"Mountain Piques" is a composition I wrote for the Pique Collective, a Baltimore-based contemporary music ensemble. It was premiered on October 18, 2018 at the Black Cherry Puppet Theatre, who crafted abstract shapes and choreographed their movement to the music.

The work is a quartet for three acoustic instruments (guitar, flute, and cello) and a fourth musician who, using a laptop computer's trackpad, controls a range of sounds just like a normal instrument.

"Mountain Piques" embraces many classical music archetypes. Before electronics, composers used the flute’s flutter, the cello’s warmth, and the guitar’s intimacy to convey imagery of nature. I add a psychedelic quality to the work's pastoralism with audio samples of birds, frogs, and ambience. Like much classical music, the piece also explores rhythmic complexity, polyphony, and uses four contrasting movements as an expressive canvass.

The slow first movement, "The Rainforest," ends with the metaphor of a ticking clock. "Bursting at the Brim," the title of the second, scherzo-like movement, comes from a line from “Ode to a Nightingale,” by John Keats. Electronics this time bring in the sounds of birds, again creating a musical metaphor.

"The Heaven of Animals" and "Waterfall" are longer and more experimental. In these movements, sounds of the forest become erie, with undulating pitched rhythms, and an aggressive electronic part. These movements also contain virtuosic solos in the cello, guitar and flute parts. One section features a drum with the flute, guitar, and cello perform much like their ancestor instruments from the Middle Ages. While the flute is normally considered a high pitched instrument, the third movement uses an alto flute to explore a darker, more melancholy side to the flute.

This project took about a year to complete. I spent seven months writing it, and the Pique Collective spent an additional four months learning to play it. The Pique Collective, whose vision is to bring new music to alternative venues, reached out to Black Cherry Puppet Theatre to create visuals for the piece. Puppeteers Michael Lamason, Jeanine Padgett, Emily Schubert, and Alissa Glenn crafted large, abstract shapes and choreographed them to the music.

In my longest piece to date, "Pluto," I wanted to create as much sound from as little means as possible, ideally to be performed in an intimate space like a parlor. It's written for just one clarinet, and one person operating electronics.

Playing into a microphone, the clarinet interacts with live electronics to create a one-person orchestra. With techniques such as looping, delay, pitch shift, ring modulation, and aliasing, the clarinet creates a living surreal electroacoustic environment symbolizing interstellar space.

The piece could bring expansiveness and a sense of wonder to a small, intimate venue or hall, a blackbox, a warehouse space, a reverberant church, or a planetarium. The piece’s difficulty varies, but the third movement, “Planet Heart,” was written to be simple enough that a high school performer could play it in their garage.

I also wanted this piece to have an educational element to it that appeals to children. I was exposed to classical music at a very young age, and had a boyhood love for outer space. Children are far less likely to make value judgements about the way music sounds, and just use their imagination to enhance the experience. In addition to performing this piece at college venues, clarinettist Andrew Im and I reached out to community organizations to make music more accessible. We ended up performing at two churches in Vermont and New Jersey.

“Gravity,” the longest and final movement, won third place in the Peabody Prix d’Eté.

In addition to "Mountain Piques," featured the first project in my portfolio, I've written a number of other pieces for small ensemble.

My personal favorite of these is "Lake Pontchartrain," for string sextet. It captures the stillness of the lake, its cloudy days, and its surrounding bayous, combining it with emotions of sadness, longing, and nostalgia.

"Escape," for bassoon quartet, has been performed in New York, Maryland, Tennessee, and Spain. It's overall a bleak piece; the dark registers of the bassoons and a hulking contrabassoon solo are mixed with arcs of wailing and quarter tones. "Endurance" is a piece I wrote for flute, clarinet, cello, violin, and piano, and has a more rhythmic quality.

I wrote "Enkidu" for solo saxophone and live electronics. This seventeen minute long work, like "Pluto," uses live electronics to expand the saxophone's capabilities. It is in three movements without break, and was performed at the Electroacoustic Barndance in Jacksonville, Florida.

I wrote "Kings Highway / Stillwell Ave." for piano in 2007 after living in New York City for a year and a half. I had essentially failed at my first job. Luckily I found a new one in Virginia, but the process of moving out was extremely cathartic. New York had been my home.

The last night I spent in my Queens apartment was nightmarish. Heat radiators were going off, water was dripping from a faucet, and I heard sounds in my own head. I was also hyper-aware of the sounds I heard when I walked out of my last day at work. The relief of never having to return quieted my mind enough to hear the sounds of New York's traffic and children laughing.

After composing it and performing it at the Church of the Holy City in Washington, DC, Vin Grabill created a video to accompany it from hundreds of photos I took in New York. The video was featured at the Rosebud Film Festival.

I sometimes perform under the stage name Sir Microtonal. It is my way of personally connecting with the audience. I play an apparatus of synthesizers, MIDI controllers, and computers. Many of these songs are short, loud, experimental, and written to be performed at underground venues.

Baltimore has a scene for people who crave new, interesting music. I've performed my solo work at Reverb, Bloom Bars, and a number of venues around the country. These works explore freedom of form, timbral variety, and lyricism in a way that's neither classical nor pop.

This song cycle is part of a larger set of songs that address issues the working poor deal with in the present United States. Although the US remains the richest country in the world, it faces an ever growing segment of impoverished citizens as income inequality gets worse. "Songs of the Working Poor" borrows ideas from cabaret, jazz, folk, country, Caribbean music, indigenous music, and spirituals to give these sinister texts an American flavor.

So far, I've completed and orchestrated three songs for soprano and large ensemble, and am working on three more songs for tenor. I wrote the lyrics, many of which were inspired by personal life experiences from teaching for a year at a prison, and teaching math for seven years in schools with large percentages of children from underprivileged families. I've also taken on jobs in the service sector to make ends meet.

Each of the songs for female voice borrows from an American genre: cabaret, swing jazz, and folk music. The first song, "My Biggest Mistake," is based on a conversation with a Baltimore mother had to work so hard to provide her son with the basic necessities that she regretted even having a him. The second song, "Seasonal Affective Disorder," hits straight at America’s present opioid epidemic. It notes some of the causes: doctors overprescribing medicine, depression, alcoholism, isolation, bleak winters, and the decay of cities and towns. A third song, "Wabash," mourns the death of a loved one while portraying American landscapes. Themes in Wabash are reminiscent of both “Oh Shenandoah.”

The second set, for tenor, piano, and bass, addresses men's issues. One song is told from the perspective of a prison inmate who is forced to make undergarments for Victoria's Secret. In another song, the singer mourns the separation between him and his four-year-old daughter. A final song, the singer regrets a bad decision he made in a fit of rage, later reflecting that he doesn't feel capable expression other than anger. Unlike the soprano songs, set for a larger ensemble and based on popular musical genres, the tenor songs are more quiet and introspective.

This project is in its early stages. These songs are currently being considered by several ensembles looking for new music to perform. I hope to write up to twenty Songs of the Working Poor, and possibly develop them into an opera.

Early on in my composition career, I became hypnotized by the sound of vibrating piano strings. Most people distinguish a piano's sound by its attack. One day while I was experimenting, I recorded myself playing a note on the piano, and then edited out the attack so only the decaying string vibrations could be heard. I began building entire pieces by splicing together hundreds of recordings of piano strings, like a mosaic.

"Un Jardin" is a work for fixed media in three movements, which Vin Grabill later set to visuals. It has an extremely angelic tone, beginning with a repeating, warbly, hymnlike chord progression, and leading to an overwhelming climax. "Ceres," the second movement, is simply a cluster of every piano key at the same time. The lightness of the piano sounds turns the dissonance into a shimmering texture, highlighting some keys more than others to create melodies inherently connected with sound.

I continued experimenting with recordings of piano strings in "Pranayama," which sparsely features samples of synthesizer and my own voice to add a tinge of color to the piano sounds. "After the Storms," incorporates the sounds of electric guitar, handbells, windchimes, buzzing home appliances, and computer synthesis. It begain as a dance piece choreographed by Danielle Greene and performed at the Boyer College of Music and Dance at Temple University, also heavily uses piano string recordings. Later Vin Grabill made it into a video piece.

These three pieces have been featured at a variety of venues. "After the Storms" was presented at the SEAMUS conference, and "Pranayama" was presented at the International Computer Music Conference. They've also been shown at the Church of the Holy City in DC, the Vitruvian Gallery in DC, the Tin Roof Brewery in Baton Rouge, and broadcasted on WTJU.