portfolio of works
Hello and welcome to this portfolio page. I’ve selected work samples from the projects I’ve found the most meaningful to work on. All of them include electronic media as a core component: specifically sampled audio which has been extremely time-stretched. All involved collaboration, Prairie Winters and Sadie’s Story more extensively.
I enjoy the layering of meaning that occurs from combining sampled audio with original composition, and likewise from different artists each contributing to the same multimedia project through their own artistic medium (e.g. music, choreography, text, theater direction).
Below these selected works I’ve included a few other composition-adjacent creative projects of mine to give a fuller picture of what I do with music.
Prairie Winters
original electronic score for dance-theatre piece
Prairie Winters is a dance-theatre piece about a third generation Irish-Canadian immigrant grappling with a large inheritance of oil money, symbolized in a fur coat.
The process of composing the score began with two recordings of The Rocky Road to Dublin, a tune which the main character has stuck in her head—one recording of an Irish folk band and one of an American wind band arrangement. I time-stretched fragments of each to 81x and 12x their length (respectively) using the former as an ambient texture and the latter as a cantus firmus for further composition.
Another major part of the process was discussions with the creative team about the meaning of inheritance (both material and immaterial): how the shadow of burdensome familial love manifests in the main characters head, breaks out as violence, and the music’s relationship to and representation of her experience of this.
The video should begin from 7:45 for the start of the music. You may watch from the beginning for context.
Additional details in this document.
Dalom
double bass and live electronics
Dalom is built from the Hungarian Folk tune Arra Alá a Baranya Szélben, recorded by Béla Bartok and Lajtha László in 1936.
This song was used as the basis for the tuning used in the score and all musical material. The recording was time-stretched, cut up and arranged to form an ambient accompaniment to the bass part. The bassist used a midi pedal to control input into live effect processing (distortion and grain and filter delays).
The video should begin from 1:30.
Score below:
Sadie’s Story
flute(s), recorded interview, and fixed media electronics
Julianna Eidle (the performer here) commissioned me to write this piece from a set of interviews with her great-grandmother Sadie and family. Julianna and I worked together to edit the 4 hour interview into this 16 minute narrative.
The result is a piece akin to a podcast, using music and sound design to tell the story together with interview.
Sadie’s story is a 2022 winner of a BMI Composer Award and was programmed at the 2023 awards ceremony.
Score below:
other projects…
pop music production
Pop music production is a form of collaboration I enjoy alongside composition. It gives me an opportunity to bring a sense of theatricality or cinema to someone else’s composition (though the process is not unlike composing). I use sound design and play with a sense of acoustic space (and perspective) to help tell a story and give a sense of linear narrative progression.
These are two songs by my dear friend Gaja, a London-based Polish singer-songwriter, which I produced and mixed.
Just Intonation / MAX/MSP
Here are a couple patches I’ve built to help explore basic Just Intonation principles. I hope to at some point further develop and build the first of these to have a physical keyboard tool for writing and learning just intonation music.
JI 3-dimensional axis ‘keyboard’
A patch that let’s you explore 13-limit just tuning as a 3+-dimensional space, building new intervals, hearing them, and helping you to visualize them.
JI Basic Fraction Explorer Tool
A patch that lets you explore how frequency ratios based on prime partials combine in up to 13-limit just intonation.
requires Bach for notational elements