15-Piece Chamber Orchestra

This work involves not only Oregon artist Randall Speck’s fabulous colored-pencil drawings but also melodies and fragments drawn from 25 Christian hymns, chorales, and songs.

Flute (solo), Wind Ensemble

I composed this as my master’s thesis at the University of Oregon.  When flutist Kristen Halay, a fellow student, was lamenting that she had run out of new repertoire, I suggested that she ask the composition students to write pieces for her — whereupon she promptly commissioned me.  She wanted it to commemorate her father, John R. Halay, who had recently passed.  After further conversation with Kristen, I chose topics for each of the three movements:  her father’s temperament and love of sailing, a meditation on grief, and the blending of a hymn tune with a musical theme borrowed from her favorite episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  A gifted performer, Kristen performed it beautifully with UO’s Oregon Wind Ensemble.

String Orchestra

Melodic echoes and harmonic color adorn this (mostly) quiet reflection. The texture of this piece grows out of a chant-like melody.  It is not a setting of the text, but rather is voiced out of a meditative response to the psalm’s content.  I composed it as a short etude for the Belhaven University Orchestra.

Choir and Orchestra

I arranged this from an earlier setting of Psalm 29 at the request of Stephen Sachs and Christopher Shelt, who premiered it in a joint concert by the Belhaven University Concert Choir and Orchestra.  “

String Orchestra

This is the transcription of a vocal quartet (setting a poem by C. S. Lewis) which I had originally composed during the 1996 Oregon Bach Festival Composers Symposium.  The BU String Orchestra premiered it under the direction of Song Xie. Then students and I took it on a musical trip to Tokyo. The following year it was included in a concert by the Mississippi Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Crafton Beck.