Completed September 14, 2022
Premiered June 3, 2023 at Current Space by Danielle Williams (cond.), Mind on Fire, and recorded live by Jason Charney

Supported by New Music USA’s Creator Development Fund for 2022-23
Commissioned by Mind on Fire
Winner of a 2024 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award

Original text:

Movement I - The apparition of these faces in the crowd...

worn-down, faded bench 
companion to weary travelers 
catching their breath between stations
we sat together
laughing into each other’s shoulders
as we ducked beneath neon-singed clouds 
of rush hour smoke
rolling, tumbling down
old-town alleys turned glass walkways 
noodle bars turned Apple Stores

Taoist temples turned shopping malls 
teeming 
thrumming
into the night
our hands nearly touched 
amidst the rhythms of the crowd 
as indefinite and fleeting
as the skyline around us 
my train arrives
I rise to leave
looking back through tinted plastic, I wonder 
in this city of forgetting
will you remember me?

Movement II - ...petals on a wet, black bough.

when I returned
the bench was no longer there 
they turned it into 
a Starbucks
the largest in the world 
I went in
a ghost among the rows of emptied Gravitas blends 
silhouetted against the Roastery Bar’s harshly gilded tones 
floating up the escalator past smoky mocha updrafts 
and glimmering Tom Dixon fixtures
when through a tinted mezzanine glass panel -

I see us
          past coffee-stained mugs and soft curls of wispy steam 
     together, sitting
undisturbed by the surrounding rush 
of raindrops and unfilled orders
the moment suspended
     a gentle warmth about us
unconcerned, content
as we laugh, sip, and remember -
hazily I saw their outlines rise
the pair evaporating with the last of the moisture 
into the crowd, out the doors
as a gust of smog blew in 
and filled their void

they built a bigger Starbucks in Chicago.

Large Ensemble

Nanjing West Road, for soprano, mixed ensemble, and fixed media

For Confluss

The process of deconstructing your core belief system is often painful and isolating. In the case of leaving “the church,” it’s a messy combination of stripping away both the moral foundation of your ideals and abandoning a community that has surrounded you for decades. So much of the Christianity I grew up with emphasized alienation from the “world” and that people and community would ultimately fail you unless you had your one true friend, Jesus. Stepping away from the church meant abandoning real community, real support. It took me years to learn that wasn’t true. 

This promise of isolation should one leave is prevalent throughout much of my experience with Evangelical Christianity. Nothing quite exemplifies it as well as the hymn, This World Is Not My Home, which was a favorite of my congregation growing up. There’s something deeply sinister about the refrain, which says, “Oh Lord you know, I have no friend like you,” and “I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.” 

I Can’t Feel at Home is my way of looking back at my own deconstruction and represents my first musical foray into better understanding the impact the church and the process of leaving it has had on me. The text for the work comes from two sources, excerpts from the poem “ABSCENCE/PRESENCE VARIATIONS” by writer and long-time collaborator, Caroline Preziosi, and interpolations of the refrain of This World Is Not My Home. 

Excerpts of the hymn weave their way throughout the piece. A recording of my childhood church singing it crests in and out of a pad of tape delay feedback, built from its melody before erupting into the chorus. Electronics and live performers lock perfectly in sync, a flashback to when times were simple and faith was strong. Things begin to warp and glitch however, eventually shunting us back to a more complicated present where the only way forward is “to continue turning.”

I Can't Feel at Home

Telos Consort performs "Dot Plot" by Cole Reyes

Thomas Giles, soprano saxophone
Kyle Landry, baritone saxophone
Charlotte Munn-Wood, violin
Thea Mesirow, cello
Huizi Zhang, piano

Recorded at Oktaven Audio; Ryan Streiber, recording engineer
Mixed by Mike Tierney
Video Edited by Kyle Landry

For more information, visit telosconsort.com

Dot Plot (performed by Telos Consort)

Stuff #2 (2025)

Text by Linda Catlin Smith, premiered by Ekmeles at the University of Pennsylvania, Spring 2025.

“I’m working with a kind of deliberate disorientation. What is very important is to keep this disorientation continuously at play. I want to get myself out of my comfort zone. This is a balancing act between what I can control and what I don’t yet understand, between the known and the mysterious. I don’t seek a point of closure or culmination but one of opening and departure. I want to get to the point where everything is new.” – Linda Catlin Smith

Not Knowing

Redshift by Eric Guinivan 
Emily Stevens and Brian Willey, Percussion
Video performance: https://youtu.be/r4U8-0EjtQ0

Recorded December 2024 

Program note and perusal score: https://www.ericguinivan.com/redshift.html
Music available from the composer: https://www.ericguinivan.com/contact.html

Redshift for Percussion Duo and Electronics

for low string trio and resonating snare and bass drums

(my grief is a compass)

we searched for a new world as the sky fell down around us.

even then, we admitted it was beautiful.

(i search for love in every world and i find it every time)

premiere:
april 24, 2025 by catinblack ensemble (Javad Javadzade, contrabass; Ema Grćman, cello; Sofia von Atzingen, viola) at harvard university’s paine hall

eroding sky; a new and brighter star | catinblack ensemble | 2025

performed by Adrian Mantu at Cellissimo Festival, May 2024

In an Occupied Space (for solo cello)

Paul Novak - a diagnosis (2024/25) for soprano, mezzo-soprano, and sextet
performed May 8th, 2025 by Mycelium New Music at Fulton Street Collective

Mycelium New Music
Justin Weiss, conductor/co-artistic director
Paul Novak, flutes/co-artistic director 
Michael Tran, clarinets
Dylan Feldpausch, violin
Isidora Nojkovic, cello
Jonathan Hannau, piano/keyboard
Rebecca McDaniel, percussion
with guest artists:
Kristina Bachrach, soprano
Emily Price, mezzo-soprano

"a diagnosis" is a catalog of bodily aches, a list of symptoms which grows strange and resonant. It will eventually be the opening piece in my in-progress song cycle when i was nine i couldn’t walk, which draws from my recollections of a childhood diagnosis with a psychosomatic illness. a diagnosis focuses on the body and the things it unknowingly stores: memory, trauma, ache, desire. The text is adapted from my poem “a diagnosis.”
Paul Novak

Art: Max Ernst, "the Triumph of Surrealism"


a diagnosis (2024/25) for voices and sextet

Casey Cangelosi, percussion
Video performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMBCd9PfuMA
Casey's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIw9gkSYmyj21uAd85Ydu8g
Casey's Website: https://www.caseycangelosi.com/

Hypernova (2020) for percussion solo and electronic playback was written for Casey Cangelosi.  In outer space, a hypernova is a type of stellar explosion which ejects material with unusually high kinetic energy, an order of magnitude higher than most supernovae.  The piece is centered on broad and expansive explosive gestures that give birth to sparkling and technically virtuosic phrases.  The soloist plays a small kit of vibratone, five tuned gongs, tamborim, hi-hat, and kick drum.  The accompanying electronic part is made entirely of acoustic hand-stopped or bowed piano samples that were recorded during and assembled as digital instruments.  There are four main types of these samples used throughout the piece:
 
- Piano with the string hand-muted and the pedal up.  The most agile tape parts are primarily made with these sound samples.
- Piano with the string hand-muted and the sustain pedal down.  Most low, resonant tones and some mid-range notes use these samples.
- Bowed piano, modified with post-production effects to give it an organ-like quality.
- Hand-muted, no-pedal piano samples with the envelope reversed to play backwards as a swell gesture.  You hear this sound at the very beginning of the piece.
 
Check out and follow along with the performance part: https://issuu.com/ericguinivan/docs/guinivan_hypernova_performance_part
 
Please contact the composer at https://www.ericguinivan.com if you are interested in purchasing a physical copy of the music for performance.

Nanjing West Road, for soprano, mixed ensemble, and fixed media

Bobby Ge