A scaled-down version of my piece En Caso de Fuego for one piano. The original work is written for five pianos. Performed by myself at The Wild Beast at California Institute of the Arts. The piece is a narrative about a burning building and those that get caught inside it.

Scenes and Selections from En Caso de Fuego

An arctic sunset, and out alone on the plains, a single man blows into a flute which echoes everywhere that is the ice, and this is the world.

Arctic Radio

Falling through the darkness, a cathedral of water that is void of all.

Falling

Tuning In On The Beast

Spiro is a vocal piece for breath, written almost exclusively in esperanto. It can be most simply be explained as a ‘Breath Poem’.

This piece strives to explore the universal breath, and this is done through use of a universal, yet unaccepted, language. The breath is of course the most common sound produced by humans, yet is the least accepted form of communication.

Within the breath lies so much intimacy and detail.

Spiro was premiered on 24 April 2014 by the Contemporary Vocal Singers in the Wild Beast music hall at CalArts.

Spiro

Butterfly [A]ffect

Because winter is still my favorite season.

something else cold

Originally meant to be a spoken work piece accompanied by harp, this because a radio poem and one of the transitions of my collection of short stories Trout are Selfish: Short Fictions and Transitions.

Jesse VanDenKooy

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