Nice sounds, Alex. Really cool. I love the restraint and the care you take in laying out the ideas....

Good work. 

Here's the final version for Feeling, hard to keep up with The Cyanist's talents, but I am happy with the changes made! :)

Feeling

Sliding doors in the life

Grind, Torsten Grind

Close to me.wav

Pixercise (ver. 2024) mvt 4_excerpt

Benjamin Fingland, clarinetist, and guitarist Dan Lippel premiered "Spell Weavers" in April, 2025 at Williamsburg Biannual. 

Spell Weavers

Full Moon Glitch 10122025 Yamaha cp60

For wind octet. Performed on July 17, 2025 in Seiji Ozawa Hall by fellows at the Tanglewood Music Center. Commissioned by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society.

PROGRAM NOTE
Peaberry is a piece of music about coffee -- or, better said, my relationship to coffee. Coffee aficionados will know that coffee beans are not actually beans at all. They're seeds, and they start their lives inside a coffee cherry. Typically, two seeds grow in each cherry, giving coffee beans their characteristic flat-sided shape. A "peaberry" is the rare result when only one seed grows inside a coffee cherry. Because they're scarce and tasty, peaberries are a prized commodity in the specialty coffee world. 

I started home-brewing coffee during the pandemic. I've since gone all the way down the rabbit hole, becoming enthusiastic enough about each cup to seek out the subtle differences between peaberry coffee and a normal cup of joe. Along the way, it's become clear that my routine would be unfathomable without a jolt of java – a day-defining dependency that I haven't fully come to terms with. 

I know I'm not alone. Bach's coffee cantata, which must be the most famous coffee piece in the Western classical tradition, depicts a young woman's coffee habit with some combination of playfulness and moralizing concern. Here I am, three hundred years later, retracing familiar ground.

This music invokes the energy of a few too many great cups of coffee. Alongside the jolts and jitters, it takes time to slow down and linger in a gentle, wistful frame of mind – the kind of mood coffee can be especially good at tamping down. Still, the charm of an especially tasty cup of peaberry is always chattering just around the corner.

Peaberry

Mirage (2007) for soprano, flute, guitar, piano, and percussion. Text by Christina Rossetti.

Yi-Lan Niu, soprano 
Chris Cramer, guitar 
Elaine Moss, piano

Michael Rosewall, director

The hope I dreamed of was a dream, 
Was but a dream; and now I wake 
Exceeding comfortless, and worn, and old, 
For a dream's sake. 

I hang my harp upon a tree, 
A weeping willow in a lake; 
I hang my silenced harp there, wrung and snapt 
For a dream's sake. 

Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart; 
My silent heart, lie still and break: 
Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed 
For a dream's sake.

Mirage

This was the first ever song I created way back in 2007.

City Lights 

Spotify

City Lights

New York composer Alex Nohai-Seaman’s music has recently been performed by soprano Tony Arnold and soundSCAPE, guitarist Daniel Lippel, The Great Noise Ensemble, the New York and Chicago Miniaturist Ensembles, at the 2012 New Voices Festival, New Music Hartford, the Ball State University New Music Festival, the La Crosse New Music Festival, and in Israel, Italy, Canada, New Zealand, and Taiwan. 

His works are regularly performed by professional and college ensembles, as well as at national and regional conferences of the Society of Composers, the College Music Society and the Long Island Composers’ Alliance. He has received commissions, including those from Voices Up at Fordham University, bassoonist Marc Vallon, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, guitarist Christopher Cramer, and Turning Old Pages, Singing New Notes-a multimedia collaboration at St. Norbert College.  

Alex was a resident fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2008, 2010, and 2011 and was selected for the 2012 New Voices project at Caltholic University of America. The premiere of his dissertation composition, Requiem on a text of Rilke for soprano and chamber orchestra (2006), served as a fundraiser to build an AIDS clinic in sub-Saharan Africa. Upcoming commissions include a song cycle for soprano Yi-Lan Niu, as well as a works for soprano and guitar, guitar and piano. 

Alex studied composition with Laura Schwendinger, Stephen Dembski, David Brackett, Joel Naumann, and Fred Thayer. Alex is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at Suffolk County Community College on Long Island, where he teaches composition, music theory, piano, and directs the contemporary music ensemble.

Mirage

Alex Nohai-Seaman

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Jim Scully, Composer

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