Projects

These pieces are a shameless celebration of wonder and the beauty of the natural world. The first of them, A bird came down the walk, was commissioned by Big Mouth Society in 2022. The piece follows the silly and surprising path of a bird only to become lost in the poetic mechanics of flight. The next three pieces in the set asked to come into the world, too, and so I listened. The exponent of breath is a short trio about love. To make a prairie is an instructional guide for naturalists: "to make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee/one clover, and a bee/ and revery./ The revery alone will do, if bees are few." The universe her shoe is yet another piece about the moon. 

the moon 

has long since set

and the stars have faded

midnight is gone

time passes

(gold thread running through

my fingers, fresh silk

running through my fingers)

I lie

alone.

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performed by Emily Lau and Jesse Ehrenberg as part of Cold Songs/Warm Songs: An At Home Holiday Celebration. The whole project is charming and homey and wonderful: ...and the stars, then called Fragment, starts at minute 9.

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I first imagined this piece as I sat on an old fountain in Paris, thinking that I wanted to write something that showed time and dirt and grit in the way that architecture does. The idea was to take an old Chopin Prelude, No. 7, and render it just recognizable to someone who knows the tune but otherwise destroy it until it became something else. That particular prelude has always held some strange significance over me: I remember reading when I was in high school that the piece reminded Chopin of his home in Poland, and that if played well it was as cheerful and plain as it was a lingering memory of places long past.

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A couple years after writing forgetting a melody I realized that the piece has little to do with Chopin, but it brings my heart back to how it felt to play the piano as a young person. So much of my emotional atlas was formed sitting at the piano bench playing these lines over and over again and trying to figure out what they meant. I'm still trying, and they mean differently now. 

This piece was created as part of Timbre 2023, a wonderful project built by New Music Mosaic to connect composers and performers. It is an exploration of abandonment to the night: therefore, don't think about it too much. Let it happen to you.