After Wonder is part of an ongoing collaboration with visual artist Jacob Rowan.  Our work together finds inspiration in T. S. Eliot’s poetry (particularly in Choruses from the Rock and Four Quartets), as well as ideas and images from the biblical account of the tower of Babel. This piece portrays a kind of awestruck dismay and patient longing.

The first of two collaborations with fellow composer Kurt Landre, who named the piece Insipid Digression.  We composed this in one sitting, without talking, each completing the other’s phrase and beginning a new one until we found a natural end.  

(To view our second collaboration, see Digression III)

I composed this short prelude during a workshop on choreography and composition.  My collaborator (Margo van Ummerson) independently designed a solo dance, and we put the two together, sight unseen.  The effect was surprising, captivating…

In this, our second collaboration, Kurt Landre gave me a twelve-tone row and a rhythmic gesture, with which I composed a short etude.  

(See also Digression I)

A friend of mine commissioned this as a birthday gift for his wife.  It includes a handful of references to well-known romantic pieces, as well as a variety of subtle allusions to melodic motives from a familiar celebratory tune.    

This piece never got a suitable subtitle and was inadvertently numbered out of order when the Digressions were collected as a set.

This is a short prelude with a silly name, composed in one sitting.

This wistful etude, named after an early mishap in the compositional process, was composed in a single sitting.

An early work, based on an improvisation, for a UO Composition Workshop with pianist Anthony Demare.

A birthday present for my charming wife, Quita–a sincere, whimsical portrait of our enduring affection and steadfast friendship.  Imagine drifting off to sleep while meditating on a peaceful, secure, beloved companionship.  A serene music-box theme wanders through episodes of adventurous whimsy, always drifting back to relaxed charm, eventually faltering and fading into slumber.  Such friendship is beautiful beyond what words (or music, even) can express.  I will love you always, Quita!

Pursuit voices its title through the interplay of three themes.  The first begins as a curiously remote melody, a distant voice calling for discovery.  The next comprises a series of tensely focused chords, stealing forward tentatively as if the pursuer hopes for a closer look. The third launches off in a careening sprint along an uncertain, twisting path, gradually closing in on…something progressively more wondrous and mysterious.  The initial melody periodically interrupts the chase, growing more grandly insistent, until the roles are reversed and the pursuer is overtaken by the pursued.

This piece follows the composition of Sakharoviana, during which I had the opportunity to consider various recollections of Andrei Sakharov’s character and personality at some length. What emerged was a striking image of warm-hearted reserve, compassion, persistent and intense curiosity, measured complexity of thought, and moral perseverance.  The present work pursues a musical rendering of this image as a singular inner disposition of spirit.

Building on harmonic materials developed for Sakharoviana, Sakharov Song takes the shape of a continuous arch, built out of a series of chords in rhythmically and texturally symmetrical patterns, with an introduction and coda comprising the same series of chords in irregularly spaced blocks.

I. Prelude (Evening Shade)
II. Leviathan
III. Invention
IV. Artifice
V. Lounge
VI. Statues
VII. Postlude (Dangling Hope)

These etudes comment on a common but problematic way of thinking. The musical language for this series is deliberately contrived to be abstract and open to unbridled interpretation, but its use evokes intentionally vivid and concrete imagery.

Snow Music is a conversational meditation on a single moment of wonder: One evening, halfway through composing this piece, sitting at the piano in a pool of lamplight, I was surprised to notice snowflakes falling outside my living room window. Their simple, swirling, entrancing beauty crystallized the music’s expressive focus.

This prelude is a still-life image of the Tower of Babel, the first fruits of ongoing collaborative work with artist Jacob Rowan.