Work samples

  • The Quiet Sound of Making Beds

    James Young, composer
    Kelly Xio, poet
    Ah Young Hong, soprano

    This is a small, intimate song, and I appreciate you listening to it. The first part explores the sounds of the words and creates a library of gestures. The second contextualizes them. Throughout, the musical score slowly degrades, the staves lose their lines, until by the end, the soprano is only looking at words in contour.

    text - -

    When I go home Maman asks me to help her with little chores around the house that have not changed after all these years. You go through hell and there’s always worse but trash night is Wednesday and recycling’s on Friday. In 2013 I shattered a mirror and cut my fngers on the glass trying to catch it. I felt the wind kicked out of me as I sobbed “no more bad luck, please” and kowtowed to the Universe, my bloody hand gripping the fbers of beige rug. I found grace showing up on a doorstep and being asked to come in and make my bed.

  • Music Circus: Mind on Fire at the Enoch Pratt Free Library

    Clips from May 31, 2024 at the Pratt central library in Baltimore

    Mind on Fire filled the Enoch Pratt Free Library with over 30 musicians, visual artists, poets, dancers, and theater artists. It was a very good time.

    featuring.
    The Arm - Carly Bales - Taylor Boykins Gracie Carney - Allison Clendaniel - Ami Dang David Diongue - Liz Downing & Friends - Laure Drogoul Ruby Fulton - Orlando Johnson - Konjur Collective Troy Long - LaTeisha Melvin & The Ensemble Dance Jamal Moore - Heather Morrison - Bao Nguyen Ty Page - Stephanie Ray - Peter Redgrave Robin Rhodes - Khristian Weeks - Kelly Xio - Will Yager

    James Young ... executive director
    Jason Charney ... tech director
    Emre Yagci ... videography/editing
    Adan Rodriguez ... videography

    Allie Smith ... adult programs specialist
    Barnard Smit ... manager Best & Next

  • Shouting Gates

    composed by James Young in 2015
    performed by the TCNJ wind ensemble
    conducted by David Vickerman

    Shouting Gates is an experiment in mass indeterminacy combined with the propulsive frameworks of contemporary band music. Over the movement's restless 14 minutes, sonic structures lock into high-speed comets, hurtle into walls, break apart, and reform with new forward momentum. It is an angry, joyous yell of a piece. 

  • Opposer

    with Waco Mammoth
    James Young, bassoon
    Robin Rhodes, double bass

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About James

Baltimore City  

James Young is a texpat making music in Baltimore. He is a composer and improviser, administrator, educator, and show runner. “There is seemingly no limit to his intensity.” (I care if you Listen)

He has built, housed, or developed a number of musical projects and organizations. Of these, Mind on Fire (which Young directs) is the apotheosis of a decade’s worth of musical research and observation. Mind on Fire was founded in 2017 by a small contingent of classical and experimental… more

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Mind on Fire

Mind on Fire makes music by living composers and showcases the talents of performing artists, building creative access and collaborative partnerships in Baltimore.

Mind on Fire was founded in 2017 by a small contingent of classical and experimental musicians with a goal to bring new, contemporary classical music back to Baltimore. Mind on Fire takes notated music out of the conservatory and puts it into dialogue with the incredible, radical art ecology of the city. By pairing new classical work with local experimental artists (musicians, poets, dancers, filmmakers, and visual artists), it is our intention to engender a sense of community and camaraderie between a diverse group of art makers and the audiences who follow them.

In the following eight years of operation, we have produced 47 concerts featuring 125 separate performances presented to over 4,500 attendees. When institutional and independent artists work together, the commerce of ideas is often dynamic and surprising. What happens when disparate resources, sensibilities, and expertises are shared in the pursuit of art making? Mind on Fire seeks to answer that question by presenting exceptionally compelling art performances by people of all disciplines and skill levels.

I am the co-founder and executive director of Mind on Fire.

  • Music Circus: Mind on Fire at the Enoch Pratt Free Library

    Clips from May 31, 2024 at the Pratt central library in Baltimore

    Mind on Fire filled the Enoch Pratt Free Library with over 30 musicians, visual artists, poets, dancers, and theater artists. It was a very good time.

    featuring.
    The Arm - Carly Bales - Taylor Boykins Gracie Carney - Allison Clendaniel - Ami Dang David Diongue - Liz Downing & Friends - Laure Drogoul Ruby Fulton - Orlando Johnson - Konjur Collective Troy Long - LaTeisha Melvin & The Ensemble Dance Jamal Moore - Heather Morrison - Bao Nguyen Ty Page - Stephanie Ray - Peter Redgrave Robin Rhodes - Khristian Weeks - Kelly Xio - Will Yager

    James Young ... executive director
    Jason Charney ... tech director
    Emre Yagci ... videography/editing
    Adan Rodriguez ... videography

    Allie Smith ... adult programs specialist
    Barnard Smit ... manager Best & Next

  • Bashi Rose: Three Tone Destruction of Oppression

    composed by Bashi Rose (drums/poetry)
    premiered by Mind on Fire, September 2023 at Lovely Lane United Methodist Church

    Stephanie Ray and Dannielle Sturgeon, flutes
    James Young, conductor/bassoon
    Nicholas Cohen, contrabassoon
    Anastasia Kuptas, soprano sax
    Sarah Manley and Tim Dugan, trombones
    Gracie Carney and Ruby Fulton, violins
    Joelle Arnhold and Karin Kilper, violas
    Erin Snedecor and Bud Stracker, cellos

    Jason Charney, tech director/audio recoding
    Dezimond Fisher, videography

  • And We Each, scene XVI

    AND WE EACH, Act I, Scene XVI
    an opera by Michael Hersch after text by Shane McCrae
    presented by Mind on Fire

    premiered September 28, 2024 at the Baltimore Theatre Project

    Part of the world facing a row
    Of mumbling, kneeling corpses their
    Eyes open... From one oblivion to another
    From noise to all I saw... stumbled and
    Fell into him and the man fell
    First to his knees then forward onto
    His face without raising his arms to stop himself among the dead.
    I mistook the dead for the living and
    Afraid he might be hurt I crouched
    And rolled him over and spoke...

    "I didn’t call your name. I just said it out loud I just... it had become my name the moment you knelt I just wanted to hear it I wasn’t asking you to follow me.... when my name was taken I couldn’t rise to follow... How did you rise to follow me?"

    AND WE, EACH
    an opera in two acts

  • Foggy: Infinity Knives Live and Orchestrated

    from Mind on Fire's performance of the music of Infinity Knives

    October 2021 at the Voxel

    Tariq Ravelomanana ... composer
    Brian Ennals ... singer/MC

    Ty Page ... conductor
    James Young ... arranger/editor
    Jason Charney ... tech director/audio
    David Crandall ... lighting designer

    Tomi Faison ... videography
    Neve Jahn ... audio recording
    Matthew Sullivan ... mixing/mastering

    Stephanie Ray ... flute
    |Victoria Ritter ... oboe
    Jenny Tscheulin ... clarinet
    James Young ... bassoon
    Anastasia Kuptas ... sax
    Rafaela Dreisin ... trumpet
    Dan Pendley ... trombone
    Scott Miller ... tuba
    Shelly Purdy ... percussion
    Jeremy Lyons ... guitar
    Allison Clendaniel ... piano
    Anthony Shields ... violin
    Joelle Arnhold ... viola
    Bud Stracker ... cello
    Robin Rhodes ... double bass

    in memory of David Crandall

  • Brittany J. Greene: r_upTure

    Composed by Brittany J. Green
    Commissioned and premiered by Mind on Fire - July 8, 2021

    Danced by Ayan Felix
    Shot by Ivy Williams
    Edited by Jason Charney

    "r_upTure (2021) draws its musical material and text from a Python program by the same name. The Python program was designed to build a musical system that filters out non-common pitches between chords in a given progression. As the program runs, however, the system begins to rupture, adding in non-common pitches and chord extensions. Several resultant iterations of the program were used as source material and appear as layered strands throughout the piece. The text narrated throughout the piece is a recitation of the program's code.The rupturing of both the program and the piece draws from modes of resistence and rupture theorized in the works of Black Feminist theorist bell hooks, creating a sonic space that imagines how structures can be ruptured and redefined." - Brittany J. Green

  • Carlos Bandera: Spirare

    composed by Carlos Bandera

    performed by En Route on September 10, 2023 at 2640 Space

    Amir Nasseri, violin
    Kimia Hesabi, viola
    Erin Snedecor, cello

    Orlando Johnson, movement

    presented by Mind on Fire

  • Catherine Lamb: point/totality

    point/totality is slow music of deep resonance composed by Cat Lamb in 2014. Here it is performed by Owen Gardner and Jeremy Lyons in 2019 accompanied by Kevin Blackistone's projections. Please listen with headphones and increase the brightness of your screen to its maximum.

    @ the George Peabody Library, Baltimore, in association with 'In the Stacks' and us, 'Mind on Fire.

  • Nudie Suits: Cascadia

    composed by the Nudie Suits
    arranged by James Young

    performed May, 2017 at EMP Collective

    •

    • Music Composition

    Music is a manifold operation of instantaneous, complex communication, a method by which I explore issues of intimacy, physical energy, history, and accumulation. It is the single most powerful way for me to directly and honestly make contact with the world.

    I am a music composer and artistic director. The great majority of my work involves acoustic, orchestral instruments, whether I'm writing for them or bringing them together.

    As a composer, my music is often contrapuntally messy in the air and seeks expression through the limitations of breath, timbre, or spacetime. While engendering trust with musicians I work with, I ask them to push to the edge of their own ability. In this way, I’m searching for an intimate “hyper-idiom,” where the personal individuality of the performing artist comes to the surface, and their own unique virtuosity alights. In technique, my work explores sonic color and theatricality in the lineage of Gerard Grisey, Per Norgard, and Claude Vivier - through themes of obsession and absurdity, balancing between horror and catharsis.

    The composer Witold Lutoslawski said it this way: “I regard creative activity as a kind of soul-fishing, and the catch is the best medicine for loneliness, that most human of sufferings.”

    • The Quiet Sound of Making Beds

      James Young, composer
      Kelly Xio, poet
      Ah Young Hong, soprano

      This is a small, intimate song, and I appreciate you listening to it. The first part explores the sounds of the words and creates a library of gestures. The second contextualizes them. Throughout, the musical score slowly degrades, the staves lose their lines, until by the end, the soprano is only looking at words in contour.

      text - -

      When I go home Maman asks me to help her with little chores around the house that have not changed after all these years. You go through hell and there’s always worse but trash night is Wednesday and recycling’s on Friday. In 2013 I shattered a mirror and cut my fngers on the glass trying to catch it. I felt the wind kicked out of me as I sobbed “no more bad luck, please” and kowtowed to the Universe, my bloody hand gripping the fbers of beige rug. I found grace showing up on a doorstep and being asked to come in and make my bed.

    • Caliburn.mp3

      CALIBURN (2019 rev. 2021) is taken from poetry by Mike J. Maguire

      Allison Clendaniel sang it. Jenny Hughson, James Young, Ty Page, Sarah Manley, and Robin Rhodes played instruments on it in 2024.

      Recorded and mixed by Craig Bowen at Tempo House (in Baltimore)

      Embrace of fire.
      Grace captured in wire.

      The cut will desire and need. 
      The end will bleed,
      Will end the need.

      And desire
      Will cut the wire.

      In captured grace,
      Fire of embrace.

      - "Grace Gives Grace" from "Drawn Inward" by Mike J. Maguire

    • Dogs Dream of Ghosts (Suite)

      A suite from a video opera featuring bugs, ghosts, planes, water, bees, moons, suburbs, sounds, falls, woods, bricks, spies, ash, dogs...

      It is a surreal covid quarantine opera...

      Videos and compositions by James Young
      Sung by James Young and Allison Clendaniel

      Commissioned by the High Zero Foundation as part of Red Room in Your Room in 2020

    • Shouting Gates

      composed by James Young in 2015
      performed by the TCNJ wind ensemble
      conducted by David Vickerman

      Shouting Gates is an experiment in mass indeterminacy combined with the propulsive frameworks of contemporary band music. Over the movement's restless 14 minutes, sonic structures lock into high-speed comets, hurtle into walls, break apart, and reform with new forward momentum. It is an angry, joyous yell of a piece. 

    • Sunsetters

      Sunsetters is a collage composition from the album "We had to vanish for awhile."

      "We had to vanish for awhile" is a selection of songs originally compiled for a play about Charlotte Salomon. It is a work of collage - - alternative syntactics of classical music spanning about 150 years from 1820. 

      The play, titled "Life or Theater?," by Carly Bales ran for a month in 2018.

      The composers are generally Austrian, German, and French - taken in part by how much Salomon wrote about them and in part by how they were sequestered (in full or part) from the rising violent hegemony of the 1930s. They are - most likely - Franz Schubert, Gustaf Mahler, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Liszt, Arnold Schoenberg, and Georges Bizet.

      At least - this is what I think I remember.

    • True Fluorescent Skeleton: Mvt. 29 & 30

      Two climactic movements from an hour-long tenor sax solo James Young composed for Ty Page.
      29. Them.son
      30. Prot.arp

    • Hammer.mp3

      HAMMER SO MUCH IT CRACKS (2016) sets a Ballade by François Villon

      Lisa Perry sang it. Ken Thomson conducted it. Gina Izzo, Theodosia Roussos, Hila Zamir, Garrett Brown, Tyler Taylor, Allison Wright, Cole Bartels, Tom Sanderman, Ledah Finck, Maria Fiore, Nick Pauly, James Burch, Laura Nygren, Thomas Kotcheff, Eric Shuster, and Dylan Greene played instruments on it in 2016

      Recorded at MASS MOCA as part of Banglewood

    •

    • Performance

    I am an active improviser and bassoonist, and my work outside of composition leans towards embodiment. Whereas my compositional work is heavily planned and takes weeks or months to realize, my performance work is momentous and extremely enervating.

    I have two projects to which I devote the majority of my improvisational time.

    Mowder Oyal: a trio and at times quartet that combines free jazz, with experimental classical music, and dirty no wave punk.

    Waco Mammoth: a duo with me and Robin Rhodes - much more geared towards improvisation and natural acoustics.

    • Opposer

      with Waco Mammoth
      James Young, bassoon
      Robin Rhodes, double bass

    • Dollars and Cents

      with Mowder Oyal
      James Young on bassoon
      Adam Holofcener on guita
      Bashi Rose on drums

    • A chair in the center of the earth

      with Waco Mammoth
      James Young, bassoon

    • Imaginary

      with Mowder Oyal
      Bashi Rose on vocal and drums
      Adam Holofcener on guitar
      James Young on bassoon

    •