Reflection on Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring

Bach's Chaconne (Recomposed)

This piece is inspired by the works on Agnes Martin. Here works are subtle and easy to miss. She makes simple movements (e.g. a single brush stroke) over and over again in a geometric pattern. From far away, the painting seems perfect, as if a machine created the work. However, the closer you get, the more you realize the thousands upon thousands of imperfections, until that’s all you see. The beauty of the work arises from what makes every movement similar but utterly unique. What I love about her work is how still it is, and how she creates a world where you have to work for to see its beauty. She was a painter who was content quietly being who she was, and invited an audience only if they wanted to join.

Here is a link to the score:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/19ISD1xC-49csXkMw1YagzoWNsTwX8Lp-/view?usp=sharing


Gavin Goodrich is a composer and concert pianist whose works synthesize pure mathematics, Vipassana Meditation, and visual arts. Born in an Alaskan fishing community, he taught himself piano, composition, and mathematics from YouTube videos before receiving a scholarship to study mathematics and music at Columbia University, where he is in his final year. He is a New York-based composer with recent commissions including writing for the International Contemporary Ensemble and Ekmeles. Under the advisement of Dr. Joseph Dubiel, his senior theses concern systematizing 15th-century Franco-Flemish polyphonic music into the realm of microtonality and using Schenkerian Techniques in non-tonal music spaces. Gavin also has a passion for teaching. Apart from individual tutoring, he designed curricula and taught math and music at Spring Street International School, as well as created and led a yearly Symposium for Peruvian high school girls with special emphasis on Ancient Greek and Indian theatre. In his spare time, Gavin enjoys solving higher dimensional Rubik’s Cubes and is currently internationally ranked for solving both 4 and 5 dimensional puzzles.

A Quiet Tribute to Agnes Martin

“You Might Have Mentioned How the Doorknobs Worked” is a poem by Jennifer Boyden, my high school English teacher. She lived in a house with crystal doorknobs that transmitted radio frequencies, so voices with no clear source would follow her and her family around their house. The voices drove them mad; they eventually started sleeping on their lawn every night. Despite being gaslit by her home, Boyden describes the intangible voices as if they were the voices of angels. She characterizes her family’s search for the voices as a spiritual journey. By combining 15th-century Franco-Flemish composition techniques, Gregorian chant, tone rows, and microtonality, I create the effect of finding G-d in speaking doorknobs. My biggest source of inspiration for this piece was the mathematical spirituality of Missa Prolationum by Ockeghem, which is a compilation of mensuration canons (songs where the voices sing the same part but at different speeds).

Here is a link to the score:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/19D0zQXiZhxMFJ8okoE0rG7A2TgASzWpM/view?usp=sharing

Gavin Goodrich is a composer and concert pianist whose works synthesize pure mathematics, Vipassana Meditation, and visual arts. Born in an Alaskan fishing community, he taught himself piano, composition, and mathematics from YouTube videos before receiving a scholarship to study mathematics and music at Columbia University, where he is in his final year. He is a New York-based composer with recent commissions including writing for the International Contemporary Ensemble and Ekmeles. Under the advisement of Dr. Joseph Dubiel, his senior theses concern systematizing 15th-century Franco-Flemish polyphonic music into the realm of microtonality and using Schenkerian Techniques in non-tonal music spaces. Gavin also has a passion for teaching. Apart from individual tutoring, he designed curricula and taught math and music at Spring Street International School, as well as created and led a yearly Symposium for Peruvian high school girls with special emphasis on Ancient Greek and Indian theatre. In his spare time, Gavin enjoys solving higher dimensional Rubik’s Cubes and is currently internationally ranked for solving both 4 and 5 dimensional puzzles.

You Might Have Mentioned How The Doorknobs Worked

Phase Trio

The title of this piece comes from Douglas Hofstadter’s book I Am a Strange Loop, which explores how animate matters arise from inanimate material, such as consciousness arising out of the raw material that constitutes the human body. In his book, Hofstadter talks about cyclic structures called “strange loops” that act similar to fractals, where, if you look at part of the structure, you see the entire thing. No matter how many times you cut it, you will always be le  with the complete structure. Somewhere in this self-referential structure lies the secret to a watery bag of bones and meat calling itself “I”.
I wanted to explore this concept by taking a solo flute and using looping technology to give the effect of an orchestra. There is no prerecorded material in this piece; everything comes from the flute and the computer playing back what the flute has already played.

Link to Max Patch:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ha9c68zs7qt434OouX3w2X1o89ZdeIIl/view?usp=sharing

Performed by Annie Nikunen
Written by Gavin Sol Goodrich

I Am A Strange Flute

This piece started on September 1st, 2022, the day after my mom died. After a summer of caregiving and a day of death logistics, I sat down at a piano for the first time in weeks, and, for the second time in my life, I wrote a piece without stopping. This became the piano part to the trio. No writer's block, no reflecting; I wrote the piece in less time than it took to play it. After pausing my music career to take care of my mother on a remote island for three months, the piece fell out of me as soon as I had space away from doctors, nurses, and family members. A large part of my identity became caring for my mother, parenting my teenage brother, and helping my grandparents through the death of their only daughter. The day my mom died, I lost a large part of my identity. This piece is about the realization that I will be treading in grief for the rest of my life.
After reading the biography and four letters of Hilda Dajč, I decided to add a violin and clarinet part to the original piano score, which added a sense of community to the grieving piano solo.
My mother’s death was not a surprise; she lived with an aggressive cancer for 6 years. Towards the end, after she lost the ability to speak, I would hold her hand and sit next to her in silence, knowing there was nothing else I could do for her. This trio is my attempt at understanding Mirjana Petrovid’s thoughts as she met Hilda for the last time, knowing that this would potentially be their last meeting and not being able to speak. Knowing that their friendship will become permanently fixed with no new experiences to add to it, and the helplessness of watching a loved one about to die and doing your best to comfort them without words. This piece is me trying to glimpse into one of the saddest moments of a stranger’s life, an attempt to see through my own grief by connecting with Mirjana’s wordless goodbye.

Hilda And Mirjana’s Last Encounter

I wrote this piece on September 1st, 2022, the day after my mom died. After a summer of caregiving and a day of death logistics, I sat down at a piano for the first time in weeks, and, for the second time in my life, I wrote a piece without stopping. No writer's block, no reflecting; I wrote the piece in less time than it took to play it. After pausing my music career to take care of my mother on a remote island for three months, the piece fell out of me as soon as I had space away from doctors, nurses, and family members. A large part of my identity became caring for my mother, parenting my teenage brother, and helping my grandparents through the death of their only daughter. The day my mom died, I lost a large part of my identity. This piece is about the realization that I will be treading in grief for the rest of my life.

I think The Day After My Mom Died is my best piece, but many people don’t find it engaging. Most musicians like I Am A Strange Flute the best (it’s for flute and electronics), and most pianists like Phase Trio. The Day After My Mom Died is the first piece I wrote without thinking of the audience, making it one of the closest to my heart.

The Day After My Mom Died

My mother died last summer after battling cancer for 6 years. My grandmother, my younger brother and I were at the core of it, especially the last three months when she was in hospice. I became the head of the household: organizing finances, navigating the bureaucracy of palliative care and finding long term housing for my younger brother. My grandmother was my mother’s caretaker, and we both did our best to help my brother through the process. The four of us: my mother, my grandmother, my brother and myself, spent every day together, helping each other through the progression of the disease.
A week a er my mom’s passing, I moved to Spain to begin my Fulbright grant, my grandmother returned home, and my brother went to live with our father. An er spending every day together for three months, we went our separate ways, them 950 miles apart, me 5000 miles away. We still talk a few times a week, but there is only so much peace you can find in those around you. I can be a good grandson and a great brother, being a point of stability in their lives, but I can’t help them love the world again. The only thing that can do that is going outside. I live on the coast of Spain, my brother’s on an island in the Pacific Northwest, and my grandmother in Nevada, 3 parts of the world with beauty unfiltered by human ingenuity. The only way to love the world aft er watching your only daughter die or realizing that your mother will never meet her grandkids is by sitting by yourself, looking out at the Nevada desert or the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean and letting the world be enough. It is the only way to regain the faith needed to recognize a human cannot understand the universe but still have trust that you are loved by it. No book, music, or art can do this for you. Nothing short of the environment can rekindle your love for the world.
This piece is about the three of us independently carrying on with our lives a fter a tragedy brought us together for so long, and my hope that they have found what I have found in the world that surrounds me.
The clarinet melody is from the chant “Alleluia: Pascha nostrum” found in the Worcester Cathedral manuscripts, (GB-WO (Worcester) F 160, Pal. mus. XII, 7). It is a chant about rejoicing and praising Christ. The other two parts are my own.

5000 Miles Apart

The moment I realized my mom’s creative outlet was parenting, that my brothers and I were her works of art and the things she was most proud of creating before she died, I recorded my breathing. I wanted an emotional artifact of accepting the gratitude and the burden of being someone else’s creation. This became the rhythm of the piano chords of this piece. Once I found the right quartertone harmonies, the other parts fell into place.

This piece was performed by Ensemble Modern at Rice University on April 7th, 2024.

Gavin Sol Goodrich

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