through depths and shadows - for sinfonietta (2023).

through depths and shadows continues my recent exploration of the relationship between music and the visual arts. through depths and shadows was inspired by Jackson Pollock's fascinating and atypical piece, The Deep, which I saw this summer at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Unlike many of his athletic and excited “drip paintings,” this one seemed to have a much more measured and slower energy. The painting layers large swaths of colors on the canvas—while also maintaining distinct lines, gestures, and shapes—allowing for the various shades to make their presence known or hidden depending on the other colors present. My experience of this piece was very different from what I usually experience with Pollock; rather than experiencing dynamic and vibrant motion across the painting, I felt like I was continually sucked into the canvas and attempting to find myself within the layers of the “deep.” Looking at this painting became an experience of continual exploration and uncovering, in a way that is analogous to exploring the many layers of one's self. through depths and shadows is not a literal representation of the painting but an abstraction of both Pollock’s materials—his modes of layering, sporadic drips, and gradual unveiling—and my experience of continually searching within the shadings and underlayers. through depths and shadows was written with admiration for the incredible virtuosi of the Grossman Ensemble.

Commissioned by the Grossman Ensemble and the Center for Contemporary Music at the University of Chicago. Premiered December 2023 with the Grossman Ensemble and conductor, Georgia Mills. Recording Engineer, Chris Willis.

through depths and shadows - for sinfonietta

Jesus that name we love

Charlotte Mundy, soprano
Laura Cocks, flutes
Madison Greenstone, clarinets
Marina Kifferstein, violin
Ellery Trafford, percussion

[Program Note]
The inspiration comes from reading academic papers, grappling with their meaning, feeling a bit frustrated, and ultimately playing with the sound of words.

[Text]
"Composition puts together elements from the input spaces to create new entities in the blended space, yielding flowers that can gaze and empathize. Completion extends the image suggested by the original mapping, drawing on our background knowledge of the circumstances summoned by the CIN. For instance, we know that flowers deprived of nourishment will soon die; thus, the flowers that will be laid with the miller in his grave will almost certainly be dead flowers. Because these are anthropomorphic flowers, we can also imagine that the nourishment they require is not water (even in the form of bitter tears), but evidence of true love." (Lawrence Zbikowski, “The Blossoms of ‘Trockne Blumen,’” Music Analysis Vol. 18, no. 3 (1999): p.313.)

“Composition puts elements from the input spaces” (2025) for TAK Ensemble

Reflective Contours - for reed quintet (2025)

Reflective Contours responds to the relation of two primary materials in Norman Lewis’ painting, Street Musicians. In this painting, the central foreground consists of a collection of jagged shapes and calligraphic lines combining bright colors and dark shadings. Surrounding this exists a hazy framing, which consists of largely the same color palette but as greyed and blurred clouds. I am captivated by the collective and playful energy in the central material that seems to recede to the outer edges of the misty texture. In my experience of the painting, the tender framing quells the energy of the central activity with a gentle and reflective hue, while the central motion gives a buoyancy to the haziness. Thinking about the collective activity in everyday musicmaking, in Reflective Contours, I wanted to highlight the virtuosity of the quintet by creating a web of interweaving lines in both movements; sharp and angular in the first movement and resonant and tender in the second movement. These two characters inform the experience of the other, echoing on my experience of Lewis’ painting. Reflective Contours was written with admiration for the Akropolis Reed Quintet and the RED NOTE Music Festival.

Premiered in March 2025 by the Akropolis Reed Quintet at Illinois State University. 
Tim Gocklin, Oboe
Kari Landry, Clarinet
Matt Landry, Saxophone
Ryan Reynolds, Bassoon
Andrew Koeppe, Bass Clarinet

Reflective Contours - for reed quintet

Three Dreams for tenor, piano, and string quartet

Commissioned by Miguel Zazueta

Performed by Miguel Zazueta (tenor), Kyle Adam Blair (piano), and Quartet Nouveau (Batya MacAdam-Somer, Missy Lukin, violins; Annabelle Terbetski, viola; Elizabeth Brown, cello)

Conrad Prebys Concert Hall, UC San Diego, 05.22.25

I. The Dream Keeper (Langston Hughes)
II. Sueño Despierto (José Martí)
III. In Tall Grass (Carl Sandburg) / Primero Sueño (Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz)


The Dream Keeper - Langston Hughes

Bring me all of your dreams, 
You dreamers. 
Bring me all of your 
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them 
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too rough fingers
Of the world. 


Sueño despierto - José Martí

Yo sueño con los ojos
Abiertos, y de día
Y noche siempre sueño.
Y sobre las espumas
Del ancho mar revuelto,
Y por entre las crespas
Arenas del desierto,
Y del león pujante,
Monarca de mi pecho,
Montado alegremente
Sobre el sumiso cuello,
Un niño que me llama
Flotando siempre veo.

 
In Tall Grass - Carl Sandburg

Bees and a honeycomb in the dried head of a horse in a pasture corner—a skull in the tall grass and a buzz and a buzz of the yellow honey-hunters.       

And I ask no better a winding sheet
                             (over the earth and under the sun.) 

Let the bees go honey-hunting with yellow blur of wings in the dome of my head, in the rumbling, singing arch of my skull.     

Let there be wings and yellow dust and the drone of dreams of honey—who loses and remembers?—who keeps and forgets? 

In a blue sheen of moon over the bones and under the hanging honeycomb the bees come home and the bees sleep.

 
from Primero Sueño - Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Piramidal, funesta de la tierra
nacida sombra, al cielo encaminaba
de vanos obeliscos punta altiva,
escalar pretendiendo las estrellas;
si bien sus luces bellas
esemptas siempre, siempre rutilantes,
la tenebrosa guerra
que con negros vapores le intimaba
la vaporosa sombra fugitiva
burlaban tan distantes,
que su atezado ceño
al superior convexo aún no llegaba
del orbe de la diosa
que tres veces hermosa
con tres hermosos rostros ser ostenta;

quedando sólo dueño
del aire que empañaba
con el aliento denso que exhalaba.

Y en la quietud contenta […]

Three Dreams, for tenor, piano, and string quartet

Paul Novak - a diagnosis (2024/25) for soprano, mezzo-soprano, and sextet
performed May 8th, 2025 by Mycelium New Music at Fulton Street Collective

Mycelium New Music
Justin Weiss, conductor/co-artistic director
Paul Novak, flutes/co-artistic director 
Michael Tran, clarinets
Dylan Feldpausch, violin
Isidora Nojkovic, cello
Jonathan Hannau, piano/keyboard
Rebecca McDaniel, percussion
with guest artists:
Kristina Bachrach, soprano
Emily Price, mezzo-soprano

"a diagnosis" is a catalog of bodily aches, a list of symptoms which grows strange and resonant. It will eventually be the opening piece in my in-progress song cycle when i was nine i couldn’t walk, which draws from my recollections of a childhood diagnosis with a psychosomatic illness. a diagnosis focuses on the body and the things it unknowingly stores: memory, trauma, ache, desire. The text is adapted from my poem “a diagnosis.”
Paul Novak

Art: Max Ernst, "the Triumph of Surrealism"


a diagnosis (2024/25) for voices and sextet

This composition’s title is derived from a work by the 20th century Catalan visual artist Joan Miró. The piece captures the experience of looking at the strikingly beautiful painting for the first time and gradually taking it all in in: first, as an incredibly rich and colorful composite, then honing in on specific shapes.

Benjamin T. Martin: Ladders Cross the Blue Sky in a Wheel of Fire

Justin Weiss is a composer and conductor whose music explores relationships between the visual arts and music through the intersection of lyricism, liminality, fragility, and textural play. Justin’s music has been recognized with a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Prix Langage Musical from Les Écoles d’Art Américaines de Fontainebleau, the Walter E. Aschaffenburg, and awards and recognitions from institutions such as ASCAP, Society of Composers, Inc., and The American Prize, Tribeca New Music, and YoungArts. 

Justin’s music has been performed internationally by ensembles including Quatuor Diotima, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the Grossman Ensemble, TAK Ensemble, Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, Sandbox Percussion Quartet, and ~Nois Saxophone Quartet. Justin is the conductor of the University of Chicago New Music Ensemble, a co-founder and conductor of the new ensemble, Mycelium New Music, and has premiered dozens of pieces internationally. Justin studied at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the Royal Academy of Music in London, and is a PhD Fellow at the University of Chicago where he studies with Augusta Read Thomas.

through depths and shadows - for sinfonietta

Justin Weiss - Composer