Just short pieces for assorted instruments.

Miniatures

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

Composition for chamber ensemble based on Oliver Messiaen's "Modes of Limited Transpositions".

Olivier's Way

Mode Five II

These songs are influenced by images from the poem Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold. I’m not sure how this poem came to me, I’m not a big reader of poetry, but there is is. I used several images from the poem to name the songs, as well.

The Tide is Full

Sweet Dreams Of Coriolis

"sear", premiered by Alarm Will Sound and Alan Pierson at Richardson Auditorium on March 21, 2023.

I spend a lot of time in the kitchen (or at the grill) cooking. It’s something I love to do for myself and others, whether I’m preparing meals for the week or hosting a gathering. In 2018, I read Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat from cover to cover. At the time, I was more passionate about eating than I was about cooking, but I was willing to learn. 

In the section of the book on Heat, the author talks about an event called the Maillard reaction, a chemical reaction in which heat causes browning of proteins and sugars within ingredients. There are many ways to achieve the Maillard reaction, one of them being the searing method. Simply put, you prepare an extreme heat source (like a 700 degree skillet), you put a raw ingredient on the skillet (like a steak), and then the surface becomes deeply browned (and incredibly flavorful). A few drawbacks of this method include smoking up your kitchen, setting off the fire alarm, sweating profusely, but it’s worth it for the flavor (…sometimes…this is why I like the grill, even in the dead of winter).

sear is a piece based on extreme contrasts, with the idea of blistering heat in mind.

sear

INSTRUMENTATION:
1 x Piano
1 x Violoncello
Program Note:
ENDLESS ROMANIAN TRACES for Cello and Piano was commissioned by Julian Armour.
The composition commences with the famous Romanian dance tune Perinitza, introduced by the piano. My music evolves from a fusion of lyrical, evocative, cheerful and pleasant aural memories.
Their resonances derive from the poetic and vibrant force of the specific Romanian dances and from my own perception, leading to a metamorphosis fitting at the concert hall.
I intend to transform original melodies once common to the many into music uncanny yet. This musical "alchemy" invokes time, fate, necessity, circumstance, and human transgression. It reflects the relationship between place and persons; history and imagination. I try to blur the distinction between what is found and what is made; between what is intended and what is meant; and between what we are led to hear and what we might finally know, researching the notion of folklore tunes as a site of aural memory and a reservoir of human experience.
I enhance the structural ambiguities in the work itself, and across an ample breadth of materials and techniques, while retaining the cohesive aural vision of the whole.
My music expresses a phantasmal itinerary for an eternal voyage into a totally changed, amazing world. - Dr. Maya Badian

Endless Romanian Traces For Cello & Piano by Maya Badian

This work was premiered in Merkin Concert Hall on May 31, 2023, by an extraordinary group of players: Curtis Macomber, violin; Lois Martin, viola; Chris Gross, cello; and Christopher Oldfather, piano. Edited and Mixed by Paul Kozel at the Sonic Arts Center, New York, New York, from audio from the dress rehearsal and performance at Merkin Concert Hall.From Berlioz's program for Symphonie fanastique: 

“A young musician of unhealthily sensitive nature and endowed with vivid imagination has poisoned himself with opium in a paroxysm of love-sick despair. The narcotic dose he had taken was too weak to cause death but it has thrown him into a long sleep accompanied by the most extraordinary visions. In this condition his sensations, his feelings and memories find utterance in his sick brain in the form of musical imagery. Even the beloved one takes the form of melody in his mind, like a fixed idea which is ever returning and which he hears everywhere.” (N.B.: Do not try this at home.)
 
II. Passion mocked. (“Barb’ry Allen.”) This scherzo is a flippant, bitterly sardonic take on the folksong “Barb’ry Allen”. The lyrics of that song — which with the right performer is a sad, poignant, and moving one — concern a young woman spurning the love of her suitor, who is on his deathbed. She is angry that he once slighted her while drinking toasts with and to his friends at a tavern, and on her arrival at his bedside she greets him coldly with the words, “Young man, I think you’re dying.” After she leaves the young man confirms the aptness of her observation;
Barb’ry Allen hears his funeral bell tolling and dies of a broken heart. In many versions of the song, the two end up buried in the same churchyard, and a rose growing from his grave intertwines with a briar growing from hers in a “true
lovers’ knot.” My treatment of the song downplays these more heartwarming parts of the story. It begins with a pizzicato cello introduction, joined shortly by the viola after a brief rest, both parts marked “jaunty.” After another rest,
the violin and viola accompany the cello as it presents the tune in its lowest register, still pizzicato. The tune reemerges a few more times, notably in the slower middle section, played “a little drunkenly” by the piano, after which the music
grows alternately frenetic and halting, ultimately lurching into Berlioz’s nuit du sabbat before hitting a wall.

Reveries. Passions. (Fantasy-Quartet for Piano & Strings)(2020 — II. Passion mocked. "Barb'ry Allen"

Named after the Irish fairy of the same name, the piece exhibits the same characteristics the Watershee is known for. Beginning with a soft haunting melody and devolving into an aggressive chordal pattern, it is indicative of the Watershee's preference for luring victims to her using her song.

The Watershee

A Night In The Park

This piece was recently featured in the 60x60 PianoForte Mix 2012 in Chicago. It is entirely composed of sounds taken from a piano.

Program Notes:

This piece, Anomalous, was composed using only audio samples of a piano, both keys and various percussion effects, and manipulation of the signal through digital means. The sounds have been transformed into a musical idea far different from the original tones.  The piece begins with a synth-like resonance underscored by a deep almost heartbeat soundscape. This atmosphere is interrupted by a rhythmic pulse punctuated by short distorted piano notes. This builds to a sort of crescendo until ultimately making way for a sound reminiscent of the contrabass to come into the forefront leading to a final descent into nothingness. 

Anomalous

For Solo English Horn

Sylph shares its name with a mythological creature first described by Paracelsus as an invisible being of the air, his elementals of air. The piece itself is derived from the alchemical symbol for air, an upward-pointing triangle, bisected by a horizontal line. 

Sylph

Those Who Remain

Emmanuel Olowe

Pestilence

A short atonal prelude written a year or so ago.

Prelude

Fugato for Solo Piano

https://www.amazon.com/Star-Drifter/dp/B08J82WKB5/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Michael+Ramsey+Star+Drifter&qid=1609904060&s=dmusic&sr=1-1

Star Drifter

Star Drifter (Remix)

I wrote this piece in 2014 as a commission from the Renee B. Fisher Young Pianist's Competition. Accordingly, the piece is an etude and aims to challenge the player both in terms of technique and as well as interpretation. 

In my opinion, the work's most distinctive features is its  maze-like form that features unpredictable returns to the beginning of the piece.

For Piano

A dance from a parallel dimension, in a time you didn't know.

Hoovooloo (15 Steps to love) - 15EDO

Composer interested in the combination of Electronic/ElectroAcoustic/Acoustic instruments.

Sylph

brian alan deLaney | composer.

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