| Year |
2011 |
| Time |
10:07 |
| Size |
13.8 MB |
Tracing Arcs is my largest project to date in terms of duration, instrumentation, and structural scope. It’s my first piece for a full orchestra, and it’s been the central focus for my first three semesters of graduate school. It could best be described as a symphonic poem, a single movement divided in this case into four disparate sections. First, a lush, neo-romantic introduction that establishes the primary motive; next, a brisk, rhythmic postminimalist section; third, a tuba cadenza; and finally, a sweeping conclusion that ends in a whisper.
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| Year |
2011 |
| Time |
1:05 |
| Size |
1.47 MB |
My latest electronic music project involved selecting a movie clip, erasing the audio, and writing my own score for it, similar to Drift. This time, my target was a one-minute excerpt (9:20-10:23) from Alex Roman’s breathtaking short film, The Third & The Seventh. The video features Roman’s CG renderings of architecture, including the Phillips Exeter Academy Library and the Quadracci Pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The realism of his work is made more impressive by the fact that every aspect of the video, including sound and music production (except the composition itself) is solely Roman’s doing. With his approval, I may soon be able to provide the excerpt accompanied by the music I’ve written for it.
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| Year |
2011 |
| Time |
3:22 |
| Size |
4.64 MB |
| Ozymandias
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
|
“Ozymandias” is one of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most famous and enduring poems. Published in 1818, the sonnet masterfully evokes a poignant image of foolish hubris and wryly comments on the futility of human endeavor. Incidentally, its structure – with the long build to the climax at the tenth line – lends itself well to being set to music, in this case as an art song for tenor and piano.
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After a brief period of time in limbo, my website has returned with a fresh coat of totally rad.
For years, I’ve written my website myself in metapad, a simple text editor. It served me well enough, evolving as I learned how to do a few simple things like CSS and PHP includes, but it’s a bit frustrating to have to open and edit a text file, copying and pasting code around, every time I want to update. So I decided to finally go through with scrapping the whole thing and upgrading to WordPress. I mainly wanted an administrator backend to make posts, but look at all the other cool stuff it does!
- Categories and tags for organization and searching.
- An interface for streaming music files.
- Easier embedding of video and flash. Check out Wotan’s Throne and a new piece, Fulcrum, if you don’t believe me.
- An RSS feed. I’d link you, but you should really click on that icon in the lower right. It changes color when you mouse over it! I still find that entertaining, and I have a college education.
You’ll notice I’ve removed most of my older pieces in a gross act of self-revisionism that would make Stalin blush. It’s also no longer possible to download MP3s of my music unless you know where to look.
Not everything is up yet, but the bits that matter are. The only downside is that I no longer have an excuse to put off actually writing music.
| Year |
2009 |
| Time |
~1:47 |
| Size |
1.75 MB |
One of the most frustrating aspects of video game music is its repetitive nature. Players must typically spend an extended amount of time in one area of the game before moving on, and each area has traditionally contained a single track that loops continuously. Listening to the same music over and over becomes irritating, especially if the player fails at the task necessary to continue and is further delayed in unlocking a new level and its music.
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| Year |
2009 |
| Time |
2:12 |
| Size |
3.03 MB |
For this project, I selected a segment of video from a BBC documentary called Galápagos: The Islands that Changed the World, stripped the audio, and composed my own. It depicted sea turtles eating algae underwater, then swimming on the surface; by the end, it had zoomed out to an aerial view of the archipelago. Unfortunately, I don’t have the rights to distribute the video, but here’s the music to it.
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| Year |
2009 |
| Time |
2:59 |
| Size |
4.11 MB |
Good texts for art songs are difficult to find. I was playing around with some Percy Shelley poems, but then, as I was looking through Brandon Bird‘s website, I found the Letters to Walken. “An Acquaintance?” Year 2 caught my eye, and the rest, as they say, is awesome.
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| Year |
2009 |
| Time |
1:26 |
| Size |
1.97 MB |
| Book IV (1-9)
Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
trita solo. iuvat integros accedere fontis
atque haurire, iuvatque novos decerpere flores
insignemque meo capiti petere inde coronam
unde prius nulli velarint tempora musae;
primum quod magnis doceo de rebus et artis
religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo,
deinde quod obscura de re tam lucida pango
carmina, musaeo contingens cuncta lepore.
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I traverse the distant haunts of the Pierides, never trodden before by the foot of man. ‘Tis my joy to approach those untasted springs and drink my fill, ’tis my joy to pluck new flowers and gather a glorious coronal for my head from spots whence before the muses have never wreathed the forehead of any man. First because I teach about great things, and hasten to free the mind from the close bondage of superstition, then because on a dark theme I trace verses so full of light, touching all with the muses’ charm.
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| Year |
2009 |
| Time |
1:06 |
| Size |
4.61 MB |
This was a project for my Electronic Music course. We were required to write a soundtrack for any of several provided videos in the public domain. I selected footage of someone’s vacation to the Grand Canyon. The music consists of polychords and extended tertian chords in piano and strings, a solo cello, a subtle synth, and my voice, all slathered in reverb and/or delay. The sounds come from a Kurzweil K2000. The video? Who knows.
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| Year |
2008 |
| Time |
3:01 |
| Size |
4.16 MB |
| Book III (830-831, 838-842)
Nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum,
quandoquidem natura animi mortalis habetur. [...]
sic, ubi non erimus, cum corporis atque animai
discidium fuerit quibus e sumus uniter apti,
scilicet haud nobis quicquam, qui non erimus tum,
accidere omnino poterit sensumque movere,
non si terra mari miscebitur et mare caelo.
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Death, then, is nothing to us, nor does it concern us in the least, inasmuch as the nature of the mind is but a mortal possession. [...] So, when we shall be no more, when there shall have come the parting of body and soul, by whose union we are made one, you may know that nothing at all will be able to happen to us, who then will be no more, or stir our feeling; no, not if earth shall be mingled with sea, and sea with sky.
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