These pieces were all written, performed, and recorded in conjunction with my undergraduate studies in composition at SUNY Purchase or at my doctoral studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. I am thankful to all of the performers involved on these projects – they delivered on difficult material under less than ideal rehearsal conditions. I could have chosen to only include the most professional recordings of only the most polished works, but I instead prioritized documenting everything, since I don’t plan on re-recording most of these pieces, and I believe the individual works are served by being heard in this broader context.

The material for 7 preludes for “Music can sleep” was assembled out of three distinct aborted attempts at a piece for pierrot ensemble. Initial drafts began in late 2019 – progress was disrupted by the onset of the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, and subsequently by work on other musical projects. By 2022 I had unintentionally amassed a miniature archive of false starts and disparate fragments for the ensemble. I selected the most psychologically potent material and arranged it into a narrative form that embraced irony and contradiction.

I have come to prefer this manner of working – generating a large amount of material over a long period of time and then assembling at a later date, once I have gained some distance from my original intentions.

When working with sets of miniatures, like in 7 preludes or It stays how it is, I am drawn to unusual temporal proportions. I do not want to create a form that is merely balanced or well-paced for its own sake – I want to make the passage of time feel strange and expressive in its own right.

With It stays how it is, I intentionally adopted a sonic surface that was stiff and dry. Part of this was so your attention would be drawn to its temporal unfolding, which is where I thought the real art was happening. I had also become impatient with what I perceived as an overwrought sentimentality in my previous material. Intimacy and vulnerability is always of primary importance to my aesthetic, but my efforts to achieve this in my earlier music began to feel cheap – hushed whimpery tones and fragile timbres, bland fetishization of silence, and so on. (You can hear an example of this in Music for winds and percussion – it tries to draw you into its precious atmosphere but I don’t feel like it has much to say once you’re there. But hell if I know, maybe you’ll like it). It stays how it is remains my most austere exercise in wrestling against my own taste, and while some of the writing is a bit clumsy, it helped me develop a sense of dry humor and a paradoxical air of mystery that had a positive effect on my aesthetic moving forward.

for piano trio is another experiment with dryness and austerity, but with comparatively softer edges. For this piece I worked within tight restrictions – the rhythm is confined to a steady succession of quarter notes, and the strings and piano never play together. This allowed me to write quickly and semi-improvisationally – it took a lot of deliberation and false starts to arrive at the tonal and affective language I wanted, but once I got there I was able to write out the whole thing in one or two sittings. Like many improvisations it suffers from a rather conventional formal arc. To my ears it nevertheless achieves a satisfyingly uncanny emotional register.

Nisi Masa is a piece very much wrapped up with my early adolescence and initial exposures to 20th century modernist music and European art cinema. It is structured as an excavation of an interior world of private associations – and so the back half of the piece (and the title) makes reference to a scene from Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 whereby a telepathy demonstration at a party triggers in the protagonist a Proustian flashback to a childhood memory. In many ways 7 preludes occupies the same naïve and childlike world as Nisi Masa, but more cautiously and with a greater sense of detachment.