interlocutor (2021) for piano quartet

interlocutor was written as a part of the 2021 RED NOTE New Music Festival for Left Coast Chamber Ensemble.

Performed April 2021 by Left Coast Chamber Ensemble
Anna Pressler, violin
Phyllis Kamrin, viola
Leighton Fong, cello
Allegra Chapman, piano

Image: "in my opinion" by @constantbageltherapy on instagram

interlocutor (2021) for piano quartet

je suis plus prés de toi dans l'obscurité... for brass quintet was written as a part of the 2016 MATA Jr. Festival for Face the Music, under the guidance of mentor Žibouklė Martinaitytė. 

performed July 2021 by Reno Modern Brass/reNEW Ensemble
Josh Reed, Trumpet
Cassidy Robinson, Trumpet
Kevin Miescke, Horn
Paul Fleming, Trombone
Eric Rogers, Bass Trombone

je suis plus prés de toi dans l'obscurité... (2016) for brass quintet

reflected tides (2021) for soprano and ensemble
i. drifted at random

reflected tides was written in collaboration with poet Ira Goga for Ruston Ropac and the Blackbox Ensemble during the summer of 2021 as a part of their 2021/22 season. This recording was made during a residency at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute.

Leonard Bopp, conductor
Ruston Ropac, soprano
Annie Nikunen, flute
Tyler Neidermeyer, clarinet
Lara Lewison, violin
Dudley Raine, viola
Jordan Bartow, cello
Julian Loida, percussion
Jixue Yang, piano

Text adapted from "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life" by Walt Whitman:

Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses,
Froth, snowy white, and bubbles,
(See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last,
See, the prismatic colors glistening and rolling,)
Tufts of straw, sands, fragments,
Buoy’d hither from many moods, one contradicting another,
From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell,
Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil,
Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown,
A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves floating, drifted at random,
Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature,
Just as much whence we come that blare of the cloud-trumpets,
We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out before you,
You up there walking or sitting,
Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet.

reflected tides (2021) for soprano and ensemble: i. drifted at random

prisms and mirrors (2021) for pierrot sextet

I’m fascinated by prismatic musical forms: structures that continuously refract and reflect, kaleidoscopically shifting and evolving but at the same time static and unchanging. I imagine a light shined through a series of crystals and mirrors, shimmering into colorful spectra and bouncing in unexpected directions. Similarly, prisms and mirrors maps a single idea through a series of musical refractions and reflections, a set of continuous variations which is by turns textural, rhythmic, and melodic. To me, this concept of musical form resonates with the beautifully collaborative nature of writing music, in which all ideas are continually refracted throughout the course of notation, interpretation, and performance. prisms and mirrors musically enacts this refraction, with all the fragility, intricacy, and color of a prism refracting light. prisms and mirrors was commissioned by the Boston New Music Initiative as part of their 2020-21 season. It is scored for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, percussion, and piano.

Performed December 2021 by Blackbox Ensemble
Leonard Bopp, conductor
Annie Nikunen, flute
Tyler Neidermayer, clarinet
Teagan Faran, violin
Jordan Bartow, cello
JC (Jon Clancy), percussion
Jixue Yang, piano

prisms and mirrors (2021) for pierrot sextet

"birds, the binding of" was written for Quince Ensemble as part of their 2021-22 residency at the University of Chicago. It sets a text by poet Ira Goga entitled "birds, the binding of."

Performed by Quince Ensemble
Engineered by Chris Willis

birds, the binding of (2022) for high vocal quartet

entwining (2021) for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano

Recorded June 2021 by Music from Copland House
Moran Katz, clarinet
Pala Garcia, violin
Alexis Gerlach, cello
Margaret Kampmeier, piano

One of the preoccupations of my music in the last several years has been miniature forms. I’m drawn to short, unassuming pieces which contain entire musical worlds, and to tiny structures which are nevertheless immersive and finely detailed. entwining is a set of three interlocking miniatures which are very different but nevertheless subtly unified. The first movement is a colorful swirl of motion; the second a shimmering meditation; and the third a gentle and luminous dance. The title entwining refers to the complex orchestrational ways that the performers converge and interlock musically through the piece. This focus—on the collaborative, social aspects of performing chamber music together— feels especially resonant for a piece written during the COVID-19 pandemic and recorded during a virtual residency.

entwining was commissioned by Copland House for its CULTIVATE 2021 emerging composers’ institute, and was premiered by the Music from Copland House ensemble. CULTIVATE 2021 fellowships and commissions were funded by the Amphion Foundation, ArtsWestchester, ASCAP Foundation, BMI Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, Friends of Copland House, Jandon Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, NewMusicUSA, and New York State Council on the Arts.

entwining (2021) for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano

dialogues in color (after ellsworth kelly) for string orchestra, piano and percussion (2020/22)

Performed May 2022 at the University of Chicago, conducted by Justin Weiss

As someone who is fascinated by the transformation of tiny, simple ideas into complex pieces of art, I find the work of Ellsworth Kelly captivating. Kelly, a painter and sculptor known for the minimalist abstraction and geometric austerity of his work, spent much of his career fixated on the endless permutation of certain color palettes and patterns. One of Kelly’s specific preoccupations was with planes of color, and the sensation of viewing these paintings is often surreal: viewed against the backdrop of the white gallery wall, the juxtaposed geometric shapes take on an expressivity and a sense of lightness and heaviness. 

Just like the infinite permutations of Kelly’s work, dialogues in color is about the complex juxtaposition of simple musical ideas. Each movement of this set of four preludes is a conversation between two distinct musics: the first between a low, distant thunder and a lyrical chorale, the second between a high, wandering twinkle and a reckless, thorny sound world, the third between a syncopated scherzo and its resonance, and the fourth between a trembling repeated note and a shimmering, cascading run.

dialogues in color (2020/22) for string orchestra, percussion, and piano (excerpts)

nothing moves in a straight line (2022) for percussion quartet

Performed July 2022 by Aiyun Huang, Rebecca Lloyd-Jones, Nikki Joshi, and Emma Ng, percussion, as part of soundSCAPE Festival in Bobbio, Italy.

Image: Untitled (1992) by Joan Mitchell

nothing moves in a straight line (2022) for percussion quartet

dances and prayers in isolation (2020)
for various instrumentations
i. dance no. 1 for flute and marimba "fidget"

Paul Novak, flute
John Corkill, marimba

dances and prayers in isolation is a set of short pieces written for and performed remotely from quarantine by friends and colleagues during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Each miniature is scored for a different solo or duo instrumentation, and the work is structured with fast, rhythmic movements alternating with somber, reflective ones.

Image: Treatise on the Veil, Cy Twombly

dances and prayers in isolation (2020): i. dance no. 1 for flute and marimba "fidget"

"ghost story" was written in collaboration with poet Victoria Flanagan and choreographer Marc Macaranas as part of "New Music/New Dance," an interdisciplinary performance by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition and DanceWorks Chicago.

Kristina Bachrach, soprano
Ben Melsky, harp
John Corkill, percussion

Adeline Else, dancer

Hunter Brown, sound engineer

ghost story (2023) for soprano, harp, and percussion

dream catalog (2021) for soprano, mezzo-soprano, and percussion quartet

Performed May 2023 by Ekmeles and Sandbox Percussion at the Logan Center for the Arts
Charlotte Mundy, soprano
Rachel Calloway, mezzo-soprano
Jonny Allen, Victor Caccese, Ian Rosenbaum, and Terry Sweeney, percussion
Jeffrey Gavett, conductor

In January 2021, I began to keep a dream journal. I dreamt a lot this year about masks and crowds, as many of us did; I also dreamt frequently about my body and my health. Some of my dreams were related to my life and memories, and others had no clear connection. In many of my dreams, familiar things seemed unfamiliar and strange; in others, mundane things took on a profound but puzzling affective weight. In some of these dreams, I inhabited my own body; in others, I did not. The text for dream catalog is adapted from my poem of the same name, which is structured as a list of dreamt images—sometimes strange, sometimes funny, sometimes beautiful. dream catalog was written for Ekmeles and Sandbox Percussion as part of a 2021-22 UChicago Student-Led Project.

Image: René Magritte, "The False Mirror"

dream catalog (2021) for soprano, mezzo-soprano, and percussion quartet

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

many aches (2023) for mezzo-soprano and piano (excerpt)

Commissioned by Lynx Project as part of their 2022/23 Amplify Series, in collaboration with poet Parker Scheu

Performed by Hailey Cohen, mezzo-soprano, and Florence Mak, piano
Classical Music Chicago Rush Hour Concert, June 27th, 3023

many aches (2023) for mezzo-soprano and piano (excerpt)

gravity dances (2023) for clarinet, trombone, piano, percussion, violin, cello, and bass

i. stumbling dance
ii. sinking dance
iii. hurtling dance

Performed June 2023 at the Norfolk New Music Workshop
Norfolk Contemporary Ensemble
Ning Zhang, clarinet 
Yuki Mori, trombone
Makana Medeiros, percussion
Liam Wooding, piano
 Lauren Conroy, violin
Thomas Hung, cello
Alyssa Peterson, double bass
Lisa Moore, conductor

Thumbnail: "Falling Apart" by Sarah Schonert

gravity dances (2023) for septet

ornithology of desire for was commissioned by InfraSound Ensemble as part of their 23/24 season. It is scored for three spatialized piccolos and electronics. 

Performed on November 11th, 2023 by InfraSound Ensemble
"Portals Between Worlds," LGBT Center of New York
Yoshi Weinberg, Stefanie Proulx, and Megan Torti, piccolos
Alex Ring Gray, electronics

ornithology of desire (2023) for three piccolos and electronics

a dance is a kind of wish (2023) was commissioned by the University of Nevada, Reno for the faculty of the School of Music in honor of the University’s 150th anniversary. It is dedicated, with admiration and gratitude, to Dmitri, Aaron, Joshua, Eric, Natalie, Hyeyeon, Andy, and Reed.

Performed February 2023 by the faculty of University of Nevada
Dmitri Atapine, cello
Aaron Hill, oboe
Joshua Anderon, clarinet
Eric Fassbender, bassoon
Natalie Higgins, horn
Hyeyeon Park, piano
Andrew Heglund, percussion
Reed Chamberlin, conductor

Image: The Three Dancers (1925) by Pablo Picasso

a dance is a kind of wish (2023) for cello and chamber ensemble

gardensongs (2024) for string quartet

         I can’t stop
putting plants in the ground. There’s a hunger in me,
a need to watch something grow.
- Ada Limon, “Sway”

gardensongs reimagines a string quartet as a garden teeming with life. I think there’s a real power to thinking of the complex network of relationships in a string quartet (musical, artistic, personal) as an ecosystem: grown through small daily rituals, needing to be nurtured and cared for with tenderness, encompassing an intricate web of symbiotic relationships. In gardensongs, I explore the ecology of the string quartet, envisioning its virtuosity as the cultivation of a garden. Inspired by timelapse videos of flowers sprouting and blooming, the first movement takes the form of a playful set of dances in which material germinates and propagates between the different members of the quartet. The second movement is a shimmering and expressive meditation on the garden as a metaphor for the connections between us – musical, ecological, familial. 

gardensongs (2024) for string quartet
​ i. dances of blooming
ii. i need to watch something grow 

Live Performance by Quatuor Lontano, July 2024

gardensongs for string quartet was co-commissioned by Quatuor Lontano and Meenakshi Chakraverti in honor of her daughters Pia and Milena.


Image: Claude Monet, Monet’s garden at Vétheuil

gardensongs (2024) for string quartet

seven dreams about my body (2023/24) for sextet
i. dream in which i float on a black sea (for toru takemitsu)
ii. dream in which my body is a flock of birds (for ben johnston) 
iii. wasps’ – nest – dream (for gyorgy ligeti)
iv. dream in which my body is a constellation (for kaija saariaho) 
v. dream in which my body is clockwork (for unsuk chin)
vi. teeth – falling – out – dream (for andrew norman)
vii. dream in which i cannot walk (for anthony cheung)


Performed at University of Chicago Tea Time Series
Justin Weiss, conductor
Paul Novak, flute
Michael Tran, clarinet
Blaise Magniere, violin
Isidora Nojkovic, cello
Winston Choi, piano
John Corkill, percussion

Image: Salvador Dalí, "Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus"

seven dreams about my body (2023/24) for sextet

forest migrations (2024) for orchestra
by Paul Novak

Forests slowly move to new geographic areas across many generations in response to environmental threats such as climate change. These migrations demonstrate the power and versatility of the natural world, which we think is static but is truly always developing and adapting. However, the phrase “forest migration” to me also darkly alludes to the very different migration that trees undergo as forests around the world are destroyed. And I have been thinking about the great debt musicians owe to trees. So many of the instruments we play are constructed from wood, and in a certain sense the creation of these instruments seems, poignantly, like a third type of migration.

forest migrations explores different layers of time, with active layers of surface motion always buoyed by the slow movement of the forest. Much of the material of the piece is built from tightly interwoven canons which unravel patiently throughout the ensemble like the mycelium network of a forest. Throughout the piece, the wooden instruments of the orchestra resonate in their most fundamental ways, with music built from natural harmonics, open strings, and melodies of interlocked fifths. My aim was to create a sound world that is patient and resilient, like the natural world this piece pays homage to.

forest migrations ​was commissioned by American Composers Orchestra through the 2020 Underwood Commission. 

Recorded by Aspen Conducting Academy Orchestra, Ulysses Derrien, conductor


forest migrations (2024) for chamber orchestra

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

for narrator, flute (doubling harmonica), oboe (doubling harmonica), trumpet in C, trombone, piano, percussion, violin, and cello

Premiered August 2015 at Boston University Tanglewood Institute Honors Recital

IV. When my dream was near the moon…
V. Not all the knives of the lamp-posts…
VI. Rationalists, wearing square hats…

Six Significant Landscapes is a programmatic work based on a series of wonderfully evocative Wallace Stevens poems of the same name. Each poem in the series suggests a unique atmosphere and uses a distinct language and tone, but subtle motivic connections create a sense of unity between the poems. As I worked on this piece, I struggled to musically capture the moods of the text while still representing this overall unity. In this performance, the final three movements of what will be a six movement cycle for narrator and octet will be performed. In the fourth movement, a trembling texture descends through a series of nocturnal variations (using a quotation from Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire) before settling back into silence. The fifth movement juxtaposes pulsing repeated notes with shimmering colors, utilizing harmonicas to draw diverse timbres from the ensemble. The sixth movement begins with a solemn progression of open fifths, but springs into a lyrical section of joyfully angular lines. 


Six Significant Landscapes  IV. When my dream was near the moon...

for orchestra

Winner of the 2015 National Young Composer's Challenge

Premiered October 2015 by Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra

Image is The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh

Fractured Night/Blue Stars

for solo Piano

Premiered January 2015 by James Winn

Image: Manhatten Winter III by Karin Schmachtenberg

January Fragments I. Dream

Six Significant Landscapes I. The old man sits in the shadow of a pine tree...

The sea has always served as an inspiration to my music, but rarely as directly as in on buoyancy, which was written as a programmatic depiction of the ocean. The piece begins in a swirl of color, with sounds intertwining like unaligned waves. Cascades of descending lines collide with swells in the brass and strings, and fragments of melody emerged from the texture before being swallowed up again. In the middle section of the piece, a shimmering sound world is punctuated with rumbling growls in the brass, and as the work closes, the intertwined swells and flowing runs of the opening section return. The primary melodic and harmonic material of the work is derived from Takemitsu’s “sea motif” (the notes spell out S-E-A in German), and this motif is explored and developed over the course of the piece. on buoyancy was written as part of the NYO-USA Apprenticeship under Sean Shepherd.

Written for and performed by the National Youth Orchestra of United States of America in July 2016, conducted by Enrico Lopez-Yanez

Image is "Out to Sea" by AJ LaGasse

on buoyancy, for orchestra

written as part of the 2018 Bowdoin International Music Festival in collaboration with Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Premiered in July 2018 by Susan Kang, flute, Erica Schwartz, viola, and Caroline Mellott, harp

Image: "Relief Head of Ashurnasirpal II," Assyrian, ca. 875-860 B.C.E., from Kalhu (Nimrud), Iraq, on display in the Bowdoin College Museum of Art

debussy palimpsest (2018) for flute, viola, and harp

As I was writing anatomies of fragile things, I was thinking a lot about the complex and colorful patterns on the wings of butterflies, and in the sound world of this piece I wanted to capture their intricacy and fragility. The work opens with a swirl of gently descending runs in the piano and violin, which are interrupted by a plaintive oboe melody. Distant, celestial chords emerge in the top octave of the piano, as the violin and oboe interject with tremolos and fragments of melodies. In the middle section, the falling lines from the beginning are distorted: where before they were fragile constellations of sound, now they’re now jagged and syncopated. The final section returns to the music from the beginning, and the work closes with a long, sustained harmony fading to nothing.

Premiered November 2018 by Julia Simpson, oboe, Angela Bae, violin, and Wesley Ducote, piano at Shepherd School of Music Fall Composer's Forum

anatomies of fragile things (2018) for oboe, violin, and piano

Premiered April 2019 in Duncan Recital Hall

Joshua Hong, conductor
Megan Torti, flute/piccolo
Julia Simpson, oboe/english horn
Justin Best, clarinet
Julianne Mulvey, bassoon
Shawn Zheng, horn
Ayman Abouleish, trumpet
Zach Glaser, trombone
Joe Desotelle and Justin Kang, percussion
Wesley Ducote, piano
Mae Osawa and Julianne Oh, violins
Sarah Mason, viola
Nathan Hsu, cello
Rachel Martin, bass

Image: Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus, by Cy Twombly

as the light begins to drift (2019) for sinfonietta

not of longing (2019) for soprano and double bass

I love vocal music that straddles the line between abstract musical object and concrete linguistic meaning. For me, writing for voice allows an opportunity to fragment and deconstruct a text like a musical motif, and to build narrative meaning out of musical phrases as if they are sentences. In not of longing, I set a tiny fragment from the last sentence of Maggie Nelson’s genre-defying book “Bluets”, an achingly beautiful set of poetic “propositions” that meditate on loss and the color blue. “Bluets” closes with the sentence “When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light,” and I adapted the second half of this line into many different splintered forms throughout the piece. The pairing of soprano and double bass might seem unwieldy, but I was actually intrigued by the seamless blend between the sounds of the voice and bass: throughout the piece, you’ll hear the bass imitating vocal sounds and the soprano mimicking string effects like ricochet and tremolo. The piece builds from sounds, into syllables, into words, into full sentences, before it retreats back into unintelligibility. not of longing was commissioned by soprano Anika Kildegaard and bassist Will Yager for their duo LIGAMENT in Fall 2019.

Performed March 2020 by LIGAMENT in Voxman Recital Hall in Iowa City, IA

not of longing (2019) for soprano and double bass

insurance interludes (2019) for saxophone, cello, and piano 

“If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?”
            -Charles Ives 
“Real hell is there for me in the office; no other can hold any terror for me.”
            -Franz Kafka
“Poetry and surety claims aren’t as unlikely a combination as they may seem.”
            -Wallace Stevens

insurance interludes is a set of musical portraits of three modernist artists who worked in insurance for the majority of their lives. I’ve been fascinated for a while by the biographical similarities between composer Charles Ives and poet Wallace Stevens: both men were innovative pioneers in their fields the early 20th century who filtered American Transcendentalism through a modernist lens, both lived in Connecticut, and both famously refused to quit their day jobs as insurance executives. In addition, both men had troubling aspects of their lives that complicate my love of their art. Ives was a noted misogynist and homophobe whose pejorative of choice was “sissy,” and, to me, Steven’s superbly imaginative poetry is somewhat undercut by his deeply conservative politics. While Franz Kafka was far less attached to his day job as an insurance lawyer, (he frequently remarked it was just a way to support his writing), it is not difficult to make connections between his career as a bureaucrat and the nightmarish depictions of bureaucracy in his fiction. For each of these three artists, a radical creative practice coexisted with or was perhaps even shaped by a career in insurance; insurance interludes is an attempt to reconcile these disparate, multifaceted aspects of their personalities.
​
Like the three artists that inspire them, these short pieces are very different, but there are subtle connections between them. The first movement attempts to capture Ives’s contradictions through jagged, angular rhythms; the second depicts one of Kafka’s surreal and bleak landscapes; and the third musically enacts Steven’s playful musings on the human imagination, in poems like “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman.” 
 
insurance interludes was written for New Music on the Point in Spring 2019; a version also exists for clarinet, cello, and piano. 

Performed June 2019 by Garret Klaus, alto saxophone, Addie Hotchkiss, cello, and Winston Choi, piano at New Music on the Point

insurance interludes (2019) for saxophone, cello, and piano (excerpts)

to grow in lightness (2020) for viola, percussion, harp, and piano

i. filigree cities 
ii. cities lined like a hand's palm

performed March 2020 by Sebastian Stefanovic, viola, Nick Finley, percussion, Cindy Qin, harp, and Chelsea de Souza, piano

​“….in his dreams now cities light as kites appear, pierced cities like laces, cities transparent as mosquito nettings, cities like leaves' veins, cities lined like a hand's palm, filigree cities to be seen through their opaque and fictitious thickness.
"I shall tell you what I dreamed last night," he says to Marco. "In the midst of a flat and yellow land, dotted with meteorites and erratic boulders, I saw from a distance the spires of a city rise, slender pinnacles, made in such a way that the moon in her journey can rest now on one, now on another, or sway from the cables of the cranes."
And Polo says: "The city of your dream is Lalage. Its inhabitants arranged these invitations to rest in the night sky so that the moon would grant everything in the city the power to grow and grow endlessly."
"There is something you do no know," the Khan adds. "The grateful moon has granted the city of Lalage a rarer privilege: to grow in lightness."
-from Chapter 5 of “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino
 
to grow in lightness was written for violist Sebastian Stefanovic and harpist Cindy Qin for their graduate recitals in Spring 2020.

Image: Karina Puente

to grow in lightness (2020) for viola, percussion, harp and piano (excerpts)

a string quartet is like a flock of birds (2020) 
nine meditations and dances for string quartet

Commissioned by Kinetic Ensemble in Fall 2020

Performed Nov. 1st, 2020
Kinetic Ensemble - Textures of Change
Live Oak Friends Meeting House
Houston, TX

I've been thinking a lot recently about togetherness and apartness; how while we grieve and reckon with the collective trauma of the pandemic we've been isolated from one another, but at the same time we're still struggling to find new ways to connect. And in a certain sense, a string quartet epitomizes these ideas: it's a coming together of disparate things, fusing solo virtuosity with a more communal, receptive way of playing. All four parts are equal, and each player has to be both a follower and a leader. And I've also thinking about how wrong it feels to be creating something slow and somber to be performed now, when a return to music-making should really be a cause for joy and celebration. a string quartet is like a flock of birds is structured in 9 interlocking movements, with slow, reflective meditations alternating with fast, rhythmic dances. The whole quartet is focused on the musical idea of togetherness: the 4 parts fit together like a puzzle, and only when all the parts are fit together do melodies emerge. Each section in the piece is about the players slowly finding each other: sometimes overlapping, sometimes drifting apart into different kinds of motion, circling around each other like birds in flight. 

https://www.paulnovakmusic.com/
https://www.kineticensemble.org/

Image: Photo by Daniel Biber

Paul Novak

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