Like an Altar with 9,000 Robot Attendants
for orchestra

Performed by the USC Thornton Symphony & Don Crockett
October 16, 2015
Bovard Auditorium, Los Angeles, CA

“And inside, the house was like an altar with nine thousand robot attendants, big and small, servicing, attending, singing in choirs, even though the gods had gone away and the ritual was meaningless.”
-Ray Bradbury, “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950)

Like an Altar with 9,000 Robot Attendants (2015) - USC Thornton Symphony

Chamber work for Trombone Quartet and surround sound electronic track. Written for the Juilliard Beyond the Machine concert series, premiered April 5, 2003. This was one of several "study pieces" in electro-acoustic integration I made over the years. A portion of this served as the source material for Ecstatic Waters, Mvt. II. Performers: Adam Peixotto, Jamie Williams, Brad Williams, Ben Green.

Vultures (2003)

written May-July, rev. Oct
rec. 14 November 2017

Ethan Hoppe, violin
Hayaka Komatsu, viola
Mac Taback, cello
Jordan Calixto, bass
Miles Walter, piano
Agata Sorotokin, conductor

Greg DiCrosta, audio engineer
Miles Walter, composition

Eighteen figments after Joanna Newsom, Side A (2017)

live at Manhattan School of Music 4/2/18

now with more dB than ever!

~Nois Quartet

Brandon Quarles - Soprano Sax
Hunter Bockes - Alto Sax
Jordan Lulloff - Tenor Sax
Janos Csontos - Bari Sax

©? (extra dB mix)

Nodus Tollens (2018)
for orchestra (2222-4331-timp-strings)
Winner of the 2020 ASCAP Rudolf Nissim Prize

noun. the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore—that although you thought you were following the arc of the story, you keep finding yourself immersed in passages you don’t understand, that don’t even seem to belong in the same genre - which requires you to go back and reread the chapters you had originally skimmed to get to the good parts, only to learn that all along you were supposed to choose your own adventure.

John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

The composition of Nodus Tollens was motivated by John Koenig's online work, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Our socioeconomic and political climate is deeply divisive and partisan today, and suffers immensely from criminal injustice and strife. One can simply go online or turn on a television and learn of countless stories of death, war, hunger, natural disaster, and any amount of unending turmoil. The continued self- imposed ignorance and lack of desperately needed change will eventually lead to disastrous consequences. We are all in the same car barreling down the highway at breakneck speeds, and it will only take one small bump to end in a fiery demise. If we cannot grasp onto what is important and work towards a common good, we will bury ourselves in the graves we have already begun to dig.

Nodus Tollens alternates between tense anger and frustration and introspective moments of clarity. It represents my confusion and struggle to find where my life's path is taking me. This struggle may define others' moments of insecurity as they progress through their lives. The work begins with a solo cello playing over a slowly growing background of rumbling low strings, icy harmonics, and winds echoing the cello's ideas. The cello's beginning melodic fragments comprise every piece of the evershifting foreground and background of the piece. The rhythmic conversation of two against three is also used as a quasi anchor, to which sections constantly return before new sections occur. Bits and fragments of ideas float intangibly past the listener, seemingly important at the moment, but appear after the fact to not be important at all. We may be meaningless creations of a dead world, but that does not take away from the importance of self-discovery, and documenting and cataloguing our journey.

Premiered by the Metropolitan Orchestra of St. Louis on 03/31/2019

Nodus Tollens (for orchestra)

Performed by Alarm Will Sound at the 2012 Mizzou New Music Summer Festival 
Missouri Theatre Centre for the Arts, Columbia Missouri

The Einstein Slide (2012)
Addendum to Collective Uncommon: Seven Orchestral Studies on Medical Oddities (2010)

The Einstein Slide is a short chamber concerto inspired by a medical slide of Albert Einstein's brain on display at the Mütter museum, a medical oddities museum in Philadelphia. 
	Lucy Rorke-Adams, the neuropathologist who donated the slides to the museum, has found that Einstein's brain is remarkably youthful for a man aged 76. "The blood vessels are gorgeous", she says. To reflect this, the music is ever inspired and brilliant, undergoing constant shifts and a childlike exploration of material. Scientists have found that Einstein's brain was lacking a complete Sylvian fissure, a type of wall separating the parts of the brain responsible for mathematical ability, spatial reasoning and three-dimensional visualization. Some argue that the synergy of these diverse segments in Einstein's brain allowed him to think differently. The Einstein Slide evokes this, musically, by way of constant shifting between sections. 
	There is also the "musical equation" toward the middle of the score. This is a musical representation of the formula E=mc2 in the form of a puzzle canon. Overall, the key areas of the work are C and C-sharp, reflecting, in a musical way, the c squared notion of the famous equation.


VI. The Einstein Slide (Chamber Concerto)

Higaleh Nah
for soprano solo, viola, SATB chorus, and piano
(2018)

Winner of the University of Michigan 2019 Brehm Prize in Choral Composition and a 2021 ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composers Award

University of Michigan Chamber Choir
Maggie Burk, solo soprano
Jimmy Cunningham, solo viola
Scott VanOrnum, piano
Eugene Rogers, conductor
(9.21.2019, Hill Auditorium, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan).

Y’did Nefesh is a Jewish liturgical poem, or piyut, in four stanzas. The poem is commonly attributed to the 16th century Kabbalist, writer, and poet Rabbi Elazar ben Moshe Azkari, and is typically sung and prayed during Kabbalat Shabbat, the Friday night Sabbath service. The Higaleh Nah stanza is the fourth and final stanza of this stunning piyut.

"Higaleh nah u’fros, chaviv alai et sukat sh’lomach, tair eretz mi’k’vodach, nagilah v’nis’mechah vach, maher ahuv ki va moed
v’choneini kimei olam, almaya…"

"Please, reveal yourself, my beloved, and spread upon me the shelter of Your peace. Illuminate the earth with Your glory, so that we may celebrate and rejoice within You. Quickly, my love, for the time has come. Have mercy on me for all days, forever."

Higaleh Nah - soprano solo, viola, SATB chorus, and piano - (2018)

Score & parts rental: http://murphymusicpress.com/products/w-500

The UT Austin Wind Ensemble, conducted by Jerry Junkin in Bates Recital Hall, October 27th 2019

Program Note:
“Write what you know” is something I think about often, and having lived in New York for several years now I probably know the city's subway system better than I know certain relatives. What begins as one of the most daunting aspects of living in New York gradually becomes one of the most comforting; not the trips themselves –they’re distinctly uncomfortable– but rather their familiarity. You know what you’re in for, you know where you’re going, you know it will be over soon. It’s the tearing-off-the-band-aid of New York.

I take the 1 train, which runs along the west side of Manhattan, at least twice a day from 157th street to 66th and back. Highlights of this trip include being bowled over by the herd of people switching trains at 96th, the elevated tightrope-esque 125th street stop which skies above Harlem, and the turbulent tracks between 145th and 157th. It’s maddening, but there is something satisfying about knowing to grab the handrail once you leave 145th.

This piece is about my commute from 66th up to 157th. To me, nothing is a better symbol of the energy shifts that you experience in a city like New York. You’re either on, hurtling through work, school, meetings, friends, more work, or you’re off, sitting in the back of a Starbucks trying to catch your breath for a moment, or sitting on an empty 1 train as it emerges from underground at 125th street, sun shining through the windows. In New York, there’s no in- between.

On-Again, Off-Again - wind ensemble

Pablo O'Connell, Oboe 

MULTIPHONIA is an exploration of the sonic range of the oboe. The soloist utilizes a variety of extended techniques, including: playing without the reed "alla tromba", overblown harmonics, multiphonics, and altissimo register. 11 events occur over the duration of the piece, which are used as the basis for improvisation.

Artwork:
"We Will All Be Changed" by Michael Cina

MULTIPHONIA (2020) for oboe and tape

Completed October 18, 2020

Premiered March 29, 2021 at the Lviv Philharmonic by Natalia Martynova, piano, the KLK String Orchestra, and Roman Kreslenko, cond. 

Audio mastered by Andrew Bohman

Having lived most of my life in major metropolitan centers, nature has only rarely served as an inspiration for my work, and never more so than with The Light That Breaks Through. Written at an artist colony in upstate New York, I found myself surrounded by all kinds of novel sights - vast stretches of open sky, meadows of wild thyme, vistas of the Hudson Valley extending into an ageless horizon. I began taking multiple walks a day to try and soak it all in, as if to make up for my years spent in the city.

This piece derives its title from the beauty of sunlight spilling through crevices in the sky. Filtered through crisscrossing branches and insouciant cloud layers, the resultant light on my forest walks possessed a sprightly capriciousness. I felt a kind of kinship with its occasional clarity, particularly as an improviser: I often sit at the piano for hours before ideas solidify beyond the haze of experimentation and into music.

I sought to create a concerto that would feel like one of these unbroken improvisations: the pianist fantasizing, the strings evoking the soloist’s imagined soundscapes. The piano begins by tentatively poking and prodding at a simple three-note motif, and as such, the strings cast a similarly uncertain backdrop. As the soloist extends into grander, more explosive gestures, the strings swell in strength and take on a life of their own. Eventually, the piano emphatically regains control, and gradually returns to the opening material, as though recovering a lost memory. This time, the pianist gently invites the strings into a hymn-like melody. The piece culminates in celebratory arpeggios of the main motif that gradually drift up and away, retracting into the pianist’s highest register.

Large Ensemble

The Light That Breaks Through, concerto for piano and strings

Ryan Lindveit (b.1994, Houston) writes music.