Performance videos from my time over the the summers of 2017-2019 guest directing the Les Petits Chanteurs children's and youth choir at Holy Trinity Music School, Port-au-Prince, Haiti. 

Physical Arrangement for String Quartet is a performance created by sculptor Sara Dittrich and composer Benjamin Buchanan. It offers a striking, thought-provoking presentation that brings into question the vessel of the performance space, and factors engrained in “concert music” recital traditions by placing musicians in strenuous/precarious positions throughout the concert hall. In writing the music, Buchanan plays the dual role of composer and choreographer by exaggerating each musician’s body in space and in relation to one another. Orchestrating the pairings of instruments, the shifts in musical textures, and physical approaches to idiomatic string techniques, this quartet becomes a ballet, providing their music for, and through, their own dance. The music for this performative dance of muscles and bows is structured in the form of the age-old “sonata-style.” Stylistically some might characterize it as postmodern due to it drawing from the sonic landscapes of the Classical era, the twentieth-century avant-garde, contemporary film scores, and electronic pop music, but as a whole it demonstrates one composer’s take on today’s avant-garde contemporary musical stylings. Taking the familiar into the realm of the absurd, the exaggerated forms in Physical Arrangement for String Quartet creates a playful and meditative atmosphere in which the norms of musical traditions are defied.