On Love was written for the 2011 wedding of two former students: Nick Cherone and Shannon Smith. The text—an excerpt from Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Song”—was chosen by the bride and groom, and given the circumstances of the work’s premiere, I felt compelled to set it in a relatively straightforward fashion.  On Love is thus entirely modal (in E Aeolian), featuring only a single chromatic alteration (D-sharp) near the end.  The text has an obsessive quality to it that I have tried to project by means of a repeating, though increasingly embellished, trochaic rhythm in the piano.  On top of this simple ostinato, the soprano intones the text in a fluid, non-metrical rhythm that is vaguely reminiscent of Medieval plainchant.

For nearly twenty years prior to the completion of this piece, I had wanted to write a collection of eccentric—and wholly fictitious—dances. Unfortunately, every time that I would set out to do so, my musical material would push me in another direction, forcing me to return the original dance suite concept to my compositional back burner. In the early stages of my work on Apocryphal Dances, I feared that this would happen once again, but as the central idea of the first movement began to take shape in my mind, I excitedly realized that it was, in fact, well-suited to the demands of dance music (or, at the very least, the demands of dance music as I conceive of it). Thus, this set represents the long-overdue realization of a concept that has been gestating in my brain for nearly two decades.

The dances themselves are—in accordance with my initial plan—completely spurious (or apocryphal, in the more general sense of the term) and deliberately quirky. As such, they may appear to be somewhat at odds with traditional notions of dance music. The two main features that each of these dances share in common with more conventional (that is to say, legitimate) styles of dance music are: 1) a tangible rhythmic drive, and 2) a heavy reliance upon repetition. Of course, whether or not these pieces actually could be, or even should be, danced to is quite another matter. I must confess that I had absolutely no choreography in mind when I composed them, and any putative sequence of steps would need to be highly complex, as all four dances are metrically irregular and rhythmically unpredictable. In a certain sense, then, these pieces are only dances in name, although I suppose that some brave soul could conceivably fashion bodily movements to suit them.

Like the dances themselves, the titles of the individual pieces are simply the products of my imagination. They were chosen solely based on their sound and visual appeal, and, with the exception of the Sesquilinear Tango (which is, in fact, based on the characteristic rhythms of the tango), have no connection to actual persons, places, or events. Nevertheless, experience has taught me that listeners have a far easier time dealing with strange and unfamiliar music when it is linked to some specific visual or conceptual element, and so I have concocted the following (purely bogus) historical and technical explanations of the dances in order to help you navigate their assorted idiosyncrasies:

Yxoi Eth Drazhim is an austere and highly-formalized ritual dance for three unmarried women that is believed to have originated in 13th-century Borneo. Its name, which is a uniquely-rendered combination of Hindi and Old East Slavic terms, has no direct equivalent in English, but can be roughly translated as "the inner-force of the iron spike causes the steam to swirl in flower-like patterns." The dance itself is relatively slow-moving and requires each of the women to traverse a separate rhombus in a cyclic 31-step pattern. Although all three women follow the same sequence of steps, one of them, referred to as the oorta, always moves at two-thirds the speed of the others.

The Parakeet Coil is a rustic celebratory dance popularized by a small, far-eastern tribe of the ancient Jutes known as the Vuctae. Its evocative title refers to the fact that it was normally performed by a large group of adult male warriors in a spiral-like shape with their arms locked, and that it was only presented on rare occasions when a meal of parakeet meat (which was considered a highly-valuable delicacy by the Jutes) was served. The music itself is notable for its inclusion of brash feena calls (a feena is a kind of primitive hunting horn made from elephant tusks and caribou antlers), Viking war zithers, and Peranthian reed pipes.

The extraordinary Sesquilinear Tango was originally thought to have been discovered on a copper tablet by German mathematician and amateur archeologist Rudolf Menling during a 1928 expedition to Uruguay. In 1931, however, Swiss philosopher Ens Gobet revealed that Menling was, in truth, a fictional character that had been constructed and employed as a literary alter-ego by French mathematician Anatole Sordoin, who had stumbled upon the tango while vacationing in Buenos Aires. Sordoin referred to the dance as "sesquilinear" because he was convinced that its internal structure, when rendered as a complex vector space, closely resembled an antisymmetric sesquilinear form (or so-called skew-Hermitian form). From a listening standpoint, the most distinctive feature of Sesquilinear Tango is the fact that each iteration of its characteristic tango ostinato is anywhere from one-third of a beat to one-and-two-thirds of a beat too long, creating a repeated and highly-prominent "hitch" in the step sequence.

Churghin Taqma (the title of which has no known translation) was introduced to the Ottoman Empire by Japanese Muslims traveling through the Balkans in the early 15th century. It is a highly-aggressive and physical hunting dance that includes a repeating 27-beat sequence of irregularly-spaced steps. Near the end of the dance, the kima-oi-nithaq (a large ceremonial drum) is used to work the dancers into a frenzy, after which they are expected to fall to the ground in feigned (or perhaps real) exhaustion.

Apocryphal Dances was composed for—and is dedicated to—Kathleen Kastner and the Wheaton College Percussion Ensemble.

Over the past 100 years or so, the claim has occasionally been made by both composers and music commentators that the symphony is an obsolete—or dead, to put it in even starker terms—genre. This point of view perplexed me during my early college years, since at that time I conceived of a symphony as nothing more than a multi-movement composition for a large instrumental ensemble, and works of that kind are obviously alive and well in the modern repertory. Eventually I became aware of the additional structural and semantic baggage that the symphony carried with it (such as its customary four-movement organization, fast-slow-fast-fast tempo scheme, reliance on sonata form, tonal conflict, thematic development, and so forth), and  I began to understand why it might be ill-suited for modern forms of musical expression. Though my confusion over the issue was temporarily abated, I still found myself wondering if my earlier, more general notion of the symphony was entirely inappropriate. After all, more than a few twentieth- and twenty-first-century composers have written so-called symphonies that seem to observe very few, if any, of the conventions mentioned above. As I also discovered, the term "symphony" is derived from an ancient Greek word that simply means "sounding together," and during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Latin and Italian forms of that term ("symphonia" and "sinfonia," respectively) were applied to a wide variety of composition types, including motets, sonatas, concertos, and operatic overtures. If the accepted musical meaning of the term (insofar as such a thing existed) could change during earlier periods, I thought, why couldn't it continue to change in more recent times? Must the early nineteenth-century conception of the symphony remain its only valid characterization? 

My own first attempt at a symphony, Quasi Sinfonia, draws upon a number of different approaches to the genre. Although I retained the four-movement format and tempo scheme of the Classical symphony, the proportions of the movements are the exact opposite of what one would expect to find in such a work. The first and last movements, which are generally the most substantial, are here made to be the shortest and least thematically-oriented (in fact, the first movement has no melody at all), and the third movement, which is often the shortest and least profound of the sections in a Classical symphony, is now transformed into a large theme and variations set. My chosen instrumentation for Quasi Sinfonia departs even further from the symphonic norm. While three out of the four sections of a typical symphony orchestra (woodwinds, percussion, and strings) are represented within the 16-player ensemble, the relative sizes and internal compositions of those groups are somewhat idiosyncratic. The woodwind section is made up of a flutist (who only plays alto flute and piccolo), an oboist (doubling on English horn), a clarinetist (doubling on bass clarinet), a saxophonist (who plays soprano and baritone saxophones), and a contrabassoonist, all of whom double on various "non-traditional" instruments, such as melodica (a blown, free-reed instrument that is operated by means of a keyboard), chromatic pitch pipe, kazoo, slide whistle, and tin whistle. The three percussionists play an array of unusual instruments, including assorted hunting calls, harmonicas, a slide whistle, Thai button gongs, tuned wine glasses and glass bowls, a toy piano, bowed flex-a-tones, and a microtonally-tuned mandolin. Also included in the ensemble are a partially-prepared piano (41 sets of its strings have vinyl machine screws placed between them), an out-of-tune autoharp (played by the second violist), and four sets of large metal wind chimes (played by the upper strings).

From a thematic standpoint, Quasi Sinfonia is relatively straightforward. It features two central melodies, both of which are modal and stylistically indebted to plainchant. The first of these—a sinuous line that oscillates between the Aeolian and Phrygian modes—is first heard at the opening of the second movement. The other theme, which initially appears midway through the second movement and serves as the subject for the variations in the third movement, is an old shape-note hymn entitled King of Peace. This short tune was originally published in the 1835 Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, a collection of shape-note hymns and anthems compiled by William Walker. My decision to use King of Peace as one of my primary themes hinged on a number of different factors. I was originally attracted to the austere, medieval quality of shape-note hymns, with their hollow fifths and octaves (not to mention the peculiar, non-tempered tuning in which they are typically sung), and I was intrigued by the fact that such ancient-sounding music had been produced in the United States by Protestant Christians, a group with whom I personally identify. Using this hymn allowed me to reference both my cultural background (as an American composer) and spiritual affiliation (as an evangelical Christian) while exploring a melodic and harmonic style that was of interest to me. I also chose this theme because of its rhythmic organization. The galloping, trochaic rhythm of the hymn is heard throughout Quasi Sinfonia in various guises, often pitted against itself at different speeds, and its triple meter feel provides a subtle allusion to the traditional 3/4 patterning of a Classical symphony’s third movement.

Provided below is a brief synopsis of Quasi Sinfonia's four continuous movements:

I. Allarmi — The work's aggressive and ominous opening is intended to evoke the sounds of warning signals. Three successive groups of alarms are presented, each one considerably lower in register than the last, simulating a highly-exaggerated Doppler effect. The central portion of the movement is made up of elaborate interlocking rhythmic patterns in the pitch pipe, harmonica, and prepared piano parts, suggesting the inner-workings of a giant machine. Eventually, the warning signals return, though now seemingly in the distance.

II. Ritual — The slow, meditative second movement introduces the symphony's two main themes in a mysterious, ethereal soundscape replete with drones and repeating motivic patterns. Many of the ensemble's "standard" instruments, such as the alto flute, piccolo, clarinet, oboe, and English horn, are heard for the first time in this movement, producing colors reminiscent of a traditional orchestra.

III. Tema con variazioni — King of Peace is used as the basis for a set of eight large variations. Though the character of these transformations ranges from the exotic to the propulsive to the grotesque, all of them maintain a relatively fast pace. During the final four variations, the main theme from the second movement begins to resurface and gradually merge together with the shape-note hymn, forging a new, more elaborate melodic contour. The final variation is comprised of several shorter transformations and draws upon many of the ideas heard earlier in the work.

IV. Allarmi e campane — The symphony's shortest movement serves simultaneously as a coda, a ninth variation on King of Peace, and a return of the opening material. The alarms, though still somewhat foreboding, now give way to the exuberant ringing of church bells, as though the listener has finally emerged into the light of day.          

The Serpentine Harp, for solo harpsichord, was written in 2007 for Daniel Paul Horn, chair of the keyboard department at Wheaton College. I originally envisioned the work as a kind of peculiar folk music from an imaginary (and rather exotic) non-Western culture, played on an elaborately contorted, harp-like instrument. While harpsichord is about as Western a musical artifact as one could imagine and is decidedly un-harp-like in its playing technique, the fact that its strings are plucked (and easily retuned—see below) suggested that it would make a suitable substitute for my fictional instrument.

At the very center of my concept for this piece was a desire to compose in a tuning system far removed from the familiar equal temperament of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western art music. The system that I adopted for The Serpentine Harp, called 1/2-comma meantone temperament, resembles equal temperament only insofar as it divides each octave into twelve half steps. In 1/2-comma meantone, however, these half steps are nowhere near equal in their spacing. Instead, seven out of the twelve half steps are expanded to almost one and a half times the size of equal-tempered semitones, and the remaining five are reduced to less than one half the size of equal-tempered semitones. The results of these changes are both radical and immediately striking: the chromatic scale is so grossly uneven that it is barely recognizable as such; familiar diatonic scales such as major and minor are severely distorted, giving them a curiously alien quality; and many of the intervals in the tuning fall directly in between the sizes of those found in standard equal temperament. All of this combines to lend a strange, foreign quality to the work, allowing me to circumvent many of the age-old scalar and harmonic structures of Western music.

The Serpentine Harp unfolds gradually and freely, in the manner of an extended improvisation, and features subtly graded changes in both range and rhythmic intensity as it steadily approaches and retreats from its two wildly-active climaxes. The bulk of the melodic material is derived from a small number of short, recurring motives (the most important of which is heard at the work's opening), and the sinuous, twisting nature of the work's melodic lines is part of the inspiration behind its title. Harmonically, the most distinctive feature of The Serpentine Harp is its use of chords that include one or more of the tuning’s small half steps, which creates an audible "beating" (a vibrato-like shimmer) between the notes.

Diclavis Enorma, for keyboard player and CD, was composed in 2007 for the senior piano recital of Timothy Smile, one of my former students. The work's title is an invented combination of two obscure Medieval Latin terms—"diclavis," which refers (at least as far as scholars can tell) to a keyboard instrument that has a full complement of chromatic pitches, and "clavis enorma," which designates a special quarter-tone key on a keyboard instrument (sometimes also called a "clavis enharmoniaca"). This phrase was chosen—or created, as it were—because it evokes certain ideas that are directly relevant to my conception of the work as a whole. To begin with, the title looks to me as though it should mean something along the lines of "enormous double keyboard" or "two giant keyboards." Though both of these translations are incorrect, they are nonetheless relevant to the structure of the piece, since I conceive of it as a kind of abstract discourse between two extended "super keyboards." The first of these "keyboards," which is played by the live performer, is made up of a standard piano, a pair of chromatic toy pianos, and a set of eleven microtonally tuned call bells (the kind that you would find next to a "ring bell for service" sign). The second "keyboard," which is heard on the CD part, is even more expansive, featuring a piano with 24 pitches to the octave, multiple toy pianos, and a full set of call bells. It is to this particular part that the title alludes when it references a "clavis enorma" (i.e., quarter-tone key). The fact that the CD part features a 24-tone piano also gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "a full complement of chromatic pitches."

Diclavis Enorma is comprised of three continuous movements, each of which explores a different set of timbral, rhythmic, textural, and harmonic interactions between the two keyboard parts. The first movement, Motus Perpetuus (Perpetual Motion), is a machine-like, though rhythmically irregular, toccata that highlights the jangling tone colors and characteristically imprecise tunings of the toy pianos. Though rigorously synchronized, the two keyboard parts often move at different speeds throughout this movement. Musica Ornata (Florid Music) features elaborately ornamented melodic lines interweaving in a dense harmonic tapestry. It is during this section that the quarter-tone piano makes its first appearance, transforming the exotic, modal flourishes of the movement's opening into a tightly-packed, chromatic web. At a number of points in Musica Ornata, the two parts move independently of each other, creating a free, non-metrical rhythmic counterpoint. The third movement, Passacaglia, is a set of highly chromatic (actually, micro-chromatic) variations over a repeating harmonic pattern. As the section progresses, material from the preceding movements begins to reappear, gradually transforming the passacaglia into a large-scale recapitulation. Synchronization between the two parts is especially precise in this movement, involving as it does various interlocking patterns and unison rhythms.

Speaking in Tongues was conceived as a kind of exotic and mysterious ritual – a prayer of worship to Christ that is at times beautiful and austere, and at other times puzzling or even unnerving. The original inspiration was taken from the Apostle Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, in which he writes:

Anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God. Indeed, no one understands him; he utters mysteries with his spirit . . . If you are praising God with your spirit, how can one who finds himself among those who do not understand say "Amen" to your thanksgiving, since he does not know what you are saying? You may be giving thanks well enough, but the other man is not edified . . . So if the whole church comes together and everyone speaks in tongues, and some who do not understand or some unbelievers come in, will they not say that you are out of your mind?

The idea that an angelic or divine language, capable of expressing ideas and emotions far beyond human words, could be heard by ordinary listeners as senseless gibberish, or, even worse, the rantings of a madman, fascinated me, and I set out to create a work in which thematic coherence and beauty needed to continuously struggle for dominance in the midst of various distortions and diversions. Throughout Speaking in Tongues, unity and coherence are embodied in two recurring themes: a modal, chant-like melody and an ascending or descending quarter-tone scale. Although these gestures are nearly always present throughout the work, they are often contorted and made to sound defective in some way. Frequently, these distortions stem from the use of either complex rhythmic configurations or microtonal pitch alterations. (In order to facilitate the latter, each of the string instruments has one or two strings tuned a quarter-tone higher or lower than normal.) Likewise, the inclusion of the waterphone, an instrument renowned for its other-worldly sound quality, often masks the clarity of the thematic material and infuses the work with an unnatural (or perhaps supernatural) character. Though the work as a whole is intended to be a gradually transforming sound stream, Speaking in Tongues does feature a relatively traditional formal structure. Beginning with a section of largely slow-moving material, the piece then travels through a more active and aggressive middle section, eventually returning to the opening material in a final recapitulatory gesture – a kind of varied reiteration that is fundamental to any form of spoken communication.