On June 1^st, 2013, my family and I visited Grand Teton National Park in northwestern Wyoming. The sights and experiences of my time in the park stayed with me more than I had ever expected, more so than many other National Parks through which I've been. My Symphony № 1 is a recollection of the events of this day, divided into four movements.

The first movement, ”Teton Pass,“ chronicles the difficult journey up and down the ten-percent grade of the pass of the same name, ending with a triumphant entrance to Jackson, Wyoming. ”Chapel of the Transfiguration“ is an introspective movement inspired by the small chapel in the unincorporated community of Moose in the park's borders, and which is angled so as to frame the Tetons in its windows. ”Moose“ is a raucous movement inspired by my father's successful attempts to locate a live moose for me to see, and it depicts the creatures themselves by a set of low-pitched instruments including the contrabass clarinet. The piece concludes with ”Oxbow Bend,“ which depicts the evening beauty of one of the most gorgeous parts of the Snake River.

In March 2010, a tornado struck my neighborhood. While the tornado skipped over my house, the experience was chilling and to this day I remain unnerved by thunderstorms. Rainfall takes its inspiration from this storm and includes a cataclysmic middle section of orchestrated tone clusters and sheer percussive force from an expanded percussion section that includes a tornado siren.

The Arabesque is a reworking/orchestration of the Arabesque from the Arianna Suite. Its second orchestration, for a smaller ensemble, was written specifically for the Winston-Salem Youth Symphony. Previously, it was electronically orchestrated as a piece for dance entitled Robot Circus.

My great-grandfather was a great man of letters, and at the center of his bookshelf long sat a bookmark-addled tome of poetry by Robert Service, the so-called “Bard of the Yukon.” Though not Canadian by birth, Service was nonetheless drawn to the beautiful, hostile, and largely unexplored landscapes of Canada’s Yukon territory, and he turned his pen towards capturing the essence of rugged frontier life. This book was my first exposure to descriptions of life on that rough-hewn edge of the North American continent, and its imagery has stuck with me ever since.

The ballad “The Cremation of Sam McGee” is widely considered one of Service’s best poems, if not his magnum opus. While ostensibly rather creepy in subject matter, it nonetheless contains significant humorous elements, which led me to conceive the accompaniment of a percussion ensemble, whose timbres range from the serious to the absurd, and whose harsh and gritty sounds were perfect for portraying the rough-and-tumble daily life of the Gold Rush-era Yukon.

The length of the poem dictated a distinct approach to the setting, involving a conceptualization of the text not unlike that of a music drama, where each “scene” was written almost as a separate movement, then linked together with its surroundings via manipulation of the percussion ensemble. In total, the piece is a tone-painting of life in the Yukon winter while illuminating the fictional tale of how one Tennessee man has his final wish fulfilled.

Behind the practice rooms at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts lies an abandoned half-tunnel that appears to be an access to the now-locked remains of a boiler room which was used in the music building's days as a high school. This half-tunnel is now continually covered in poetic graffiti, and over the course of a semester at UNCSA I went down there to make a record of these texts. The text was then separated by overarching themes and set to music.

Some claim the location from which these texts originate is haunted by the ghost of a former student who committed suicide there, although the same legend says that any student who goes down in there more than once is cursed—although I (and others) have been there many times to no ill effect. While the tradition of writing poetry in this semi-sheltered environment may indeed have originated with a suicide note at one point, the texts which now adorn its walls change on a weekly basis.

Writing effective choral music presents a set of challenges unlike anything in purely instrumental composition. Of these, one of the most important is textual clarity; above all else, the listener has to be able to discern the words. Ironically, Amphigory, a setting of nonsensical texts, needed this more than a “serious” choral piece; otherwise, the audience may mistake the piece's intended meaning.

In English, the world of nonsense is vast and comes in many different varieties, from nonce words to codes to non sequiturs. In the movements of Amphigory, I explore what I have defined as the five major variations of nonsense, all set against an eclectic instrumental ensemble consisting of unusual instruments and/or those with unfortunate reputations amongst musicians.

The Sonata follows a principle I call “concatenated form,” which attempts to split the difference between composition by way of intuition and composition by way of preplanned formal design.  Various sections were composed by intuitive process of trial and error, which were then subsequently analyzed from all aspects, with the resulting information informing the compositional process of the next section.  This process leads towards an end goal of a through-composed, yet formally cohesive musical fabric with everything hinging on what came before.

The first movement, “Coup de Foudre” (literally “stroke of lightning”), is my take on variation form, as I don’t find most historical examples of the form as musically fulfilling as their concept might imply.  I took the economy of means inherent in the theme and variations and divorced them from the aspects I found uninteresting.  The result is a movement that is spread out in distinct sections in way that every previous section exerts a level of control or influence over subsequent sections, mostly through the derivation, treatment, and elaboration of scalar structures.

The second movement, “Cri de Cœur” (literally “cry of the heart”), makes use of background scalar structures derived entirely from the contents of the first movement, including derivations that lead into quarter-tone tonal areas.  The various levels of interaction between the respective musical material of the two instruments is further complicated by a series of prepared tones, which were derived and introduced in the course of the first movement, but are turned into road blocks, set off by the violin’s use of scalar material that includes notes impossible to perform on a regularly tuned piano.

The third and final movement, “C’est la Vie” (literally “such is life”), begins with a violin cadenza in a take-off of the piano’s introduction and coda to the second movement, before launching into a wistful offbeat melody based on an intervallic row, which itself is derived from one particular measure in the first movement, which appears right before that movement’s titular “stroke of lightning.”  While this happens, the piano is now dealing with the prepared tones in a free and contrapuntal manner that eventually accepts them into the musical texture, and at the end, all precompositional shackles are taken off as the violin plays a modal version of the thorny and chromatic opening gesture of the first movement.

I Want to See You in the Summer is inspired by the YouTuber and poet Savannah Brown. I happened upon her poem of the same name by sheer happenstance, and immediately felt as if it had an inherently musical character to it. I took the words and set them to a continuously flowing melody, then set about orchestrating them for a flute ensemble, adding counterpoint and texture while still retaining the sense of fluidity, as if the music continually spins itself out from the initial motif.

Time Stream is an exploration of the movement of time in music. Scored for a cello ensemble consisting of at least eight performers, each plays in unison until a “fracture point” specified in the score, whereafter each player chooses their own distinct pathway. Tempo, dynamics, and articulations are left to the performers to be improvised, although they all follow the same general path from point A to point B.

The structure of the English Horn Sonata is a synthesis of past forms. The melodic content, harmonic content, and overall texture are informed by three distinct formal layers. The melody and harmony are presented in a nested form where each large section breaks down in increasingly complicated ways, while the textural form presents four ideas in a kind of formal counterpoint.

In the early morning hours of April 26th, 1986, a catastrophic meltdown occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in modern-day Ukraine. Steam generated during a test led to a feedback loop that all but annihilated reactor 4 at the plant. Thirty-one people were killed in the explosion and meltdown, and up to seven million throughout Eurasia were affected by fallout, from Belarus to Finland to England.

During the disaster, the core melted into the basement of the facility, combining with concrete and sand and other materials into a solid object that came to be known as the Elephant’s Foot, a highly radioactive mass that would kill anyone who was in its presence for less than a minute. By 1996, it had cooled to the point that 500 seconds proved a fatal dose. It is still radioactive to this day and remains one of the most dangerous objects in the world.

The Elephant’s Foot is a tone poem about this infamous and tragic meltdown, setting the eerie nighttime mood in the Ukraine with polytonality and a folk-like melody, before building up to the thunderclap of the meltdown itself.

The Arianna Suite took shape in January 2014 as a large-scale piano collection roughly arranged in increasing technical difficulty. Its first nineteen movements were written from January to May of 2014 and the remaining movements in September and October of the same year.

Eight movements from the suite (Prelude, Humoresque, Scherzo, Waltz, Intermezzo, Gymnopédie, Arabesque, and Ballade) were premiered by the composer in concert in July 2014 at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. The Arabesque has been reworked/orchestrated twice and was arranged for dance as Robot Circus.

The suite was dedicated to a legally blind piano prodigy.

I have always been fascinated by the relationship between color and music; while I am not synesthetic, I have read about composers who were and their agreements vis-à-vis the colors of notes and keys intrigued me.

Four Colors is not only my attempt at interpreting these colors, but the movements are linked by their beginnings and endings; the end of one movement is very similar to the beginning of the next and the piece always comes full-circle regardless of where you start. With this in mind, I left the piece open-ended to performers; the full piece has four equally valid interpretations as it can be begun on any movement.

The piece was premiered by the composer in concert in July 2014 at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, starting on Cerulean and ending on Eigengrau.

In 2015, renowned cello-double bass duo Low and Lower approached me about writing a humorous piece of chamber music for them to perform. Overdrive is the result of our collaboration, featuring the two performers going on a musical road trip—much to the exasperation of their increasingly sentient GPS system.

Overdrive has been described as ”a merry romp,“ ”too clever for its own good,“ and ”pulled off brilliantly.“