Piano Quartet No. 1

Like the punk-rock models, the symmetric structures and machinic inevitability of King Crimson’s music led me to consider in the possibility of forms which functioned outside of song-forms, and still informs much of the large scale temporal organization of my music. The work does not take the vernaculars of my youth and 'raise' them via my training in European art music nor does it, in an alternate but equally telos-driven construction, take the exsanguinated and rarefied traditions of classical music and reinvigorate then through the sublimation of ‘popular’ materials with their lauded freshness and directness. In my experiences, the separations of genres and styles are never as real as our stories about them might make us think. In music, there are not two things which can be placed on opposite ends of a table, no Pauli Exclusion Principle keeping musical fermions apart. Repertoire, parts of pieces, and pieces themselves interpenetrate and emerge from ways of being musical, from the patterns of doing which result in the sound and practice we call music. Music does not represent the varied influences of the composer; it is the music that re-combines and reterritorializes us, remaking us in its own image.”

Like the punk-rock models, the symmetric structures and machinic inevitability of King Crimson’s music led me to consider in the possibility of forms which functioned outside of song-forms, and still informs much of the large scale temporal organization of my music. The work does not take the vernaculars of my youth and 'raise' them via my training in European art music nor does it, in an alternate but equally telos-driven construction, take the exsanguinated and rarefied traditions of classical music and reinvigorate then through the sublimation of ‘popular’ materials with their lauded freshness and directness. In my experiences, the separations of genres and styles are never as real as our stories about them might make us think. In music, there are not two things which can be placed on opposite ends of a table, no Pauli Exclusion Principle keeping musical fermions apart. Repertoire, parts of pieces, and pieces themselves interpenetrate and emerge from ways of being musical, from the patterns of doing which result in the sound and practice we call music. Music does not represent the varied influences of the composer; it is the music that re-combines and reterritorializes us, remaking us in its own image.”