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

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

Beyond Color There is Light ACE - for pierrot sextet (2025)

Beyond Color There Is Light draws on my experience at the massive Rothko Retrospective at the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris in January 2024.  It was truly surreal to see 115 Rothkos in a single space and there was a beautiful, enigmatic, and luminous aura among the entire space. Seeing so many of these paintings, and seeing them so closely, one starts to realize how one-sided it is to characterize these paintings as still or suspended; these are incredibly active paintings filled with magnitude of tiny details in color, brushstrokes, and shapes that add so much to the vibrancy of the work. These micro-activities also helped create the sense of inner illumination that Rothko sought to create from within the paintings themselves. In Beyond Color There is Light, I try to capture this duality of stillness and create a sense of luminosity through the orchestrational and harmonic worlds. Through passages of driving melodic lines and rich harmonic webs, a passage of dreamy, floating, and rustling chords with a lyrical cello solo, and an animated, mixed-meter passage, the experience of this piece is as if we notice all of the tiny details flash before our eyes, but we still maintain this shimmering and suspended world in our presence. Beyond Color There Is Light was written with appreciation and admiration for the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble and Tim Weiss. 

Tim Weiss, conductor
Antonina Styczen, flute
Ian McEdwards, clarinet
Laura Gamboa, violin
Miles Reed, cello
Seth Schultheis, piano
Xin Yi Chong, percussion

Beyond Color There Is Light - for pierrot sextet

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)

Loved with Everlasting Love

PROGRAM NOTE

This piece, a collaboration between Yenhsing Chen and Dooree Kang, was written for the 3rd Synesthesia Show, "Differentiation" (Peabody X MICA). It contains two parts: a sculpture and a musical composition.

We delve into moments of organic dialogue among different cultures, where established identities blur and transformation brings profound ambiguity. This effort to connect inevitably creates a challenging "gray zone," an uncertainty that sparks true understanding—especially when our communication in a foreign language doesn't quite meet our intention.

Dooree's work reimagines a traditional canvas as a sculptural installation where painting, video, and space converge. By projecting fragments of her daily life in the U.S. onto creased canvas and mesh screens, she investigates the "gray zone" between cultures—an ambiguous, fluid space where misunderstanding, humor, and moments of dissonance coexist and evolve.

Yenhsing's composition explores the interplay between two domains: language and music. The composer first recreates spoken language through meticulous instrumental writing, orchestrating the pitch contour, formants, and consonants of the speaking voice using the ensemble. Subsequently, this rendered speech is developed and transformed into musical material, thereby questioning the precise boundary between language and music. The initial material comes from the transcription of the composer's voice saying, "I hope you enjoy."

PERFORMANCE

Date: October 11-18, 2025
Location: Making Space Bmore, Organized by Synesthesia Spectrum
Opening Performance Oct. 11th, Saturday, 7:00PM
synesthesia-bmore.com/event/

Conductor: Ying Lam Eva Chu
Flute: Ivan Smaltsuga
Clarinet: Renzo DeCarlo
Bassoon: Jonathan Mokry
Violin: Isabel Rushell
Viola: Seoyeon Jun
Cello: Theo Geonhoon Kim
Double bass: Sunwoo Kim
Percussion: Cherri Chen
Percussion: Michael Liu

Recording: Yoonjung Lee
Directors: Yoonjung Lee, Dooree Kang

Speaking on the Threshold "I Hope You Enjoy It" (2025) for large ensemble

For two saxophonists, shells and live electronics. Written for Erin Rogers and Antonin Bourgault. Performed at l'Édifice Wilder, April 30th 2025.

Full video performance here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekO0geVkjgo

Limpidités VI

odes to the body unsung (2025) for 13 players

I've been thinking a lot recently about music and the body. We react to sound in every single part in our anatomy, from our limbic system to our respiration to our motor system. But when we talk about how our bodies respond to music, we tend to focus on only certain parts – we feel it in our guts, it pulls at our heartstrings, it makes us tap our feet – and ignore others. In this piece, I imagine the music which resonates and activates the “unsung” parts of the body. What would music for the gallbladder, for the eyelashes sound like? Here, I take inspiration from the wonderful poet Sharon Olds, whose odes praise parts of the body that aren’t typical poetic subjects. 
 
“ode to the ligaments of the ankle” is a jagged, raucous folk dance, and “ode to the gallbladder” is a lullaby in warm, pulsing microtonal harmony. “ode to the vertebrae of the spine” reimagines the keyboard percussion instruments as the backbone of a skeleton, and “ode to the eyelashes” unfurls in fluttering wisps. The piece is rendered in a shimmering, dreamlike microtonal language. I invite you to not just listen to this piece, but to feel it resonate in your whole body.

odes to the body unsung was commissioned by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition. It was premiered by the Grossman Ensemble, conducted by Timothy Weiss. 

Performed May 2025 by the Grossman Ensemble conducted by Timothy Weiss
Recorded by Chris Willis

odes to the body unsung is scored for sinfonietta - 1(+picc, alto fl.)1(+e.h.)10.alto sax.1000.2perc.pno.hp.11110


odes to the body unsung (2025) for sinfonietta

Hold out your hands and listen to the rain - for soprano and piano (2025)
Text from Robin Wall Kimmerer's book Braiding Sweetgrass (used with permission from the author)

Melanie Spector, soprano; Andrew Chen, piano

The text for Hold out your hands and listen to the rain draws on passages from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, and explores the many topics on nature about which she writes: the varied temporal frameworks of nature, the interconnectedness of humans, animals, plants, and mushrooms, and the role that nature plays in our memory, whether that is individually, collectively, or across generations. I found Kimmerer’s writing incredibly captivating as she brings her experience as an indigenous scientist to create deeply lyrical, vivid, and empathetic descriptions of many environmental worlds and our relationships to it. The sound worlds of Hold out your hands and listen to the rain feature passages of lush, yet delicate melodic lines, warm chords, and a shimmering lyricism to create a continual sense of wonder. Hold out your hands and listen to the rain was written with admiration and gratitude to Robin Wall Kimmerer. the Aspen Music Festival and Ear Taxi Festival.


Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and
flowing, like newly washed hair. Golden green and glossy above, the stems are banded with
purple and white where they meet the ground. Hold the bundle up to your nose. Find the
fragrance of honeyed vanilla over the scent of river water and black earth and you understand
its scientific name: Hierochloe odorata, meaning the fragrant, holy grass. Breath it in and you
start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten. - Robin Wall Kimmerer


Premiered at the Aspen Music Festival and School in August 2025; Version for String Quartet and Voice commissioned by the Ear Taxi Festival and premiered by KAIA String Quartet and Hayley Fox. 

Hold out your hands and listen to the rain - for soprano and piano

Justin Weiss is a composer and conductor whose music explores relationships between the visual arts and music through the intersection of lyricism, textural play, and transformational forms. 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