of a brook. Fast rhythmic gestures in the high register create the sounds of birds that can be heard near the bank of the stream. To express the water of a wider stream, like a tributary to river, wider and deeper, radical musical gestures are employed in the middle. Finally, a slow and peaceful section closes the piece as the stream flows into a deep river.