My work embraces a wide spectrum of styles and musical techniques drawn from my Classical piano training, experience as a new music pianist, my undying interest in Rock, Hip Hop, and Jazz, and my love of weird, wild stuff found in new concert music. I have been a new music pianist for over 20 years, which has helped to shape my aesthetic and hone my compositional techniques. I find that my compositional style moves in waves from radical to more traditional and everything in between. I am always looking for ways to reinvent the old or recast the traditional, as in the neo-Baroque Book of Muses: Nine Preludes & Fugues in the Modes inspired by the Nine Muses of Greek Mythology, to repurpose, as in the use of face masks on the keys and a plastic encased Covid vaccination card in Pandemic Sonatine, or to innovate, as in the vibrating dildos from Variations Promethean and/or the creation of the Seaboard Sampler, or Seapler, in Max. It is these three aspects of my compositional persona which I value most highly, and which continually provide both a welcome challenge and an inspiring artistic identity.
One thing I have learned, and have been told by faculty mentors like Aaron Jay Kernis, is that if you have a musical idea, no matter how strange or provocative, execute and advertise it, because somewhere, someone might have had the same thought and perhaps didn’t act on it out of fear of rejection. Letting these wild insights go to waste is tantamount to losing your distinct artistic identity.
Variations Promethean, a 75-minute work for piano and prerecorded electronic music, aims at capturing the spirit of Prometheus, the rebelliously creative giver of fire. In my search for all things rebellious, I was struck by the idea of throwing vibrating dildos into the piano. It’s provocative, striking, weird, funny (sometimes hilarious—watch for the gyrating stack! You can hear me laughing on the video recording.), and most importantly perhaps, it accomplishes a new way to engage with the piano with subtle, mysterious, and otherworldly timbres created in the process.
Pandemic Sonatine for piano, face masks, and Covid vaccination card repurposes cleaning the piano keys, face masks/bandanas, and a Covid vaccination card into a novel composition. The first movement, Wipedown, uses only bandanas on the keys for the entire movement—no direct fingers or hands on the keys at all. The pianist wipes down the keys in an aggressive manner, violently whips key clusters, and shifts from end-to-end of the entire tessitura from triple-forte to triple-piano. The second movement is entitle Crumb’s Lamentin memorium to George Crumb, who passed away the month of the work’s composition. This is the movement that uses the Covid vaccination placed in a protective plastic baseball card holder, which makes the piano melody sound more like a sitar with a “sizzle” than a piano. Standard extended techniques which Crumb utilized follow. The third movement contains a small collection of false starts in the form of gestures at the keys. The pianist pantomimes starting a piece several times in different ways, but never plays a note. This aims to reflect our constant back-and-forth in regards a return to social normalcy after the height of the Pandemic.
My Fourth Sonata uses several extended piano techniques, like a Stopped String Slide and other more traditional extended piano techniques, seen below in the video series, "Beyond the Keys":
The Fourth Sonata video performance with extended techniques in context:
Shrine, my sixth piano sonata, uses a Seaboard, which is a MIDI controller with slide, vibrato, and timbre modulation capabilities, with some acoustic piano writing. I created a Max patch called the Seapler, or Seaboard Sampler, which allows the performer to sample any audio and play it in a loop on the Seaboard in various ways. The result is a strange collection of aural memorabilia, 2020-style—Donald Trump saying, “we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol!” transformed into a mellifluous lyricism (believe it or not), and George Floyd’s three last words, “I can’t breathe!” looped into an angry antiphonal dialogue with acoustic piano. The overall sound-world of the work is somber and dark and is really meant to be a memorial for an equally dark and somber year, thus the reflective title, Shrine.
On the other end of the spectrum, a recent project involved the completion of JS Bach’s incomplete Art of Fugue. This work has been my “go-to” piece for many years when I want to decompress, so naturally, I had a personal interest in being able to play the music to completion. I was unsatisfied with current completions by other scholars and wanted to try it myself. Little did I know just how difficult it would be, but the rewards were worth every effort. I learned more about composition in this little, big project than in many years of writing my own works. What resulted was a quadruple fugue completion of 90 measures, or about four minutes, of harmonically and contrapuntally adventurous music (this work has been recorded and is available on my YouTube channel). In this same vein, I was inspired to start my current project which is half completed, The Book of Muses, a set of nine Preludes and Fugues in the modes loosely inspired by the nine muses from Greek mythology.
Finally, a few words about my experience as a new music pianist. In 2002, I was employed by the Temple University Boyer College of Music under a Graduate Assistantship as a double master’s degree student in piano and composition to rehearse and perform new works by the graduate composers. I have been playing premieres ever since. For a composer, there was no more invaluable lesson for “what to do” and even “what not to do” as I witnessed in this challenging position seeing score after piano score set for world premiere. I honed my sight reading, developed my sense of pianistic style, refined my rehearsal rhetoric, and championed the works of my colleagues both on and off the stage. In subsequent years to now, as a professor, I perform and record the works of myself, students, and colleagues. I enjoy helping young composers and colleagues get their music off the ground, into the concert hall, recorded and online, and I thrive in offering advice on notation practice, arranging music pianistically, and/or answering questions about potential extended techniques or whatever may arise. I am always learning, am curious, and eager to continue this collaborative role for many more exciting years to come.