More info/purchase link: https://www.mollyjoyce.com/store/p/imperfection

Imperfection seeks to explore and highlight supposed “perfections” and “imperfections” of string instruments. As a disabled musician, I have always been fascinated by many musical obsessions with “perfection,” either with tuning, structure, performance, and so on. Therefore with this work, I sought to explore what perfection and imperfection might mean with string instruments and within the context of the string quartet. Therefore the work explores various techniques on the instruments and specifically the range from open to closed/muted sound.

Imperfection was commissioned by Music Academy of the West for their 75th Anniversary Season, and premiered in July 2022 at the Academy by the Crimson Quartet.

Imperfection

PERFORMERS:
Jacob Schafer, violin
Nathan Lowry, violin
Catherine Chen, viola
Otávio Manzano Kavakama, cello
Derek Wang, piano

PROGRAM NOTE:
Piano Quintet No. 1, “Things people have said about death” is my attempt at processing and understanding grief through borrowing other people’s words. Or rather music.

My grandmother passed away in March 2022. After her passing, I felt that sometimes my own words were not enough to express what I was feeling. The sorrow, the emptiness, and the anger were so much bigger than I could comprehend. So I decided to look at how the composers of the past generations that I admire dealt with death and grief in their music. In this piece, you’ll hear quotations of the funeral march from Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-flat major, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, and many other pieces in the canon that don’t necessarily have to do with death. But I realized all of the pieces I quoted are integral to my musical tapestry of right now, and it only made sense to bring in those pieces to talk about someone who is very important to me.

MOVEMENTS:
I. Soup
II. March
III. Dance

PERFORMANCE HISTORY:
Piano Quintet No. 1, "Things people have said about death" was commissioned and premiered by the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble in Aspen, CO in August 2022.

Piano Quintet No. 1, "Things people have said about death"

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

longing is an aviary (2023) for orchestra
 
This work draws its title from Ross Gay’s poem “Because,” which depicts longing with an evocative catalogue of images which are quivering, luminous, and full of motion. I explore this same trembling effect in a series of tightly controlled, virtuosic dances for orchestra which spiral outwards from a single pitch. This music is driven by a kaleidoscopic sense of color, a process of refracting and unwinding, and a momentum which eventually builds into a frenzied, shimmering aviary of birds. longing is an aviary was written for the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, conducted by Tim Weiss in Spring 2023.

Performed April 2023 by the Civic Orchestra of Chicago and conductor Tim Weiss, Symphony Center, Chicago, IL. Mixed and mastered by Marc Alletag.

Special thanks to Jonathan McCormick and Anna Thompson

Image: 'Aviary' by Annie Davidson

longing is an aviary (2023) for orchestra

Written, produced, recorded, and performed by me.
Mixed and mastered by Sefi Carmel
Additional vocals by Crystal Lake Evans

Hey, Ghost!

Birds Returning For Sinfonietta

Train Dreams - for piano and electronics

Performance by Albert Steinberger.

Note: The world of classical music is a lot like a video game. When first learning music, you start at level one. As the music becomes more and more challenging, you eventually level up. Winning a competition or an audition is akin to conquering a final level boss. In the virtual world of video games, losing often means losing a life. The stakes of performance are different, but the feeling of loss is equally disappointing. Such disappointments, however, serve as motivation for further improvement. In pairing violin virtuosity with video game violence, Videogame Vespers examines the ambition we have as artists, demands of performance, the pain of failure, and the fleeting pleasure of achievement.

Videogame Vespers – for violin & tape

St. Hildegard of Bingen – the 12th century abbess, writer, composer, and mystic – spent much of her life in her monastery’s herbal garden. She wrote several volumes on botany and natural medicine, and her understanding of the natural world was deeply linked with her spiritual practice and visions. In this work, I imagine the orchestra as a garden, blooming from a solo viola solo into a colorful ecosystem teeming with life. It is orchestrated to suggest the reverberance of a single voice in a cathedral, singing in the floridly ornamented style characteristic of Hildegard. The seed of the piece from which the piece sprouts is the first two phrases of Hildegard’s antiphon "O rubor sanguinis" for St. Ursula: “O bloody red/that flowed from the height/divinity has touched: you are a flower/that the wintry breath of the serpent/has never touched.”

hildegard dreams of a garden was commissioned by the Orchestra of St. Luke's as a part of the 2025 DeGaetano Composition Institute. Performed by Orchestra of St. Luke's, conducted by Brad Lubman.

hildegard dreams of a garden (2025) for chamber orchestra (excerpt)

Video: https://youtu.be/obO7uqMYGLs

Performed by the Azure Quartet: Kj McDonald, Brenden Zak, Hannah Geisinger and Yifei Li

Spiral Sequences is a string quartet performed in two movements. The first, the shorter of the two, is frantic and pulse-driven, carried by momentum generated by spiraling 16th note patterns and repeated ostinatos. It presents fragments of a sequence-like pattern, one which is played in its complete form at the beginning of a longer, introspective second movement. The first movement presents an inward spiral, constantly tightening. The second works to unravel it.

Spiral Sequences - string quartet

Public reading session by conductor Katharina Wincor and the Aspen Conductors Orchestra on Aug. 11, 2019 at the Aspen Music Festival.
More info and perusal score at https://www.komschlies.com/music/a-hidden-sun-rises-orchestra
___________

A darkened orb, long dormant, and unseen by human eye 

Begins to stir and wake at last, and glow within, and rise: 

This, Of a great new dawn, the turning of the age, a sign 

___________

Spiral Sequences - string quartet

Jack Frerer