COMPOSITIONS

"Our Great Escape" is an orchestral work that traces the journey of two friends through the evolving chapters of their youth. The piece opens in a spirit of boundless energy and curiosity, mirroring the excitement of early friendship and the thrill of discovery. As it unfolds, the piece explores the way in which feelings change and people along with them. It reflects the inevitable transformations that come with time (how people grow, drift, and change) yet also how certain relationships, though altered, endure.

Inspired by the sweeping sounds of classic Hollywood adventure scores, "Our Great Escape" is itself an adventure, exploring memory, emotion, and the enduring power of connection.

"Winds of Change" is a piece for SATB, string orchestra, and piano built off of two proverbs: 

No wind, no waves.

Do not be afraid of growing slowly. Be only afraid of standing still.

The Foglamp Quartet is a theatrical chamber work for piano quartet and narrator that explores the boundaries between memory and forgetting. With a background in theatre, I wanted to create a piece that functions like a play, in that music shares the stage with dialogue and serves to enhance the overall narrative experience. The narration’s self-awareness and absurdity mask deeper feelings of uncertainty, fear, and longing, while the music serves as a way of both conveying and transforming those shifting emotional undercurrents. Set within a fog-covered park that serves as a kind of limbo, the piece meditates on the uneasy beauty of remembering in its exploration of the way in which the act of remembering itself can become frightening when everything else has been forgotten. The Foglamp Quartet lingers in some space between clarity and obscurity, laughter and loss of self, presence and disappearance.

The dark academia aesthetic, with its deep reverence for the intellectual and the melancholic, has become a distinctive cultural trend rooted in literature, art, and fashion. It evokes images of old libraries, the thrill of ancient books, candlelit study sessions, and a nostalgic yearning for knowledge amid the shadows of academia. The style embraces themes of existential contemplation, the pursuit of intellectualism, and an undercurrent of mystery and romanticism. Often framed in the context of centuries-old traditions and a certain reverence for the past, it also appears in much media today, from the macabre humor of The Addams Family to the worlds of Tim Burton movies. 

"Quintet for a Dark Academic" is structured to reflect the ebb and flow of this world, with moments of tension and release, sharp contrasts between light and dark, and active layers of sound that mirror the multifaceted, exciting, and at times, unsettling nature of the dark academia mindset.

"Midnight at the Riff" is about a fictional jazz club and is built around three seperate groove cells. The first of these cells features flourishes and a flashy repeating motivic idea. The second cell is characterized by a steady drive with interlocking rhythms and dissonant punctuations. The third cell consists of repeated notes that push ahead of the beat. After their initial introduction, these cells reappear in a variety of manners. Sometimes they are reintroduced individually, sometimes together, and sometimes in a manner in which they interrupt each other.

"At the Summer Festival" is a quartet for four violins about a local summer festival in the rural Southwest. Its lively sections follows someone as they wander through the festival and see the many different sights and attractions. 

"The Voice of the Sea" set text from the sixth and final chapters of The Awakening by Kate Chopin. This novella is considered a landmark work of early feminist literature. Published in 1899, this novel tells the story of a young woman named Edna Pontellier as she struggles to free herself from the oppressive expectations and environment of the American South. Over the course of the novel, she begins to develop a strong sense of self-autonomy and breaks away from many of the authoritative forces holding her back. In context of the novel, the sea is an important symbol of freedom and empowerment. Through learning to swim, Edna discovers a shift in control over her life and her world. This shift gradually develops into her searching for self-determination in all areas of her life.

"Snowscape" is a choir piece about the beauty of taking in a winter scene and appreciating it for its brevity. I wrote this poem in high school while on a family trip to Colorado. I always loved the part of the road trip in which the scenery would change from flat prairie to a mountainous winter landscape. It would feel like stepping into a Bob Ross painting, and I often wished my world could always look like that. The fact that it doesn’t is likely what makes it feel so special.

"Moonlight" is a vocal jazz piece about a restless night alone, in which time seems to pass slowly. You frequently find yourself awake and left with only your thoughts and the light streaming in through the window. Beginning with a variation of the midnight bells, the piece alternates between sections of time passing and sections of lyrics that note your waking observations.

"Orion" is a piece that exists in the space between musical theatre and art song. Written for solo tenor, it follows a narrator who keeps noticing the same constellation, Orion’s Belt, as the only one he can ever seem to recognize. That simple detail becomes a way of understanding how a past relationship keeps showing up in his present life. No matter where he looks or who he meets, he keeps coming back to the same shape. The piece explores how memory works its way into everyday moments; not in dramatic ways, but in quiet, persistent ones. "Orion" isn’t so much about holding on to the past as it is about noticing how the past can stay with us, even when we think we’ve moved on.

The Whitman Sampler: Art Songs from One Man to Another is a set of art songs that uses the text of five poems by renowned American poet, Walt Whitman. Whitman (1819-1892) was best known for his groundbreaking collection Leaves of Grass and innovating the free verse style. He is often associated with the queer community, because his poetry contatins expressions of affection for men, particularly in Leaves of Grass, where he writes with intimacy and passion about male friendship and love. At a performance of his "Songfest" in Munich, Leonard Bernstein said in Whitman's posthumously discovered poem, "To What You Said," he openly declared his homosexuality. Whitman's open embrace of queer themes in an era before queer identities were widely accepted makes him a major figure in queer literary history. 

This set of art songs was written with the goal of continuing to promote queer expression within the art song genre, an art form in which much of the repertoire is heteronormative. Whitman's work seemed especially fitting considering that art song as a medium developed and evolved during his lifetime. His work speaks to the existence of queer identities during this period in which art song was establishing itself as a style, so using his poetry is a way of looking back and acknowledging the past while promoting inclusivity in the present. Narratively, the five poems in this set were chosen to convey an overall arc that moves fromintrospective contemplation to outward passion and finally back to something internal and subdued. The first and final movements bookend the work with the narrator entertaining some hypothetical in which he finds joy with another man, whereas the middle movements show him navigating feelings associated with an existing relationship. The keys across the movements are all related by third, something distant but perhaps not out of reach.

"December Roses" is an art song set to the poetry of Rebecca Clark. It was commissioned for her Master's voice recital. 

"Time Does Not Bring Relief" is a setting of Edna St. Vincent Millay's untitled "Sonnet II." This poem expresses grief and longing, communicating a lack of expected resolution over time.

"Out Damned Spot" is an art song set to part of Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy in the beginning of Act V, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. At this point in the play, Lady Macbeth is plagued by guilt after playing a role in the murder of King Duncan and begins hallucinating spots of his blood on her hands. The structure of the piece follows this narrative, gradually becoming more haphazard. The interspersed oboe sections reflect her decent into madness.

Out, damned spot! Out!

One: two: why, then ’tis time to do’t.

Hell is murky!

Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier and afeared?

What need we fear who knows it,

when none can call our power to account?

Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood?

Trilogia dell'Amore is a set of three Italian art songs and a trio based on poetry by Umberto Saba (1883-1957). Umberto Saba's poetry has many overlapping themes of love, longing, and the way in which both influence our perspectives on life and how we are remembered. This set explores four of these poems through the lens of three interrelated characters in an Italian town. 

"The Web" is a vocal piece about a manipulative relationship from the perspective of both the manipulator and the manipulated. The lyrics were written by my friend and fellow composer Bee Pichardo and I. Bee is one of my biggest musical inspirations and most of the lyrics for this piece were improvised by her in a single take during one of our song-writing sessions. The piano accompaniment was edited by the wonderful Aidan Sudler.