Portfolio
Associated Faculty (Lecturer) position in Music Composition
The Ohio State University
Devotions / 2022
violin, cello, & harmonium
commissioned by longleash (Pala Garcia, John Popham, & Julia Den Boer)
supported by New Music USA
audio (mvt. 2, 4, 5 - 11:33) ︎
score ︎
recorded by longleash, August 13, 2022 at The Loretto Motherhouse, Nerinx, Kentucky
Medieval motets are like little jewels, crystalline structures of multiple sung lines. Each carries several different texts, a mix of Latin and vernacular, sacred and secular. Love songs and pastoral odes are braided with liturgical chant, revealing the loving and libidinal side of worship. These texts are tangled in unabashedly beautiful harmonies, using tonal clashes and intricate hocketing to illuminate their narratives. All of this happens in just a minute or two. Like punk songs, motets are intense and fleeting. What binds these complex miniatures is the theme of devotion, the persistent and undying acts of love found in both amorous and sacred narratives of the Middle Ages.
Listening to Anonymous 4's album "Love's Illusion," a collection of 13th century motets from the Montpellier Codex, I found myself drawn to a particular two-part motet, Ne m'a pas oublié. I admired how the droning tenor line patiently cycled around a single tone, bobbing like a cork in water, and how its repetitive and mirrored phrases created a lulling effect. The top voice threaded through the tenor, smearing against it to create fleeting moments of shimmering harmonic friction, elevating and descending in gentle acrobatics, pulling us into the emotional drama of the text, a story of longing and heartbreak.
I decided to use the motet Ne m'a pas oublié as the source material for Devotions (2022), a commission from the piano trio Longleash. In Devotions, the motet acted as a reservoir from which I extracted little melodic strands, turns of phrases, and harmonic slices, fusing them with my own expressions and sensibilities. The motet and my own music had considerable overlap—lulling, narrowness, smearing, repetitiveness, and serenity. But what was new for me, yet native to the motet, was the assemblage of and engagement with historical musical materials. In medieval motets the bottom voice is borrowed from plainchant and often altered. In Ne m'a pas oublié, for instance, the Easter gradual Haec dies is excerpted into fragmented phrases which are structured anew to form the tenor line. I composed with a similar attitude, excavating and reworking snippets and contours of this motet to make my own music, borrowing with a very light touch, keeping the motet more in my peripheral vision, strewn on the floor, tacked to the wall, than "on the stand" in front of me. In the process, historical meanings and materials become renovated and warped, the voices becomes voiceless. Yet, a sense of singing remains in the phrasing, range, and expression. This sort of "inbetweenness"—here, between instrument and voice—is a hallmark of motets: they flicker between the divine and earthly, the eternal and now, the cantor and troubadour.
The Song of St. Bazetta / 2022
electric guitar, bass clarinet, and orchestra
commissioned by Steven Schick and The La Jolla Symphony Orchestra & Chorus and supported by the Thomas Nee Fund
audio (11:02) ︎
score ︎
performed by Madison Greenstone, Anthony Vine, and The La Jolla Symphony Orchestra & Chorus, June 3, 2022 at The Good Samaritan Church, La Jolla, California
The program note for The Song of St. Bazetta reads:
There is a place called Bazetta. The etymological origin of its name is unknown. Bazetta is unremarkable in terms of its topography—tracts of uncultivated land adjoin with manicured lawns and linoleum-sided split level homes—yet it has an undeniable mystical presence: “a land for seeking esoteric spiritual truths,” as one hagiographer notes. Eremites came there instinctually, following an “ultra-thin allure,” and lived in the chestnut trees. Concealed by foliage, the eremites could only be heard praying. Their devotions were always sung, like angelic choirs who are believed to sing eternally in the presence of God. As the early music practitioner Christopher Page notes, the devotional singing of the eremites and their contemporaries was “not the self-conscious and extroverted activity that we [today] associate with performing.” They sang to more fully embody the spiritual meanings of their recitations, litanies, and testimonies. But that is not to say their intonations were not carefully tended to, nor deeply aesthetic. “Potent devotion beckons sonorous ecstasy.”
Hagiographic texts tell of a prodigious eremite from the forests of Bazetta whose voice “could still the sublunary world.” Walking aimlessly through the groves of chestnut trees one night, a prelate of the area, who had been afflicted by an inexplicable, generalized uneasiness for many years, suddenly felt a peculiar humming course through him. “I heard a tone like that of roaring waters… of a seraphim’s wings,” he recounted, “and awoke the next morning in the duff and detritus cured of my malaise.” The healing of the prelate was the first of many miracles attributed to the hermit, who was canonized and given the toponymic name St. Bazetta.
“The Song of St. Bazetta” is a fantastical reimagining of the devotional singing of St. Bazetta and the eremites of the region. The musicians sound with one voice, ceaselessly, in alternating choirs. They dwell upon the natural resonances of their instruments, following the slow undulation of a liturgical tenor. Without words and adornments, all that remains in this song is the voice, vox prius facta (“the voice first made”), the sounds that form our every utterance.
I composed the music for The Song of St. Bazetta without any narrative, character, or scene in mind. The object of my attention was a motet from the Montpellier Codex, La Bele Estoile de Mer. Vague outlines of this thirteenth century music, its phraseology and chordal bits, were excavated and expanded into a revolving set of harmonic planes. A simple form situates them across time. Two voices, a clarinet and guitar, sing alone at the head of the orchestra. After some time, the strings, luminescent yet brittle, echo their call, followed by the brass and winds. Each mass of sound leaves as it entered, bringing the phrases back to where they started, the two voices. The orchestration relies mostly on the natural resonances of the instruments, like open strings, almglocken partials, and wind multiphonics, revealing the motet inside the "found" sound of the orchestra. Images of antiphonal choirs and liturgical ceremony emerged as the piece progressed. For me, it started to resemble a symphonic poem of sorts. Rather than retreating, I ran toward the unfashionable and mannered genre of programme music, the stuff of the 19th century and 19-year-olds, situating the music in a magico-fictional world imbued with my own life. Transposing Bazetta, the township in Ohio where I grew up, to the time of the Desert Fathers, and narrativizing with a dream logic, invited an antiquarian and mystical way of listening, an openness to enchantment. After the concerts, some wanted to know if St. Bazetta was real.
Reliquary Grammar / 2025
fixed media album / film soundtrack
created with the generous support of the Camargo Foundation
film (“inherent transition” - 1:56) ︎
audio (”all of november” - 3:41) ︎
(no score)
Performed and recorded by Mary Stephen (piano), Keir GoGwilt (violin), Catalina Alvarez (voice), Jack Langdon (organ), Kristopher Svensson (kacapi), David Lackner (saxophone), John Popham (cello), Anthony Vine (electric guitar, piano, harpsichord, field recordings)
I wrote the music to Reliquary Grammar in Cassis, a small port town in the Côte d'Azur. Clinging to the sea, down from softly ridged vineyards, I worked in a two-story stucco studio, cradled amongst ochre cliffs that burned bright in the sun. Inside, the walls were lined with red velvet, sourced from a defunct opera house. A vaulted ceiling of gritty pale bricks hovered over shelves of dusty LPs and tattered scores, bloated antique tables with dark benches, and a harpsichord inlaid with feathered script. At night, through the bay windows, a green luminescence shimmered in the bay windows from a lighthouse, the one from "To The Lighthouse," or so I was told.
Beckoned by the antique keyboards, I began embracing expressions of yesteryear, like baroque idioms, rustic plucking, and elegiac chanson, a music for the French parlor I found myself in. I recorded and collected my ephemeral musings at these instruments, improvisations and ideas with the raw energy of something coming into being, not quite finished or refined. I collected and preserved these moments alongside those from my time spent traveling to medieval churches. Footsteps moving across a cobblestoned nave, innocuous chant pumped through white cylindrical speakers, and bells reflecting along the passages of Arles sat alongside the sounds of Mediterranean birds, mistral winds, and foaming waves wafting through my studio windows. The archive was both historical and deeply personal, a home movie of sorts.
Much of the album was recorded on my phone. From this collection of voice memos, I began auditioning tracks against one another, finding forgotten moments, making unlikely pairings and harmonic alignments, and finally braiding them into cohesive tracks. In 'Translation,' for instance, a looping idea at the piano is counterpointed with flourishes of microphone feedback, air being blown across a snail's shell, and a poem, recalling a presentation by a team of four French translators. It was read and recorded by the filmmaker Catalina Alvarez when I returned to New York. Nearly every track was composed this way: snippets from France, dreamy and fragmented, were made more real, vivid, and full through contributions from friends at home, who shone new and indispensable light on my memories.
Another friend of mine, Max Levin, took this even further, making a short film that followed the full album. He too used an archive. On a trip to Spain and Portugal, Max took camcorder footage of nature, cities, and art happenings, following his friend Nat, a poet, who carried around a bag of avant-garde books and placed them in unlikely places. Pages flap in the middle of pyramidal medians, Fluxus periodicals are spread out in the sun, books are laid in circular patterns along a staircase. The fusion of our two travel logs was so perfect I renamed the album after Max's film, Reliquary Grammar, to mark their union. The film and album remind us that material records are mere glimpses of life's multiformity and sensuousness. We cling to them, gathering and cataloguing them restlessly, as Robert Darnton says, "if only for the possibility that traces of the soul can be found in boxes in the archives."
Fluorescent Standard / 2019
bass clarinet, electric guitar, and electronics
audio (excerpt 6:30) ︎
score ︎
Performed by Anthony Vine (electric guitar) & Gareth Davis (clarinet)
Mixed and mastered by Michael Hammond at Figure 8.
“On Fluorescent Standard, guitarist Anthony Vine and clarinetist Gareth Davis present two luminous and serene worlds of harmonic sound. The duo entwine sustained tones, glowing with the resonant hues of their instruments, into enveloping and expansive atmospheres. Clarinet sonorities, swelling guitar chords, and tumbling elegiac piano fragments drift quietly through time in elusive cycles that subtly change and expand with each return.
Every vibration is interconnected, aligned and fused attentively, causing the instruments to dissolve into themselves and emit residual vibratory energies, like fluorescence. What emerges is a music that invites quiet contemplation and rewards deep listening. While Vine and Davis met through the world of modern classical music, ‘Fluorescent Standard’ finds itself in the realms of drone, ambient, and new age.
The music is grounded in early minimalist aesthetics of composers like La Monte Young and Phill Niblock, but also shares the sensibilities of contemporary artists like Fennesz, Sarah Davachi, and Stars of the Lid.”
Terrasong / 2023
sound sculpture
eight clay vessels (made by Ajay Manthripragada) with microphone feedback played back on speakers and looped cassette tapes
audio (excerpt - 5:16) ︎
photo documentation ︎
The architect Ajay Manthripragada and I share an interest in architectural terracotta. When we met, Ajay was looking at roof tiles in Rome, using their coupled imbrex-tegula structure as a point of departure for new design possibilities. Soon, this thinking gave way to making. Ajay, a ceramist too, bought a wheel, sourced some clay, and began making his own terracotta forms. Long tables in his studio began to fill with objects with hybrid identities, some bearing markers of function, like handles, pockets, and basins, some resembling architectural forms, like tiles, oculi, and tunnels. None of the pieces were fired. Each was left to dry slowly and naturally, retaining their fragility and plasticity, residing somewhere between unformed and formed. The pieces seemed to be preliminary drawings without a specific end, as if the mobile of momentary forms rotating in Ajay's mind were being "printed" in mud. Like passing thoughts, Ajay's unfired pieces came and went. All of them were recycled and returned to clay at the end of the year.
My interest in terracotta was sonorous. I was looking at resonant vessels used to shape the acoustics of churches in the Middle Ages. What drew me to these "acoustic pots" was the ambidextrous nature of ceramics, something Ajay was exploring not only in roof tiles and at the wheel, but also in several building projects. But unlike these more utilitarian uses, medieval acoustic pots seemed to refer back to age-old beliefs in clay, a magical substance, elemental and mystical, the source of creation myths and early acts of alchemy.
Ajay and I decided to mold our respective interests into one, building terracotta forms that would sing. The basic idea was to create hollow enclosures from clay and excavate their natural resonance through a simple feedback system using a microphone and small speaker. When a microphone begins to pick up its own sound from the speaker, a loop is created within the system, multiplying and growing louder, oscillating at a particular set of frequencies. The howling sound of feedback is determined, in part, by the resonant frequencies of the surrounding space. Routing a microphone to a small Bluetooth speaker inside Ajay's clay vessels, we created feedback that made their dimensions and materials audible, revealing their inner voices. The feedback could be subtly shaped by moving the microphone in and around their openings, revealing harmonic shades and metallic flourishes. What appears to be an unruly medium, just like clay, can be controlled and shaped into beautiful forms when carefully tended to.
The hollow vessels Ajay made were spare cylindrical forms. Each was varied with a sort of serial logic, recombinations of a reduced set of parameters—pointed, rounded, broad, narrow, short, tall. Their openings were positioned at their bottoms so that what sounded from speakers inside of them was filtered through the clay. Feedback sounds from each vessel were recorded onto magnetic tape, another physical and pliant material, and played back inside the very same vessels. But what sounded did not re-resonate in quite the same way from day to day. Ajay's unfired clay was changing, drying and shrinking, imprinted with fingerprints and dented from moving. The sound began to change too. The fragile strips of tape spun along the wheels of the looped cassettes broke as they played for long periods of time, unraveling and tangling in the heads of the tape machines. During the public presentation of the work, the cassettes, one by one, fell apart, leaving only the gentle breathing of tape machine noise to sound within the clay forms. The sound sculpture had circled back to its source of inspiration, the "acoustic pots" of the Middle Ages, becoming resistant to sound, falling silent.