This is a new recording of my piece for flute solo, Character Study I, as recorded by my friend Alexa Letourneau  (https://alexaletourneau.com/) at The Tank! (https://tanksounds.org/)

The reverb and echo in this recording is the natural reverberance in that space!

Character Study I (now with reverrrrrrbbbbbb)

When I began conceiving of and working on this piece, it was April, and at the time I was really looking forward to a trip I had coming up in May—but, I found that I was focusing so much on that trip that the days were passing me by, and I had lost the current moment in longing for and trying to live in a future moment. That got me thinking quite a bit about the nature of longing and led me to the concept of this piece which is about the moment before something happens. Sitting in that moment, when there is something to come, the emotional content is rich: there’s longing and anxiety, but also hope and excitement and of course fear and so many millions of other feelings that can run through you in these moments. Usually, we try to move out of them as quickly as possible, to get to the “thing” itself, which I think is a shame since there are so many shifting and gripping emotions that we leave behind with the moment. An asymptote of a curve is a line that, while getting closer and closer, never meets, until infinity. Likewise, longing is an emotion defined around its unresolvability, but which we must live in all the same. Given all of this, I invite you for these few minutes to try not to give too much consideration to the future: what happens next in the piece, after the piece, after the concert, tomorrow, the next day and so on, but instead to just live in the moments as they happen.

On the asymptotic nature of longing was premiered August 11th, 2022 by the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble in Harris Hall as part of the 2022 Aspen Music Festival, for which it was commissioned.

On the asymptotic nature of longing

Recorded at the 2022 Aspen Music Festival as part of the composition and VocalARTS Collaboration

This is a setting of the poem November, by Sara Teasdale, from her collection Love Songs.

Soprano: Gabrielle Turgeon
Mezzo-soprano: Meg Brilleslyper
Piano: Manuel Arellano

The world is tired, the year is old,
The fading leaves are glad to die,
The wind goes shivering with cold
Where the brown reeds are dry.

Our love is dying like the grass,
And we who kissed grow coldly kind,
Half glad to see our old love pass
Like leaves along the wind.

your gaze is on my face: November

Commissioned by the Emory University Symphony Orchestra – Paul Bhasin, Conductor

Premiered April 22nd, 2023

Notes:
Chlorinated bras, Face first in the bubbles, Gaslighting stares, Dead composers are dead, Three baked beans ago, These soiled onions, Desiccated soccer balls, Stab me in the eye (with your 3/4 tea-stir), The stoned rats, Cats (ltant1981ALWmbotbata)*, Wax memories, The pensive dog (sad), Byzantine etymology, No more bubble baths, The unwashed vegetables, Small pile of leaves (in a heart shape), Mangled muffin, Blendable winds, Not over my dry, bland noodles, The static constellations, Decapitating mandibles, Vibrating bees, Dry grass is a sin, Thomas Adès is a horse that lives in Colorado, Altered echo, Recursive side chaining, Bovine nightmares, Humans can have a little gasoline, as a treat**, Tell ‘em I hate ‘em, Trusting my past selves, Subtle clout, Traumatized radish, Jesus will rise again in Houston, Kinds of flow, Comforter by the eyes, My one thought, Cloud Debussy, I’m a BLT of sadness, Precarious chilling, The drama onions, Chaos is not the concern, The comedy onions, Illegal napping, Become Lattice, A stupid little French assignment, Enforced groove, Reframing the rain, Complimentary water, Nepotistic presence, Recursive box dream, The wet corn chips, Hidden in the legs, Pulverized potatoes, Cloister of deception, The sad onions, Gymnastic snails, Problems with saxophones, Semi-aquatic worms, Basket-less future, Basket-case-past-life-regression, The artificial tears
* (like the animal, not the 1981 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical based on the book about the animal)
** Don’t drink gasoline.

What Color Am I When The Sun And The Moon Hang Above Us

Premiered by the New York Youth Symphony, May 2023

Lies I Told You Four Days Ago

Crystal Says (2023)

Written for and premiered by arx duo at Connecticut Summerfest 2023

Vibraphone: Garrett Arney
Marimba, Crotales: Chris Whyte

Program Note:

it continues
the horizon is another dimension
before coming
glimpsing, in a moment
without

Crystal says beyond
stumble into
it’s past already
and also going
it cannot

Crystal Says

Laberinto de la Soledad (2023)

for flute and live electronics

Flute: Alejandro Escuer
Electronics: Sofía Rocha

Premiered at Martinos Auditorium, Brown University, Dec. 4th 2023

Laberinto de la Soledad

Anxiety for string quartet is a work that I wrote, for the most part, over the course of two nights during and in the aftermath of an anxiety attack in Winter of 2016/2017. It follows the trajectory of my experiences, beginning in the middle of the anxiety ridden night with the first movement, “In the Throes.” The second movement, “Sinking,” depicts the continuation and eventual end of that anxiety attack, while the third movement, “Postlude, starlight,” changes character and reflects instead the environment outside directly following the end of the anxiety attack. It is the only piece I’ve written that has programmatic narrative, and as such carries a very personal meaning.

Anxiety for string quartet

for those in anguish

Character Study I is an exploration of the flute’s natural tendencies, both in a historical and contemporary sense. The piece is largely based on patterns and sounds that have long had a place in flute performance which are then melded with more modern extended techniques and pitch structures to create the whole. The primary pitch content of the work, Ab, B, C, D (Db), Eb, F (F#) and G, is a combination of two maqams, modes of playing in Arabic music, of which the Persian Ney (which is a type of flute) is the primary wind instrument. Elements of the performance of maqams are also present in the piece, such as the changing of pitch collections in different octaves, although these aspects are not strictly followed and rather form a basis of inspiration from which the work was drawn. The piece is broadly organized into three equal sections (ABA’), with each of them sharing some materials with the other sections.

Character Study I for unaccompanied flute

This prelude first grew out of a desire of mine to write a work that was heavily based in triadic harmony. I had been, for a lengthy period leading up to this, writing pieces that were mostly non-triadic in harmonic language, and felt a sort of innate need to write something in a dramatically different aesthetic than my other pieces. I decided to write a piece that was post-minimalist in nature, sharing its aesthetic with minimalism, but not aligning with the ethos of minimalist composing. Instead, the piece still exploits elements such as directionality of phrase and cadential movements. In the absence of functional harmony, however, movement of notes, color, interplay of independent arpeggiation, and contour lend the music its phrasing.

Prelude (four-hand version)

A little piece I wrote as a speed-writing exercise over the course of about a day and a half. It's a setting of the first half of Sara Teasdale's poem of the same title. There's some theatrics and staging that unfortunately aren't possible to show in audio, but are part of the "experience."

Recorded by Silvina Suárez (soprano) and Jonathan Shin (piano), who have my greatest compliments for their wonderful performance.

I Shall Not Care

When I was asked to write a piece for this somewhat peculiar trio, and given only a month to do it, I knew that I needed to start planning immediately. I wanted to make a piece that was challenging, both conceptually and technically, but that still had a lightness to it—a serious attempt at being un-serious.

Echoes/27/Idyll is based on contrasts. Just as the title places different words and ideas directly up against each other, the music does as well, with materials being cycled and varied throughout. The pitch content is derived from the most natural of sources: the overtone series. Much of the work uses only the overtone scale (which has a raised 4th and lowered 7th, compared to a major scale), with the other sections still being inspired and drawing largely from overtones.

This is a live recording of the piece from its premiere at the Divergent Studio at the Longy School of Music in June 2019. 

Flute: Jessica Lizak  |  http://www.jessicalizak.com
Horn: Laura Weiner
Bassoon: Rachael Elliott  |  https://www.bassoonproject.org

Echoes/27/Idyll

World premiere recording, November 7th at the UMKC Conservatory

Duo for Two Types of Wind was written for and premiered by Duo Entre-Nous.

The title of this piece is meant to invoke both the wind as an element—the various forms, shapes and sounds it can take on—and the nature of the two instruments comprising the duo, both being woodwinds. Thus, the piece is broadly in two parts, each being inspired by a different “type” of wind. The syntax of the piece, meanwhile, takes cues from the way that we most often use wind: to speak. The performers are playing (speaking) to each other and for each other, while the audience are merely observers of the conversation they would be having anyway.

Performance by:
Duo Entre-Nous | https://www.duoentrenous.com/
Jackie Glazier, Clarinet | https://www.jackie-glazier.com/
Don-Paul Kahl, Saxophone | https://donpaulkahl.com/

Duo for Two Types of Wind

In setting out to write this piece, I wanted to explore ideas of difference in interpretation, in people and in understandings. To this end, I decided to create three sets of musical and expressive materials, each very apart from the others, both in musical and ethical terms. These evolved into the three characters present in His hand turned the page over. (all unnamed) who use text pulled from the same source—a small excerpt from James Joyce’s Ulysses—and who are all played by the same performer, joined by the same ensemble and written by the same person. The purpose is to consider how, even with so many shared elements, such diverging paths may be taken. There is no overarching narrative, but the piece exists rather to create portraits of three very different people at a moment in their existence. These characters and their music do not overlap, but instead are juxtaposed quite directly next to each other, with switches from one character to another becoming more rapid as the piece goes on.

Recorded by loadbang | https://www.loadbang.com/ 
at Oktaven Audio | http://www.oktavenaudio.com/

With special thanks to loadbang, KCEMA and UMKC for the opportunity to write this piece.

His hand turned the page over.

greys is a piece meant to explore and evoke a sound-world somewhat different than what we may be used to. It requires the performer to prepare their guitar, such that the frets do not create evenly spaced half-steps, like usual, but instead create unevenly spaced intervals that are between a half-step and whole-step. This is in a way a transformative process on the guitar—while the tone remains similar, the structure of how pitch is organized is fundamentally modified, both allowing for new possibilities while simultaneously disallowing the normal. Thus, it is meant, for both audience and performer, to thrust us into somewhere new, without option to return to where we once were. Old actions have new results.

Recording by Jay Sorce | http://www.jaysorce.com/
Premiered as part of the Hypercube Composition Lab

greys

In writing this work, I wished to provide a space for all the members of the string quartet to have soloistic moments, as well as extended melodic passages, so that the whole quartet is involved and at the forefront. The first movement has strong tonal elements, while the second abandons them. Both, however, have a strong emphasis on lyricism and texture, and beyond that a certain affiliation with romanticism. The name comes from the type of wave, which happens to be the medium of sound, but besides also has a certain longingness to it. The standing wave appears in motion but is static in space—likewise there are elements in the quartet that move only within their own realm but remain static in their relation to their surroundings.

Recording by JACK Quartet | https://jackquartet.com/
Recorded at the Oktaven Audio Studio

Standing Waves

Sofía Rocha (b. 1996 in Boulder, Colorado) writes music of uncompromising emotional intensity while exploring cognition, randomness, rhythm, and counterpoint within post-tonal frameworks. She writes for all manner of performing forces instrumental, vocal and electronic.

she/they

Sofía Rocha

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