Audio Recordings and Fixed Media Works

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Heiliger Dankgesang an die Gottheit (2019), for string trio

A brief journey into the idea of Beethoven from my own subjective position, this work glancingly engages with ideas, ideologies, cultural figures, institutions, quotations, musical quotations, mythology, religion, and dogs; which in one way or another, relate to the figure of the 18th-19th century German composer. These ideas are primarily presented in the form of text/speech, but they are combined with music written by Beethoven, as well as music written by other composers quoting Beethoven. This is meant to make perceivable some of the complexity of Beethoven as a cultural figure in this day and age.

Given the place of pride granted to Beethoven within musical education and concert music culture, it is incredibly important for educational institutions to encourage their students to turn a critical eye toward Beethoven, including his function in culture, how his music relates to standards of artistic legitimacy, and the influence he continues to exert upon musical aesthetics within the institutions designated for academic musical study. Though Beethoven is often presented as the unequivocal standard for quality in music, this idea is not informed by objective aesthetic truths, but usually by subjective, historical, cultural, and institutional forces. Acknowledgement of the complex and in many cases, arbitrary role of Beethoven in contemporary classical music and academic institutions can be an important starting point in assessing how these institutions operate and how they should operate.​​

Premiere Performance
11.2.2021
Performed by the Amorsima Trio at the University of North Texas
    Mia Detwiler, violin, voice
    Mike Capone, viola, voice
    Kourtney Newton, cello, voice
Firma | Foundation (2019), for organ
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The content of this piece is entirely comprised of material written by other composers for the organ. The material covers a time period from the sixteenth to the twentieth century and includes music from J.S. Bach, Charles Ives, Leon Boëllman, François Couperin, César Franck, Girolamo Frescobaldi, Dietrich Buxtehude, John Bull, and Camille Saint-Saëns.
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The practice of using pre-existing music in this way is aligned with the compositional techniques of many contemporary composers, but appropriation is everywhere in music, from cantus firmi, to improvisation on a jazz head, to mashups, to sampling. When composing in this way it becomes clear that multiple frameworks for perceiving music are present, including but not limited to the historical, the cultural, the referential, the visceral, and the analytical. Though this work explicitly uses traditions, styles, composers, and histories as the basis for the piece, it is interesting to consider how even non-appropriative works do so as well.

Premiere Performance
4.26.2019
Christoph Hintermuller, organ
Performed on the Möller Organ at the University of North Texas
​Basketball and Cricket (2018), for stereo fixed media

​In this piece I used two field recordings from the University of North Texas campus as a sonic template (tracing paper) for rhythmic, gestural, and timbral material. I then combined this material with the original recordings. Emphasis is placed on the recordings and composed material in roughly equal proportions to present a listening experience that oscillates between the “real” and the “artificial.”
The Curved Line in the Garden (2016), for stereo fixed media

The perception of continuity between two articulated points in time and space, monophony in electronic music, creating containers for sounds that become their own composite sounds, the grackles of North Texas, the garden of Eden from the snake’s point of view, the serpent as wisdom in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, dreams of snakes appearing from the ground, snakes eating birds, birds eating snakes, and the musical representation of spirituality in 1960’s psychedelic culture; were all things I thought about while writing this piece.