This piece supposes that there is a way to unravel a sound that reveals its knotted components. The sounds of Matthew Levy’s saxophone are here teased apart and dealt with individually, like the intrusion of overtones upon a soft subtone note in the instrument’s lowest register, or the noisy breath artifacts that become harmonized by the instrument’s air column. Saxophone sounds and synthetic sounds are layered against copies of themselves at extremely short intervals to amplify the “imperfections” in a sound that actually constitute their essences. These imperfections might give rise to shivering, quick pulses, or distortions that ring like two ceramic pots being rubbed together. Something that I imagine to be responsible for tethering the saxophone’s sound together is fraying and showing itself to you.

12.12.2018 Matthew Levy, University of Pennsylvania

Flickers of melody and color compete for attention, overtake each other, shatter into pieces, and eventually reassemble over a pedal D in the cello: perhaps like a few breaths or exhalations over that single note. An occupation with the point at which timbral transformation becomes melody—where crossfading sonorities and slowly climbing harmonics create their own kind of counterpoint—animates the gestures and harmonic motion through to the very last moment.

01.23.2018 Daedalus Quartet, Philadelphia
11.02.2017 Daedalus Quartet, University of Pennsylvania

A still convergence is followed by an animated divergence. The two-part gesture repeats in like fashion, only with the convergence adopting the animation of the divergence and the divergence adopting further textural and timbral features. Tachygenesis is a phenomenon in developmental biology whereby already-established features (such as an organ) suddenly appear much earlier during maturation, often crowding out or abbreviating the development that used to take place there, thus creating room for new traits to appear in the newly-vacated developmental space. Even on a first hearing, I would hope that with each iteration of the two-part gesture, there is an audible sense of the convergence acquiring features of the divergence, in this way opening up ever more developmental space.

03.18.2016 PRISM Quartet, University of Pennsylvania

This piece employs an excerpt from a fragmentary and evocative novel written entirely in the first person by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector entitled Água Viva (often referred to in English as “Live Water”). The excerpt makes repeated attempts to state an intensely felt desire. I was drawn to this passage for the way it turns on a dime from the most abstract psychology to the most concrete details of personal history. Each sentence signals a unique intent or mood, and yet they all drive at the same urgent desire, albeit one difficult to state with precision.

Stating that desire with absolute clarity might actually defeat the point of summoning each of these moods. Instead, with this music I’m trying to draw out the urgency of what is being confessed with each new sentence, each new attempt to get closer to the singer’s meaning. The words are sometimes torn apart in the voice or fragmented or echoed in the instruments so that the struggle evident in the written word is also evident in the sung word. Other times they are treated as plainly and directly as they function on the page. Throughout, the musical treatment suggests a way for these conflicting registers to join the same fundamental expression.

01.13.2017 TAK Ensemble, i/o New Music Festival (Williams College)

06.29.2016 Sound of Late, Oregon Bach Festival Composers Symposium

In 2015 Volkswagen was caught fitting their vehicles with “defeat devices” in order to evade emissions tests. One email to engineers as litigation approached revealed an executive desperate for any plausible explanation for what was still taking place:
“Come up with the story, please!”

At the outset, a simple process of insertions quickly defeats the sense of upbeat and downbeat. Throughout the piece I’m interested in developing these mechanically interlocking materials so that they “target” other elements of the music for “defeat.” I’m also interested in having these mechanical materials accrue lyricism in the way their elements assemble in new configurations. I want these mechanical materials to be entangled, desperately trying to come up with the story.

03.31.2017 Sound Out Loud, Midwest Graduate Music Consortium
11.16.2016 Bearthoven, University of Pennsylvania

Piano Stretch takes the sharply different soundworlds of inside-the-piano harmonics and spacious, resonant chords on the keyboard and considers them together. Some harmonics sound just as discrete as the notes played on the keys; some chords on the keys sound just as microtonal as the complex harmonics found inside the piano. The pianist must stretch to reach everything, and in some sense the piano itself must stretch as well.

06.05.2017 Eric Huebner, June in Buffalo
03.30.2016 Karl Larson, University of Pennsylvania

07.04.2014 Duo Damiana (Molly Barth, flute; Dieter Hennings, guitar), Oregon Bach Festival Composers Symposium

11.05.2013 University of Oregon Chamber Orchestra

I started work on this piece after encountering the fifth movement of Hans Otte’s Das Buch der Klange (The Book of Sounds), an hour-long suite for solo piano. I first heard the movement in Jean-Luc Godard’s 2004 film Notre Musique, where it was presented as the sole audio for the film’s brief first act, a catalogue of images of war and suffering without commentary. What was arresting about the music was its harmonic palette—of a kind with Messiaen’s, yet flirting with jazz—and its expression within an unrelenting ostinato. I began imagining the possibilities of a music that would likewise deploy dense, dissonant, yet still distantly familiar harmonies within a heavily rhythmic framework.

The title mixes two metaphors found in Wagner’s prose on overture form: referring to a closed ending he composed for Gluck’s overture to Iphegenia in Aulis, Wagner claimed that he brought the main themes to an armistice, “though no full peace,” and referring to Mozart’s overture to Don Giovanni, he lauded its “transfiguring light of music as a passion personified in tones.”

04.15.2011 Berkshire Symphony