Performed by John Tatara and Nathan Sepinwall; April 18, 2025; Midwest Graduate Music Consortium 29th Annual Conference; Stamps Auditorium, University of Michigan; Ann Arbor, MI.

Isen — for percussion duo (2023)

Soliloquy (Violin and Piano) Movement 2

Soliloquy (Violin and Piano) Movement 3

Performed by Texas New Music Ensemble, July 2025

This piece, for pierrot sextet, originally began as a solo piano work written as part of a speedwriting assignment. Feeling there was more to what I had written (about a minute’s worth) I decided to expand what I had into a longer work for pierrot ensemble. The piece’s orchestration reflects this backhistory, as all the other instruments initially emerge out of the piano – then, as the piece progresses, the piano acts as a guide of sorts, shepherding the rest of the ensemble along the work’s trajectory, until at the end it simply…lets go. For this piece I also exercised more restraint than I typically do – having written many pieces with a large amount of aggressive energy, I thought it would be nice to do something a little understated.

The work’s title is a quote from the novel A Memory of Light, the final volume of Robert Jordan’s fantasy epic The Wheel of Time. This quote comes at a very impactful moment in the novel, and really stayed with me after having read it. As I was wrapping up this piece, I thought the quote would work very well as a title, since it in many ways describes what happens musically – while also serving as an homage to a book series that has had a large impact on me personally.  

Link to score:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/l7jarka9kx6rposzbj8y2/He-came-like-the-wind-like-the-wind-touched-everything-and-like-the-wind-was-gone.pdf?rlkey=mvv0vd36gwf7tvadylejayjim&dl=0


He came like the wind, like the wind touched everything, and like the wind was gone (pierrot sextet)

Engines of Wonder seeks to enthrall the players and audience alike with a soundworld of energizing hope. The piece opens with an optional ethereal introduction, and is then propelled by the pulsing groove of the electronics in an ever-growing sense of amazement and wonder.

I hope this music demonstrates to musicians at the very beginning of their musical journey, as well as more advanced players, the power and joy of playing music together in a community, and spurs them to actively make music their entire lives.

Engines of Wonder (grade 1) ASU MIX

The Lovers is an adaptation of one movement from a much larger work, The Treachery of Sounds. Originally scored for Violin, Cello, Flute, Clarinet, Piano, Percussion, and electronics, this new version captures the tango dance of the original, with two masked dancers, for Alto Saxophone and Piano.

The title is from René Magritte’s painting of a couple, kissing while their heads are shrouded. They are simultaneously intimately entwined and kept separate. I envisioned a wild tango, fragmented at first, that gradually gains cohesion, momentum, and passion. A brief, traditional tango interlude sees the dancers in the original version come together unmasked, only to return to the masked, unrequited, unstable dance from before, exhausting themselves.

I am grateful to Andrea Edlbauer and Oksana Kuzo for their fantastic musicianship and generous help in testing this new version and giving the world premiere of the work!

The Lovers

The Lovers (Duo Edlbauer Kuzo)

5 years - that's how long I've been working on various forms of this piece. "Escape" is about navigating a sea of distress and frightening intensity of all kinds, but hopefully always with the goal of some eventual resolution in mind. It's a work that evolved from experiments quilting together samples of all kinds - everything from reversed, processed and highly spliced opera, house, pop and country music to modern orchestral and electronic music that includes my own. All of these never quite recognizable samples combine into a nightmarish journey through a slew of intensely quiet, dramatic, occasionally even violent electronic sounds in highly dynamic space. But the nightmares do have an end: the last 5 minutes are the "sunrise", and they can be a work by itself. The ultimate resolution is the gentle, distant but very bright illumination - like an ascent into the spaceborne sunrise in the attached image, bringing us to a gentle, exhausted evaporation from the nightmare we are escaping from.

Begin at or around 11:30 for "sunrise".

escape (2025)

Through My Child Eyes (Mockup)

Title: sculpture viii | kerf study
Year: 2025
Performers: longleash (Pala Garcia, John Popham, Mika Sasaki)

sculpture viii | kerf study [piano trio]

Title: echontologies
Year: 2025
Performers: Jeffrey Zeigler (cello), James May (voice, electronics)

echontologies [voice, cello, electronics]

Program note:

My main concept of this piece was formal in nature. The idea in question was simple: a gradual increase in energy and intensity from beginning to end, finally culminating in an explosion, a feeling of everything drawing to a red-hot point. What I found interesting about this particular formal idea is that it owes more to rock music than to classical – indeed, it was listening to various rock songs that undergo this type of transformation that first gave me the idea for this piece. There are numerous songs in the rock world that have this type of formal construction (i.e. Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin, One and The Day That Never Comes by Metallica, Starless by King Crimson, more Tool songs than I’d care to name, etc.) but when it comes to pieces in the classical realm that do the same thing, I was hard pressed to name even one. The reason for this, I believe, is that whether it’s sonata form, traditional fast-slow-fast arrangement of movements or sections of pieces, or even general treatment of musical themes, the idea of return is thoroughly ingrained in classical sensibilities, and this idea would of necessity preclude the type of form described above. 

What I wanted to do was to create a piece with this formal idea taken straight from the rock world, but with a “syntax” that was firmly planted in the traditions of classical music. The result is a piece that gets carried by its own momentum, and as such, has little room for backward glances. That said, there are definitely themes and other musical ideas that get developed and transformed throughout the piece. It is a fusion of sorts, one that I hope is both fresh and invigorating.

Link to score:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/g7lh2bvjhxlurua/Whirlwind.pdf?dl=0

Whirlwind (for trombone quartet)

KrisPeysen

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