Welcoming

is based on a text by poet Andrea Nicki and was premiered in Vancouver as part of Art Song Lab 2012 with mezzo-soprano Lynne McMurtry (SUNY College at Fredonia) and pianist Alison d'Amato (Eastman School of Music).

I welcome myself to this city; as no one else will do it as well; they don't know my sensibilities, my character dispositions, what I can withstand, tolerate, what I cannot.

I welcome myself with the sights of the majestic moose, and Alaskan mountains. I welcome myself with the earth's beauty. I welcome myself with hopes and desires, a desire for joyfulness. I welcome myself with an expectation of love. I welcome myself with these words to surround me like a friend.

I welcome myself with the familiarity of foreign lands, of travel, of displacement. I welcome myself with the familiarity of adaptation to new people.

I welcome myself with familiar tears for friends and places far away. I welcome myself with the constant companion of loneliness. I welcome myself with my resilience, courage and strength: the lions and tigers of myself. I welcome myself with my light spirit, with my love of life: with the songbirds of myself. I welcome myself with my curiosity, my playfulness: with the cats of myself. I welcome myself with my affability, my sociability: with the dogs of myself.

I welcome myself with my memories: some are terrible.... I welcome myself with things I have survived.

Tchotchkes for violin and piano

An original meaning of the word "tchotchke" is "a beautiful, useless thing". Tchotchkes is a set of four short pieces for violin and piano, conceived as a set of contrasting miniatures, and showcasing a variety of techniques and textures. While the music often presents itself as serious and dour, a thread of wackiness and wit also runs through the piece, asserting itself more and more as the piece goes on and bursting forth in the final movement, "Low Down". Tchotchkes was composed in July 2012 at Brevard Music Center.

All The Rage

is a reflection of my own influences and performing experiences as a guitarist. One of the things I enjoy most about playing the guitar is the multitude of musical styles that I am called on to play. It is truly an amazing experience to immerse oneself in such a variety of musical idioms. In attempting to synthesize and combine these disparate styles, I began thinking about the common elements that tied them together. In particular, I became interested in how popular music is used as a medium through which people express anger and discontentment with the world. "All The Rage" was premiered on August 1st, 2012, by guitarist Flavio Virzi at Santa Maria Gualtieri in Pavia, Italy.

Eastern Feast

is a composition for violin and viola written during a 24-hour composition project in 2012 at the University of Iowa. In this piece I tried to use a combination of elements found in both western and eastern (Iranian) music. The composition makes use of unexpected accents within stable rhythmic patterns set against a free melodic part. Both rhythmic and lyrical elements represent my native and new life in this country.

Piano Quintet

The first movement of my Piano Quintet explores the development of a few pitch cells. The central pitch cell is the basic trichord of A, B-flat, B-natural. This chromatic cell is the only collection to appear in multiple sections and serves as the central motive. This cell breaks away into a weeping violin solo before reaching a chordal high point. As an ensemble, this quintet presents an interesting challenge in balance because the piano can overwhelm the entire quartet of strings. I attempted to rectify this problem by using the piano as an ornamental and accompanimental instrument, allowing it to dominate a few brief moments before finally laying out a chord pattern for the final section.

Mysterious Dance

I started to compose Mysterious Dance on September 15th, 2012, and the final version was completed on September 25th. This piece is based on a special mode I generated by myself. The reason why I call this piece "Mysterious Dance" is that I imagined a unique dance in my head as I composed it. But it's NOT dance music. And that's why I call it "Mysterious".

Gesture No. 1

is the first of a series of pieces exploring the beauty within a single musical gesture. This particular gesture focuses on the ecstatic drive and tremendous power of an accelerando. At the same time, however, it is a meditation on tonal stasis and is the purity of energy contained within rhythm. It is written as an open score: the performers realize the piece through a group rehearsal process and collective decision making.

Town's Gonna Talk

I had the privilege to live in downtown Chicago for the month of July, 2011. My stay there was filled with daily walks from my hotel in River North down into the Loop. In stark contrast to my years living in Los Angeles, where the majority of my trips between destinations was done by car (and accompanied by the stations I'd select on the car radio), traversing Chicago on foot attuned my ears to a different kind of music: the urgent call and response of car horns, the rumble of the El, the fragments of overheard cell phone conversations, the aleatoric combinations of buskers near and distant, as well as the underlying grooves (*shuk shuk shuk shuk*...) of panhandlers along Wabash Ave rhythmically shaking their coin-filled plastic cups like maracas. For me, this urban counterpoint represented something bigger than us all, like music being improvised daily by the city, herself.