Three representative works.

Extended portfolio here.

Personal website here.

Glyptic Channels (2019) 36 min. composition-installation

Voices and Apparitions (2016) 7 min. soprano and electronics

ESQUE for String Quartet (2016) 8 min. string quartet

Glyptic Channels (2019) — 36 min.

View score here.

A composition-installation for two trombones, organ, laptop ensemble, fixed media, and cathedral. Designed for and installed in the Princeton University Chapel through a collaboration with Facilities, the Music Department, and the Office of Religious Life. Written for and performed by a fourteen-person mixed ensemble: RAGE Thormbones, Eric Plutz, and the Princeton University Laptop Orchestra.

The audience moves freely about the space. First-person field recordings of walking through the woods are punctuated by time-warped trombone samples, close recordings of fingers on a bass drum, and phonemes arranged in semi-sung gestures. The live instruments articulate a long process of harmonic clarification from free-frequency microtonality to the vertical extension of a single fundamental F. The trombones move from the balcony to the rafters, coaxing “non-musical” elements out fo the soundscape and into the musical present.

Each member of the laptop ensemble plays a Metall’Ocean. “Glyptic Channels” has been reimagined and restaged at the Museum of Human Achievement in Austin, TX (as “Glyptic Channels II” with the Mood Illusion) and as an interactive installation at the Outhaus in Los Angeles (as “Glyptic Gardens”).

Voices and Apparitions (2016) — 7 min.

View score here.

A poem-song for soprano and fixed multichannel playback. Written for Rosie K. 

This piece was written for the New Jersey Composers Guild's Milton Babbitt Centenary concert. Babbitt's "Vision and Prayer" is a soprano-and-electronics setting of Dylan Thomas's shape-poem. I was intrigued by the way a concrete poem—determined by the diamond-and-hourglass shaped stanzas—could be translated into sound. I wrote my own diamond-and-hourglass-shaped poem in response, thinking about how Babbitt's music idealizes the quantification of sound-experience, but the phenomenon of listening to it highlights all that can't be quantified, like an irrational number overspilling with decimals. 

I sampled Rosie’s speak-singing voice, then created a fixed media track that explodes the consonants of the text over a ribbon of continuous vowels. Rosie's performance, which moves from speech to song and back again, is timed to loosely coincide these electronic versions of herself.

"Voices and Apparitions" can be presented as a live voice-and-electronics performance or as a multichannel fixed media piece. It has been presented at the Underwolf Festival (Los Angeles), National Sawdust (New York), and the SEAMUS 2020 conference (Charlottesville, VA and online).

Voices and Apparitions

text by Christopher Douthitt

No

Omened

Or neume-pierced

Veil, no fossils

Scattered thin across

Sunken fields, nor pitchblende-

Hidden ore, nor greenish glow

In foggy glass; no secret scrawl.

To know would be — weighted terms — to know

Past proving grounds, past atoms split,

But the sure pull of numbers

On the thing, which is there

And not, clear as air,

Unencumbered:

A closed all

Opened

On.

Apparitions in the optic nerve,

Like wreckage on sunlit waters,

Elude the earnest plotters

Of spasmed event: surge

Buckshot through blancmange!

Starlings, converge!

That such traps

Don’t snap,

See

Unfixed

Erratic

Beast-things springing

From any nested whole.

So, sudden data singing:

The floor of frozen faces

Concatenates - no, imbricates! -

Inert input - splash! - a dozen vases.

ESQUE for String Quartet (2016) — 8 min.

View score here.

For string quartet. Originally written for the Escher Quartet and revised substantially for JACK.

The raw materials that constitute ESQUE come from a variety of sources: sketchbooks from other projects, transcriptions of since-lost field recordings, and a few half-finished experiments with pitch collections. In setting these scraps against each other, I kept returning to a quasi-lyrical argument between persistent chittering, lopsided repetition, and stabs of interrupting silence.