Portfolio
Devotions / 2022
violin, cello, & harmonium
commissioned by longleash (Pala Garcia, John Popham, & Julia Den Boer)
supported by New Music USA
link to score ︎
recorded by longleash, August 13, 2022 at The Loretto Motherhouse, Nerinx, Kentucky
In Devotions, I drew on a 13th motet, Ne m'a pas oublié, extracting 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
audio︎
Performed by Madison Greenstone, Anthony Vine, and The La Jolla Symphony Orchestra & Chorus, June 3, 2022 at The Good Samaritan Church, La Jolla, California
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.
Reliquary Grammar / 2025
album and short film
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)
Film by Max Levin
Created with the generous support of the Camargo Foundation.
I wrote the music to Reliquary Grammar in a two-story stucco studio in Cassis, a small port town in the Côte d'Azur. Inside, 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. 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. Later, the filmmaker Max Levin made a short film that followed the full album. He too used a personal archive—camcorder footage of a trip to Spain and Portugal, 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 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."