Grey Fireworks, for violin and piano (2022)

Duo Concertante (after Helen Frankenthaler)

First performance on the 1st of September 2022 at Lukaskirche Kirchensaal, Luzern, Switzerland by Samuel Nebyu (violin) and Charles Abramovic (piano) as a part of the Summer Festival of Lucerne Festival 2022

Grey Fireworks is a work that is a response to a painting of the same name by the American abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler. The composition, like the painting, moves quickly through various moods, colors, and gestures. The immense motion, choice of colors, and seemingly improvisational burst of bright hues of the painting enabled the composition’s structure and capricious quality that certain gestures have in the work. Grey Fireworks was commissioned by the I & I Foundation for
Samuel Nebyu (violin) and Charles Abramovic (piano) as part of the Summer Festival of Lucerne Festival 2022.

Grey Fireworks, for violin and piano (2022) | Samuel Nebyu (violin)

"Through us from which language speaks" for large ensemble
Composed by Sofia Ouyang

Michelle Di Russo, conductor
International Ensemble Modern Academy:
Phoebe Bognár, flute and bass flute
Jeanne Degos, oboe
Drew Gilchrist, clarinet and bass clarinet
Jens Bracher, trumpet
Michael Martinez, trombone
Jaroslav Novosyolov, piano
Ying-Chen Chuang, percussion
Aya Masui, percussion
Miria Sailer, violin
Veronika Paleeva, violin
Miho Kawai, viola
Katarina Leskovar, cello
Riverton Alves, double bass

Performed at KKL Luzern as part of Lucerne Festival Composer Seminar final concert in August 2023.

Through us from which language speaks

Written for and premiered by Ensemble Linea conducted by Jean-Philippe Wurtz

Spirare IV (2024) for Pierrot Ensemble

O lente, lente nuit... o mon fusil si lourd... (for orchestra, 2024)
Title translation: O slow, slow night... o my gun so heavy...
Title drawn from the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire

Premiered by the Yale Philharmonia on the New Music New Haven series, December 12th, 2024, Conducted by Ezra Calvino

Program notes:
O lente, lente nuit… o mon fusil si lourd… (O slow, slow night… o my gun so heavy…) is a tone poem for large orchestra. Embracing internal contradictions, the piece explores the cohabitation of diverse musical materials including prolonged and ever-shifting chromatic clusters, teeming nightscapes, and soaring melodies, among other sonic characters.

O lente, lente nuit... o mon fusil si lourd... (for orchestra, 2024)

Performance by Mycelium New Music 

For pierrot ensemble plus amplified percussion

ASMR Music (Mycelium New Music)

NOTE: This is meant to be an audiovisual work! To see the video, please follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wim23zFLpLo

Completed April 1, 2025
Premiered July 26, 2025 by Alan Pierson (cond.) and Alarm Will Sound
Recorded live, mixed, and mastered by Rob Boullion

This piece was conceived when a good friend of mine, Elicia Neo, mentioned to me that she was learning Blender, a free animation software that, for whatever reason, seemed singularly donut-obsessed. For reasons still unclear to me, animating a donut was the Blender equivalent of ‘Hello, World!’, and the more I thought about this, the more amusing yet existential the implications became. The donut seemed a perfect metaphor for the superficiality of the digital world, distinguished as much by its immediate appeal as by its fundamental emptiness. I wondered how many digital donuts existed by virtue of Blender, and I wondered how many were used as assets in video games, films, images, memes, and beyond. 

It occurred to me that even prior to the onslaught of open-source generative AI models, there were probably more digital replicas of objects than there were actual objects in the world. Between photos, drawings, animations, emoji, and derivatives thereof, the digital realm - the virtual world, the ‘metaverse,’ or whatever dystopic buzzword is next - was ever-growing and ever-deepening in its expansive, cannibalistic project of cataloguing every conceivable thought, symbol, and idea its screen-addled users could provide. And again, this was happening at a wildly uncontrolled rate even before the likes of ChatGPT were unleashed. 

You Are a Topological Donut recounts, by way of its corny meditation stylings, a history of donut imagery. The piece begins with old-timey photos and moves through increasingly surreal animations, growing more and more nightmarish and bizarre as simulation, simulacra, and self become subsumed into a digital soup of hollow pixels. Even as it sinks into apocalyptic incomprehensibility, the music remains foolishly optimistic and bright-eyed to the very end. 

This piece was written in collaboration with Elicia, who created and storyboarded all the animations in Blender. Many thanks to her and the brilliant musicians of Alarm Will Sound, whose daring and technical craft gave me the confidence to write something so enthusiastically absurd.

You Are A Topological Donut, for Alarm Will Sound

O Chest Pain

Program Note:

OSCILLATIONS, for large ensemble and electronics, plays with color and collage, juxtaposing different textures and materials on a constantly shifting sonic canvas. As the title suggests, this piece explores fluctuations between states, expanding the concept of a waveform - a core electronic sound source for the piece - into a greater formal and temporal argument. Defined as periodic movement between two points, waveforms are the building blocks of sound synthesis. In essence, sound synthesis could be described as series of interconnected oscillations, where complex sounds are produced from the combination and modulation of simple sounds. This core concept was my guiding influence throughout the composition of this piece, where fluctuations in parameters like texture and tempo are simultaneous with those in the electronics, creating another kind of sound synthesis between acoustic and electronic components in the piece. 

OSCILLATIONS feature a range of electronic sounds, from sine tone clusters and frequency modulation, to prerecorded processed sounds that act as a halo around the acoustic ensemble. The piece also embeds electronic sound sources within the ensemble, such as the ground hums produced via bass amps in the percussion set ups, and the use of electronic mechanisms like Ebows and electric fans in the harp and piano parts, furthering the shapeshifting role of the electronics.  On a macro scale, this piece oscillates between different textures, tempos, and colors, with varied electronics functioning as a glue, or collaging agent between parts. The instrumentalists weave their parts together to form composite lines, creating a jagged and episodic counterpoint that is frequently interrupted. Taken together, this combination of contrapuntal line, polyphonic noise, and ticking rhythmic vignettes, weave a vivid and varied tapestry, full of fluctuations.

This piece was commissioned by the Grossman Ensemble for premier on March 7th, 2025 under Conductor David Fulmer at the University of Chicago.

OSCILLATIONS for large ensemble, modular synthesizer, and electronics

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

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

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

Paul Novak

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