Glimpses of This Heaven We've Forgotten

Live performance by the Viridian Strings on August 28th, 2025 in Traverse City, Michigan.

Air On Haydn's Name

"Permafrost Ghosts" by Will Healy, performed live by Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra with Will Healy. Recorded in Santa Monica, California, July 2025.

Permafrost Ghosts (2025)

odes to the body unsung (2025) for 13 players

I've been thinking a lot recently about music and the body. We react to sound in every single part in our anatomy, from our limbic system to our respiration to our motor system. But when we talk about how our bodies respond to music, we tend to focus on only certain parts – we feel it in our guts, it pulls at our heartstrings, it makes us tap our feet – and ignore others. In this piece, I imagine the music which resonates and activates the “unsung” parts of the body. What would music for the gallbladder, for the eyelashes sound like? Here, I take inspiration from the wonderful poet Sharon Olds, whose odes praise parts of the body that aren’t typical poetic subjects. 
 
“ode to the ligaments of the ankle” is a jagged, raucous folk dance, and “ode to the gallbladder” is a lullaby in warm, pulsing microtonal harmony. “ode to the vertebrae of the spine” reimagines the keyboard percussion instruments as the backbone of a skeleton, and “ode to the eyelashes” unfurls in fluttering wisps. The piece is rendered in a shimmering, dreamlike microtonal language. I invite you to not just listen to this piece, but to feel it resonate in your whole body.

odes to the body unsung was commissioned by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition. It was premiered by the Grossman Ensemble, conducted by Timothy Weiss. 

Performed May 2025 by the Grossman Ensemble conducted by Timothy Weiss
Recorded by Chris Willis

odes to the body unsung is scored for sinfonietta - 1(+picc, alto fl.)1(+e.h.)10.alto sax.1000.2perc.pno.hp.11110


odes to the body unsung (2025) for sinfonietta

Michigan State University Wind Symphony - Michael Gabriel, conductor

Some of my earliest memories are of intricate boxes. My father, a furniture maker, often restores antique pieces, and I remember being fascinated by wardrobes and desks that had secret drawers and spaces. These are often only accessible by putting one’s hands in the right spot with the right pressure, a type of haptic code. In writing Puzzle Box, I wanted to create a work that pays homage to these beautifully compact pieces, where one has to explore around an object and test it in various ways until a hidden passageway opens. Puzzle Box was written for the Cabrillo Festival as part of the 2024 Conductors / Composers Workshop and is dedicated to my father. The wind band arrangement of Puzzle Box was commissioned by Kevin Sedatole, Michael Gabriel, and the Michigan State University Wind Symphony.

Puzzle Box (2024-5) for wind symphony

Premiered November 4, 2025 by Ekmeles (Charlotte Mundy (soprano), Amber Evans (mezzo-soprano), Timothy Parsons (countertenor), Tomás Cruz (tenor), Jeffrey Gavett (baritone).

Spaceships can land vertically, horizontally, or use parachutes and airbags, as with rovers and capsules. Controlled descents rely on retropropulsion, requiring precision, friction, transformation, and ultimately arrival - the shift from vast motion to stillness. The first controlled landing on another planet was Viking 1 on Mars in 1976, the same year the Rubik’s Cube was officially launched in stores in Hungary.

Decks of cards likely originated in China in the 9th century, spreading to Europe via Egypt. Shuffling can serve as a metaphor for chance, fate, randomness, and recombination - each shuffle creating a new possible universe. A conventional deck has 8×10⁶⁷ possible arrangements, a number vastly smaller than the atoms in the observable universe, yet unimaginably larger than the number of seconds since the Big Bang.

Six cards were chosen from a deck created by THIRTYMINUTES. Jeff Gavett and Charlotte Mundy both responded to these six cards. Most of the text you will hear was generated from their reflections, and in the case of V. Soldiers, the text was written entirely by Charlotte. Many thanks to Ekmeles, for guiding this musical spacecraft safely to your ears.


Six Hands for six voices

Rehearsal recording with Longleash (Pala Garcia, John Popham, and Mika Sasaki) at Brown University, November 6 2025.

drenched and beaming || piano trio + tape [Longleash]

Spirare was written for CULTIVATE 2018 and was premiered by the Music from Copland House ensemble at the Merestead estate in Mount Kisco, NY on June 10, 2018. 

Violin - Pala Garcia
Clarinet - Carol McGonnell
Violoncello - Alexis Pia Gerlach

Spirare (2018) for violin, clarinet in Bb, and violoncello

Completed February 21, 2022
Recorded April 1, 2022 by Robert Brown (alto saxophone), Sherry Du (piano), Ben Giroux (percussion)
Mixed and mastered by Ed Tetreault 
Written in collaboration with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
Supported by funding from the Maryland State Arts Council Creativity Grant

Coral reefs have fascinated me since my childhood, when I first learned about them watching Pixar’s iconic Finding Nemo. I remember being entranced in theaters by the animated reef’s resplendent colors, hypnotic variety of life, and stunning textural complexity. When I had the chance to work with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center to create a new work, coral reefs instantly came to mind as an obvious point of inspiration. 

I knew that in creating a work based on the remarkable vibrance of coral reefs that I would want to evoke, first and foremost, their almost contradictory capacity to be as alien as they were beautiful. Much research has been done to better understand coral, an academic field aging back millennia with luminaries like Pliny the Elder struggling to classify them. To capture their eerie allure, I decided to use saxophone multiphonics to ground the entire piece. These sounds could be raucous, violent, and unexpected, but also shockingly beautiful. The resulting piece, Variations for Worlds Below, is an essentially cyclic piece, consisting of four variations on a simple progression of chords built around a number of these saxophone multiphonics. 

The piece begins meditatively, establishing a broadly peaceable yet unpredictable atmosphere imitating the swaying motion of anemones and polyp tentacles. The next variation moves through songful rumination against a bed of sparkling aleatory in order to suggest the glimmering of sunlight through water. From there, the music deepens in unease to consider the alien worlds of deepwater coral and culminates in a rumbling, overpowering climax. Finally, the soundworld drifts apart into pieces, as we return to the surface.

Special thanks to Karen McDonald, Christine Buckley, Kristen Goodhue, and the rest of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s Folklife team for the indispensable support they provided in realizing this piece.

Random Stuff

Variations for Worlds Below, for alto saxophone, percussion, and piano

Her Majesty the Fool (2020)
by Oren Boneh
Fanny Vicens, XAMP mictrotonal accordion and electronics

For the video: https://youtu.be/hagaxRg15FE

Composed for Fanny Vicens for premiere at Festival Manifeste IRCAM 2020
Special thanks to Grégoire Lorieux, Thierry De Mey, and the IRCAM Pedagogical Team.
Filmed at Centre Pompidou, Paris
Video production: Année Zéro – Benoît Martin, Guillaume Foresti

Variations for Worlds Below, for alto saxophone, percussion, and piano

Bobby Ge

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