Statement on Creative Work

My work maintains a deep connection to humanistic traditions while engaging with the fragmentation and acedia of Modernity; aesthetics and technics connect with conceptualizations of self, being, and agency. In some pieces (like Ars Poetica, a collaboration with poet Marlanda Dekine) identity and the condition of 'thrown-ness' under Modernity are overt topics; in others (like A Book of Etudes) abstract considerations of pitch and rhythm are foregrounded through challenging technics of performance.  

The last several years have seen a transition from such 'essay' pieces, and their focus on technicity, historicity, or ekphrasis of visual arts and poetry towards new engagements with text, both sung and spoken; this has been largely absent from my work for over a decade, but this turn is the core focus of my latest portrait album on New Focus Recordings: https://tinyurl.com/tbiaa.  In these works and more recent projects, one found various contrapuntal moods as to the interplay of text and music, from the tight 'setting' of medieval poetry within the techniques of musical Modernism in Pangur Bán to the recitativi of Stevens Fragments, in which aphoristic speech leads to musical meditations on the temporal nature of being.  

Ovid in Tomis (currently in development) furthers this development in a large ensemble context while retaining the frequent interplay of severity and quietism in my music; written for soprano, flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, percussion, and guitar the work will combine Mahon's poem linking Ovid's banishment with the isolating fragmentation of the present with my frequent transformation of ancient historical music and technics into the Modern.  The work will premiered by BlackBox Ensemble in NY in Fall 2025, with further performances in North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Washington DC in 2025.

Its sounding is not the foundation of music; it is a temporal art, and many varieties of its temporal rhetorics are found in the works above, from polyphony and its discursive flow to quietism and repetition to the severity of virtuosity.  These ludic enterprises brought to life through my collaborators' exceptional skill, unfold in the visceral (if specious) present, in the now of performance, but music also unfolds within complex regimes of historicality.  

My work frequently exhibits a simultaneity of technical and affective elements; in works like Quintet l'homme armé, Floruit Egregiis, La Déploration, and Se je fume, c'est ma compleccïon quolerique qu'ainsi me fayt fumer. Medieval and Renaissance borrowings, quotations, and references abound. These adaptations are not romanticized simulacra but rather part of a music wherein technics, forms, and materials emerge both as contrasting features and as hybrid elements; often this Kosseleckian coexistence of past and present itself becomes the primary source of tension, energy, and significance.

In performance, my music manifests these philosophical positions through the intimate space of chamber music: performers transition between roles [soloists, collaborators, even adversaries] in an interplay of complex meters, open textures, improvisation, and virtuosity, mixing intricate structures and oscillations between order, fragmentation, severity, and grace. The goal here is an experience in which experts, enthusiasts, and newcomers share in the visceral dynamics of music-making, discerned across centuries and traditions. 

More music can be found here: tinyurl.com/db-intaglio