Fall 2023 Update - Moving, Works in Progress, and More

After spending many more years in graduate school than I ever intended to and then spending a year recovering from all of it I am finally moving into the post-student phase of my life. I’m incredibly nervous about what the future holds for me, but I’m simultaneously excited for the possibility of what is out there.

In just over a week I will be moving to St. Paul, Minnesota with my partner Ryan to get a fresh start in a part of the country where there is support for local artists and musicians in a way that hasn’t existed anywhere else that I’ve lived. So as I get ready to move and hunt for a job in the twin cities here are some updates on my upcoming composition projects.

Fall 2023 Projects

Let Him Kiss Me

First up is a piece for Baritone, Violin, Cello, and Piano titled Let Him Kiss Me. This piece is the final work that I had started during my time in grad school. I have a sketch of the piece and am working on getting that turned into a functional score. It was intended to be the first movement of my dissertation before I left my PhD and finishing it will be a really cathartic moment for me. The text is a new English translation of the Song of Songs that has been slightly modified. While I have no intention of finishing the full piece I planned for my dissertation this movement is still very special to me.

First page of the sketch for Let Him Kiss Me - (2021)

Clarinet Quartet - Title TBD

My next project is a piece for clarinet quartet that I am writing for the Miami Clarinet Quartet. I’m incredibly excited to collaborate with these players as they are a wonderful bunch of people who include my clarinet professor from my undergraduate. I don’t have a lot to say about this piece yet but I was working on it last night and it is shaping up to me a lot more optimistic in its sound world than I was expecting it to be. I decided against sketching out this piece’s structure and instead to let it develop organically based on my own sense of pacing and personal taste. I can’t wait to share it once it’s further along.

Concert Band Arrangement - One Against The Other

One Against the Other is a piece for solo piano that I wrote a few years ago that has never been performed. I always intended to turn expand it and turn it into a piece for concert band but just hadn’t had the energy or motivation to do so until recently. This one is purely a passion project as I have no ensemble or performers lined up yet. Despite that fact I’m very excited about the piece and think it’s going to be an absolute banger. I’m anticipating that it will be a brisk 6 minutes and it has a really in your face vibe to it that I’m loving. I think the biggest struggle that I’m going to have with getting an ensemble to program it is that the key signature is one that people frequently find tricky and might make the piece look more intimidating than it actually is. Once I finish the piece I’ll be shopping it around to conductors that I know as well as local ensembles in the twin cities and surrounding areas with the hope of a premiere sometime during the 2024-25 concert season. Keep your fingers crossed for me because there is absolutely no guarantee that I will be able to get this piece picked up.

First page of the original piano score to One Against the Other - (2018)

The work of being a composer

Beyond my upcoming projects there is a lot of foundation building that I am working on. I’m in the early stages of reworking this website to set the stage for my renewed efforts on my career as a composer. I’ll be updating the music section of the website to actually have a page for every piece that I am choosing to list and make scores easily available for purchase. It is really important to me that I am continuing to build my online presence and increase the ease with which people can find and access my music.

I’m in the early stages of making score videos for all of my pieces. This is a fairly laborious process because I no longer have access to the Dorico files for some of my pieces and for my older pieces I’m re-engraving them in Dorico in order to have a unified aesthetic for my scores. If you want to support that work you can go subscribe to my YouTube channel. I’m also in the early stages of working on a few different video projects to explore my process. Additionally I am workshopping a possible educational series of videos about composing, what it entails, where to begin, how somebody might start composing even if they don’t have much of a music background. Work on that series will begin in earnest after I’ve moved but it may or may not ever see the light of day.

Beyond those things I am regularly checking for various opportunities related to composing from Calls for Scores and Competitions to Grants and Residencies. While I absolutely despise the culture of competitions that exists in music I know that if I don’t participate in the system I’ve already lost that game. That being said I will not be sending pieces to just any competition. I will not pay entry fees for competitions or calls for scores except in rare situations as I am unwilling to engage in the more exploitative elements of the competition culture.

I’m going to try to do at least a weekly blog post but I make absolutely no promises. Keep doing your best out there. Remember you are enough and nobody should ever be able to tell you otherwise.