Project 1:
(un)aspirated (2025), an orchestra piece in 3 tableaux, takes its inspiration from an autobiographical memory as well as from the abstract sonic interpretation of the word itself:
"aspiration":
1. lofty ambition
2. unvoiced air
3. breathing in
4. procedure in which the body is punctured
5. complication in which internal fluid floods the lungs, drowning the patient.
The piece imagines the orchestra as corporeal entity: body dying, body irradiated, body on invisible fire. The narrative arc begins in an unaspirated soundworld, hazy, drugged, and anticipatory. It traverses through an MRI machine in the second movement, which is literally transcriptions of field recordings I made using both intuitive (piano) and scientific (spectrogram) means. After being irradiated by this material, the music finally collapses via the shocking entry of the needle. The third movement proceeds as a pair of intertwined opposites that move uncontrollably forward: the puncture and then its aftershocks and resonances. Although the danger is finished, the response to it is not.
My artistic practice has come to involve, in recent years, usually performing in my own work, in a traditional capacity as a conductor or violinist, or in new blended roles utilizing dance, theater, synthesizer, theremin, and other multimedia skills. However, I have also had in the past extensive experience in the more traditional notated world, from which I get my love of orchestra music. (un)aspirated demonstrates my orchestrational capacity within a more standard notated orchestra piece.
(un)aspirated excerpts:
Project 2: scenes from “Patience”
Waiting Room (2025) & Self Portrait with White Coat (2025) are two very different opera scenes created as studies for Patience, a 1-act multimedia opera I am currently completing with a collaborative network of representatives from public health, history of science and medicine, bioinformatics startups, classical opera houses in the US and Europe, and theater spaces.
They both demonstrate innovative ways of utilizing pre-existing technological ecosystems and mixing prerecorded characters and live performers as scene partners. Waiting Room specifically draws from my dance/movement theater/improv background and approach to blending instrumental, stylized, and expressive gesture. It is performed by myself (movement, film, speaker feedback instrument), Han Xia (percussion), and Christina Herresthal (mezzo-soprano in fixed media).
Self-Portrait was commissioned by the Tanglewood Music Center and shows my ability to be sonically creative, set text, express narrative, & blend media with acoustic performers within a traditional classical opera soundworld, delivering something new and striking, but not alienating, to a well-educated classical music festival audience. It is performed by Danielle Romano (Doctor One), John Arlievsky (Doctor Two), Alison Norris (conductor), Christina Herresthal (Patient in fixed media), myself (electronics and Korg Minilogue), and fellows from the 2025 Tanglewood Music Center.
Waiting Room excerpt time code: 5:12-9:10
Self-Portrait with White Coat excerpt time code: 2:07-6:34
Project 3: Lynchiana
With Lynchiana, I have tried a new approach to composition that pays homage to the auteur American director David Lynch's concept of sound design. The piece is in four short, consecutive mise-en-scenes: I. Exterior Hollywood – II. Interior Abandoned Factory – III. Exterior White Picket Fences – IV. Interior Red Lodge. The score is more like a script in which the musicians have agency over their individual sonic choices, in the sense that actors have agency over the precise delivery of their lines, expressions, and movements, supervised by a screenwriter and director. All text is from either a bibliography of scholarship or Lynch himself.
Lynch's approach to sound is marked by processes of retrograde, distortion, ventriloquism, tactility, and disembodiment, exposing disturbing components of commercialism and industrialism. He famously appropriates cheesy pop music of 1950s White America, making its sincerity ring false and dissonant. All the pitch and rhythm materials in this piece come from two versions of one such song, from the Club Silencio lip-sync scene in Mulholland Drive: Roy Orbison’s Crying (in C Major) and Rebekah Del Rio’s Llorando (in D-flat Major). The dissonance between these two keys and the identities of the two people singing them is the main tension. By superimposing and warping these two versions simultaneously, I hope to show the way American ideals of optimism and excess are gravely abnormal and even malicious.
It is performed by International Ensemble Modern Academy at the Lucerne Festival of Contemporary Music. A different version for reduced percussion and AI-assisted fixed media vocal samples was created for planned performances in Tokyo by Kajimoto and Svalbard by the Arctic Philharmonic.
Lynchiana excerpt time code: 2:48-5:57