Four representative works.
Extended portfolio here.
Personal website here.
Glyptic Channels (2019) 36 min. composition-installation
Voices and Apparitions (2016) 7 min. soprano and electronics
Foal in the Sunlight (2021) 4 min. vocal sextet
Volute & Twining (2018) 9 min. two quarter-tone pianos
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.
Foal in the Sunlight (2021) — 4 min.
View score here.
For vocal sextet (SATTBB). Written for Variant 6.
The words and music are inspired by the year I spent on a horse ranch in Bastrop, Texas, a place unruly with life. Something was always being born overnight.
Foal in the sunlight
All eyes crawling to you
Spread your wings in burning dew
I'm clasping the clod
That set you loose
That broke the cloud
That keeps collapsing on
The heap of you
Foal in the muscle slick of moonlight
All eyes flashing in recoil
Ocean foaming from the soil
Foal, floating feather
Flung from the flesh of the femur
I'm clasping the clod
That set you loose
That broke the cloud
That keeps collapsing on
The heap of you
Volute & Twining (2018) — 9 min.
View score here.
For two pianos tuned a quarter tone apart. Written for HOCKET.
Inspired by the Shepard-Risset glissando and by Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s theory of “ultrachromaticism and non-octavian spaces.” The pianos execute a series of intertwining scales whose rhythms and intervals expand and contract in broken synchrony.