Chamber and Solo Music

Vocal Music

Music with Electronics

Commissioned by Copland House for CULTIVATE 2021
Completed 03/25/2021

Recorded by Pala Garcia (violin), Alexis Pia Gerlach (cello), Moran Katz (clarinet), and Peggy Kampmeier (piano)

Based on Mokha Laget's 'Moroccan Capriccio'

I first met Mokha at an artist colony during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic. We both felt extraordinarily fortunate to have been given the opportunity to concentrate on creating art during such an exhausting time, and as such, we both spent the majority of our residencies working in our respective studios. It was only in the tail-end of Mokha’s stay that I finally got to see her work. 

I was instantly enthralled. Her paintings possessed a palpable immediacy through their surprising scale, vibrant contrasts, and endearing whimsy. They were frequently unpredictable - trying to follow any one particular shape, I would quickly lose my place in a sea of impossible geometries. Even so, when I stepped back to consider the whole, Mokha’s paintings nonetheless felt cohesive and organic. We spoke then and there about collaborating, eventually deciding that I would write a new work based on her Moroccan Capriccio. 

The resulting piece, Intuitive Geometry, seeks to capture the same kind of mercurial yet self-consistent discourse that defines Mokha’s resplendent art. Filled with whirling arpeggios, mixed meters, and restless modulations, the piece is one of constant motion. Should any listener try to follow any one particular instrument, they might quickly become lost - yet even as ideas ricochet between the members of the quartet, the piece remains united through its economy of material. Virtually every gesture is built out of an unevenly oscillating third, ensuring that the piece as a whole maintains its congruence.

It was delicious fun translating Mokha’s kaleidoscopic architectures into music, and I am truly grateful for her friendship and artistic generosity.

Chamber Pieces

Intuitive Geometry, for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano

Commissioned by the Albany Symphony 
Completed April 28, 2021
Premiered June 11, 2021 by David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony's Dogs of Desire

Newness was on my mind in late February 2021 when David Alan Miller asked me to write a piece for the Albany Symphony’s ‘Dogs of Desire.’ I had recently graduated from school, spring was around the corner, and slowly but surely, the world seemed to be inching toward some semblance of normalcy. It had been a long, dark winter, and there was a hesitant hope in the air even around me where I lived: some of Baltimore’s more enthusiastic cherry blossoms had begun to prematurely flower. 

I did not want to write a simple ‘spring has sprung!’ piece, however - the harsh realities of the last year would have made such an approach disingenuous for myself. Instead, I was drawn toward the beauteous ambiguities of Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi’s work. His poetry was filled with natural imagery of the seasons that he shaped into dark yet lyrical ruminations on life, death, and rebirth. 
	
		Fall - ‘...The wind that burns to ash then restores.
			The air fills with embers
			And you go with them.’ 
						- excerpted from his poem, ‘草 (Grass)’

		Winter - ‘Bloom, unbloomed - snow soon thaws (by the dawn)
			midnight snow shrouds the night...’ 
						- excerpted from his poem, ‘花非花 (Flower, no flower)’

		Spring - ‘The gate illumined by
			The sun brings the sweet taste of spring.’
						- excerpted from his poem, ‘春眠 (Spring sleep)’ 

Relatively few of Bai’s poems seemed to concern the summer, and so The Gate Illumined is shaped around his preferred seasons. The music begins tentatively, opening with a brief flurry of motion that is quickly suspended. The gesture repeats, slowly unfolding into running scales and drifting harmonies as two singers trade phrases back and forth. The two are initially opposed - one sings of desolation, the other restoration. Gradually, the music begins to shed its equivocation as its pulse solidifies into running motion. A gathering sense of optimism swells through the ensemble as the singers find agreement. Ultimately, the piece ends the way it began, culminating in the opening gesture.

Large Ensemble

The Gate Illumined, for two sopranos and sinfonietta

Completed June 5, 2021

Commissioned by Dr. Wendy Case

Cities can mean vastly different things for different people. Glimmering masses of glass, steel, and concrete, such urban centers often see some of the world’s richest occupying the same spaces as the poorest. For some, city streets might represent glamor, thrill, and culture; for others, they are a grim and unforgiving purgatory. I would always feel a touch of the surreal as I took walks through the various metropolitan centers I had lived in, passing soiled back alleys near gaudy concert halls, parched soup kitchens set against ostentatious skyscrapers. Somehow, it felt as though these worlds should not be able to coincide. 

Doppelgänger Streets draws its inspiration from China Miéville’s smoky noir, The City and the City. Ostensibly a murder mystery, the novel explores a peculiar world in which two different cities quite literally occupy the same physical space, unable (or perhaps unwilling) to perceive one another. The idiosyncratic setting and intoxicating prose left a strong impression, stylishly evoking the paradoxical dualities of urban environments. 

To explore these themes, I wanted violin and electronics to feel dimly related yet foreign to one another, occasionally intertwining with analogous gestures. The violin plays searchingly through chiaroscuro soundscapes, drifting in and out of focus as it explores fragments of a melody. Halfway through the piece, crackling glitches begin to break up the sound, suggesting sights of things that should have remained unseen. Eventually, the violin manages to realize its ruminative melody, bringing a touch of warmth to a world otherwise coldly aloof. 

This piece would not have been possible without the dedication of Dr. Wendy Case, whose humor, kindness, and enthusiasm made her a wonderful collaborator to work with.

Doppelgänger Streets, for violin and electronics

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.

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

Completed Feb. 17, 2023
Premiered Mar. 7, 2023 by ~nois

The more people I’ve spoken with, the more I have come to cherish moments of shared understanding. For me, language often feels rather insufficient as a means of expressing thought - like trying to portray a three dimensional image on a flat surface. Understanding someone’s words is a delicate process of reconstructing the ineffable depth and interiority of their thoughts, and quite frequently, much is lost in translation. 

These ideas provided the seed for To Speak As One. To me, the saxophone quartet as an ensemble naturally contends with such questions of mutual understanding and communication. It is conversational in scale; its instruments share much in common both registrally and timbrally; virtually any technique that can be done on one instrument can be done on any other. The result is a collection of instruments that very easily behaves as a hyperinstrument, able to blend and move with uncommon unity. 

Over the course of the piece, I sought to shift throughout between treating the quartet as a singular entity versus four unique players. The resulting work scatters its lines across the group, assigning disparate notes and rhythms to each musician as they discover the composite together. Players enter and peel off constantly, and even in moments of stasis, there is an element of confusion - it’s not always clear which instrument is playing which sounds. Even with all its raucous sounds and lurching instability, though, To Speak As One is intended to be an intimate piece, ultimately focusing on how a small ensemble - with all their cuing, breathing, and eye contact - can discover ways to nonverbally find shared understanding with one another.

This piece was begun while in residence at Copland House, Cortlandt Manor, New York, as a recipient of the Copland House Residency Award.

To Speak As One, for saxophone quartet

Completed April 1, 2023
Premiered April 19, 2024 by Khemia Ensemble in Music for a Great Space, Greensboro, North Carolina
Commissioned by Khemia Ensemble

I have been an admirer of Karen An-Hwei Lee’s sumptuous poetry for years now. Her profound yet transparent writings are often surprisingly prosaic, blending technical buzzwords and theological jargon together with colloquial, personal observations of the world around her. Though her works pose elemental questions about God and existence, the writing never feels pompous: her posture is always one of quiet curiosity and humility. 

Selecting a text of hers to set, however, proved quite a challenge. The same features of her poetry that so appealed to me - its unwieldy vocabulary, its prose-like nature, its ambiguity - also made it decidedly tricky to conceive of as song. I was grateful, then, to discover Say If Not a Moon, an unexpectedly lyrical yet no less characteristic piece of hers. 

The poem paints a familiar scene of a full moon rising over an ocean. Defying such imagery’s conventionally Romantic or Impressionistic connotations, Lee casts the moon as a coldly indifferent observer: an Eckleburgian eye, gazing out at the world with little interest in its machinations. I sought to capture this passivity in Pupil of Light using two contrasting pieces of material: bright, shimmering gestures in the percussion/piano, and insouciant melody in the voice/winds. Floating their way through such a potentially vibrant world, the singer’s lines seem affectless by comparison - as is Lee’s distant yet beauteous moon.

I am deeply grateful to the intrepid musicians of Khemia Ensemble for commissioning and realizing the piece.

Pupil of Light, for Khemia Ensemble

Commissioned by Justus and Elizabeth Schlichting for the 2023 Bang on a Can Summer Festival

Completed May 27, 2023
Premiered July 29, 2023 as part of Bang on a Can's Loud Weekend 2023 by Todd Reynolds (cond.), Claire Litwinowicz (vln.), Santiago Velo Quintairos (vla.), Elizabeth Kate (vc.), JP Bernabe (cb.), Abrielle Scott (fl.), Anne Pinkerton (ob.), Lucas Gianini (cl.), Will Pyle (sax), Maya Stone (bsn.), Betty Chen (pno.), and Ethan Strickland (perc.)

I love watching ensembles play. There’s always so much happening at any given moment: all this cuing and tuning and listening and watching. The complicated group dynamics going on can be dizzying to keep track of, and within larger chamber ensembles, there can be such an intricate web of communication that it feels like a miracle that pieces hold together at all. 

This kind of intimate group communication happens all the time in nature, and one of the most familiar is the flock. Flocks of birds have often been written about in a near-mythological manner - the massive patterns they form and their hypnotic motion have inspired studies and superstitions alike. They can grow to be tens of thousands strong, but despite all their apparent organization, flocks do not have a solitary leader. Instead, individuals hone in on the signals of their seven closest neighbors, and they move about together. Since each neighbor will have its own seven neighbors and so on, a signal from one end of the flock eventually ripples all the way to the other. 

Of a Feather is inspired by the whirling coordination of flocks. Gestures are imitated and scattered throughout the group a la flock communication, and much of the vocabulary of the piece is filled with rushing motion. The piece is mercurial and vibrant, moving rapidly through key areas while freely expanding and contracting its motifs. Ultimately, Of a Feather is a study in ensemble communication, treating its members equally as individuals and parts of a whole.

Many thanks to Justus and Elizabeth Schlichting for commissioning the piece, and much gratitude to the fellows of the 2023 Bang on a Can Summer Festival for realizing it.

Of a Feather, for chamber ensemble

Completed August 23, 2023

Premiered at the Cube, Virginia Tech, September 26, 2023 by Derek Shapiro (cond.), Ariana Wyatt (sop.), Betsy Lantz (fl.), Michelle Smith Johnson (cl.), Kyle Hutchins (sax), Annie Stevens (perc.), Gloria Engle (pno.), John Irrera (vln.), Molly Wilkens-Reed (vla.), Alan Weinstein (vc.), and Charles Nichols (ambisonic mapping). 

Commissioned by Gordon Yee

I have a complicated relationship with Christianity. There are few, though, who could purport to have as complicated a faith as Saint Augustine’s. He was a thinker blessed with the two attributes needed to ensure one’s legacy: a relentless, obsessive, autocannibalistic thought life, and the need to write it down. 

And write, he did: Augustine’s seminal texts, the Confessions chief among them, are difficult works, filled with surprising vulnerability, heady hermeneutics, and harsh self-flagellation. A searing streak of humility - indeed, bordering on self-hatred - runs throughout, as Augustine believed that the existence of evil on a global and personal scale stemmed solely from human weakness.

Unlike many of my churched peers, I did not inherit my faith - rather, I had been the first in my family to convert, and I eventually realized I might be one of the first to step away. I was well- acquainted with the kind of Augustinian guilt that pervaded Christian thought, and I experienced firsthand the kind of painful self-loathing that came with such emphatic doctrines of sin. 

I was deeply struck when I encountered Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo’s wryly meandering poem simply titled To St. Augustine. Liu had been an insistent thorn in the Chinese Communist Party’s side for much of his life, though his contrarian nature meant that he was equally critical of Western ideology - including, naturally, Augustine. I was fascinated to see someone outside the faith engage with it so candidly, and I identified closely with his oblique perspective on Augustine’s work.

I chose to interpret Liu’s poem from my perspective as both an insider and an outsider to Christianity. The music veers between rumination and outcry, mashing together abrasive, distorted samples of hymns with floating, dreamlike textures. Though the piece searches for some kind of equilibrium in the contradictions of God, it ends with a perhaps inevitable ambiguity. 

This piece is dedicated to my brother, who was always a step or two ahead of me in matters of faith and philosophy. Many thanks to the Virginia Tech School of Performing Arts for commissioning and realizing the piece through their Yee Commission.

To Saint Augustine, for soprano, mixed ensemble, and fixed media

Completed September 11, 2023
Premiered by JACK Quartet in Taplin Auditorium, November 29, 2023

Written for JACK Quartet

The grisaille technique has always interested me for the challenges posed to its practitioners: the technique limits painters to monochromatic palettes. Beginning as underpainting for stained glass, grisaille eventually flourished as an entire form of its own in the 16th century. Today, art historians depict it as a singularly rigorous exercise that forced artists to more carefully consider their brushstrokes and composition in the absence of color. 

Many of my teachers spoke similarly about writing for string quartet: a practice that forced artists to write with economy and intention within a limited color palette. This piece, Panes of Grisaille, is a study in timbre, seeking to pull as much depth and energy from its homogeneous instrumentation as possible. The music leans heavily into sounds and tunings that are only possible on strings, ricocheting through as many techniques as possible while barreling forward with incessant momentum. 

I owe much thanks to the astounding musicians of JACK Quartet, to whom this piece is dedicated. I only dared write something so frankly demanding knowing it would be in their hands.

Panes of Grisaille, for string quartet

NOTE: This piece is meant to be enjoyed as an audiovisual work! To see the video, please follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0w2LJfEISA 

Completed March 7, 2024
Written for Aliayta Foon-Dancoes and j clancy
Premiered April 16, 2024 at Taplin Auditorium

No art exists in a vacuum. Everything owes its existence to something earlier, and this cycle of ideas forms the backbone of creativity. The public domain - the body of work free from copyright restriction - is one of the most important fixtures of today’s creative landscape, providing a rich library of source material for artists of any medium. 

The Disney Corporation has long had a difficult relationship with the public domain. Most famously, when their copyright on Steamboat Willie was set to expire, Disney aggressively lobbied the US government to pass the Copyright Act of 1976 (derisively called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act by its critics) to dramatically extend copyright term limits for all intellectual property.

The law’s worst effect was to cast the public domain as a villain to be guarded against, a stance that could not have been less prescient. The world was on the cusp of the digital era, a time of unprecedented availability of information, and such a newly protectionist approach to IP would eventually lead to the kinds of headaches artists of all kinds face today - from remixes getting ‘copystruck’ by content monitors to exclusivity restrictions that vary confusingly from country to country. 

In 2024, Steamboat Willie finally ran out its copyright limit. Hundreds of thousands of memes sprang up to crassly mock Disney, and this piece - as much as it is a joyous celebration of the public domain - is proudly suffused with that same kind of over-the-top, meme-worthy contempt. 

It was an absolute delight to create this piece, and I must also give credit to Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, and John F. Kennedy for providing such wonderful source material to supplement Mickey with.

You Have Entered The Public Domain, for violin, percussion, and fixed media

Completed July 29, 2024
Premiered December 4, 2024 by the Attacca Quartet

Dedicated to the Attacca Quartet, whose omnivorous enthusiasm for music was as infectious as it was inspiring

When preparing to write a new piece for the incredible Attacca Quartet, I had to reformulate my attitudes toward music. Where other ensembles would specialize, Attacca approached a stunningly wide repertoire with wit, joy, and open-mindedness. For them, there could be no music too high or too low, too silly or serious, too old or new. Instead, any music could serve as its own justification. 

Loosely inspired by William Blake’s parallel poetry collections ‘Songs of Innocence & Experience,’ this piece is structured in two halves that correspond roughly to the titular themes. Blake completed Songs of Experience six years after Songs of Innocence, and he originally intended the former to be exclusively centered on adulthood while the latter concentrated on youth. By the time he finished the collections, however, neither half was purely innocent nor experienced. The two contained poems of the same subject matter, the same titles, and in some cases, the same content - Blake actually moved some of the poems in 'Innocence' to 'Experience' upon completion, suggesting a complex relationship between the halves. 

I reflected on the soundworld I had developed over the six years or so since I started composing: a music of rushing motion, extended techniques, and mischievous self-awareness. This style stood in stark contrast to the first few pieces I had written: pop-like chord progressions, simple melodies, emotional transparency to the point of embarrassment. I decided I would set these old, ‘naive’ ideas in conversation with my current musical language. 

I hope that by juxtaposing and interweaving these musics that I can cast some doubt upon the linear narratives of growth we often feed ourselves. Sometimes, perhaps, one must double back to go forward.

Music of Innocence & Experience, for string quartet

Written for Modern Medieval Voices
Premiered February 25, 2025 in Taplin Auditorium, Princeton University

Text by Robin Helweg-Larsen

Her thoughts were all inside her –
Free from reality –
Poor little cramped-up spider
Who never saw the sea.

Recluse Song is a distant and somewhat self-aware meditation on the process of responding to another person’s art. The piece sets a brief poem by Robin Helweg-Larsen that describes, but never purports to really understand, the swirling inner dialogues of its subject—an introspective recluse poet (heavily implied to be Emily Dickinson). His poem carried a mild air of pity, but it also managed to walk the line between a number of challenging dualities: the internal versus the external, the intimate and the detached, the vivid and the subdued.

I set out to do to his poem what he had done to Dickinson’s work: rather than inviting listeners fully into any kind of inner world, the music keeps them at arm’s length, adopting a deliberately observational quality. Emotionally placid and measured, the music evokes a sense of stillness, as though seeing a distant figure through frosted glass.

The text is treated nonlinearly, emphasizing the texture of language: the sensation of words on the tongue, the interplay of their sounds, and their resonances against one another. Meaning unfolds gradually, not through narrative progression but through the layering and juxtaposition of fragments.

Ultimately, Recluse Song is a study in detachment, paradoxically inviting listeners to linger in its delicate, suspended world.

To Saint Augustine, for soprano, mixed ensemble, and fixed media

Bobby Ge