Setting of the poem by Emily Brontë, for soprano and string quartet. To be performed this November at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.
I’ll update this page with the live recording when I have it!
Kingfishers
September 14, 2026Trio for flute, clarinet and bassoon, about 4:30. It will be performed at the fall concert of NACUSA SF, Friday Oct. 23 at 8 pm, at the SF Community Music Center.
The title is inspired by Hopkins’ “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”, and Olson’s “The Kingfishers”, but the music doesn’t have a detailed connection to either.
Quasi all’antica
April 24, 2026Overture in an almost classical style, for chamber orchestra. Duration ca. 4 minutes. Composed for the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra; performed June 6, 2026, at Old First Church in San Francisco.
Parts and audio — includes a demo but also the live recording (MP3).
Program note:
“Quasi all’antica” (“Kind of old-style”) is an overture for chamber orchestra, a tribute to 18th-century music. Its form is modeled on the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, with two parts, each repeated with different orchestration. The sound and harmony are my own version of 18th-century language, plus a few more modern touches. The mood is lively, like the overture to a comic opera.
Strauss Horn Concerto #1, for horn and string quartet
April 24, 2026An arrangement of Richard Strauss’s Horn Concerto op. 11, with the orchestral part reduced for string quartet. Created for Megan Cullen and the Bay Area Arts Alliance; to be presented in concert April 25, 2026 at the San Francisco Community Music Center.
Performance by Megan Cullen, horn, February 2026:
The First Century of World Wars
November 11, 2025Setting of the poem by Muriel Rukeyser, for mezzo-soprano and piano. Text used by permission of Bill Rukeyser. Composed for the Del Mar International Composers Symposium, August 2025.
Performance by Sarah-Nicole Carter, mezzo, and Phil Dannels, piano.
Mirage and Echo
November 11, 2025Trio for flute, viola and harp. Composed for the Del Mar International Composers Symposium, August 2025.
Performed by Ginevra Petrucci, flute, Julia Moss, viola, and Rosanna Moore, harp.
Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout
August 31, 2025Duet for flute and violin, named after the poem by Gary Snyder. Written in 2020. About 6 min.
The Garden (I)
May 3, 2025Part I of a setting of H. D.’s poem “The Garden”, for soprano with violin, clarinet, and cello. Runs about 2:40.
Performed April 26, 2025 at the Center for New Music, San Francisco, by Hailey Gutowski, soprano, Maki Ishii Sowash, violin, Stephen Zielinski, clarinet, and Vicky Ehrlich, cello.
Cowlick
February 19, 2025For mixed quintet (cb/va/vn/cl/ob). Composed for a call for scores by the Bridge Music Collective, and premiered on March 1, 2025 at the Center for New Music, San Francisco.
PDF Score and parts, and synthesized demo, in this folder.
The Song of Wandering Aengus
September 19, 2024A setting of the Yeats poem, for soprano, violin, and piano. Duration about 5m.
Performance: Oct. 26, 2024 (YouTube). Marielle Leiboff, soprano; Manny Vousé, violin; Amy Zanrosso, piano. In the Bay Area Arts Alliance’s Opus 5 concert, at the Center for New Music, San Francisco.
“The Song of Wandering Aengus” (1897) is a poem of Yeats’s early period, telling a compact fairy story in the style of a ballad. It draws on the Irish mythological figure of Aengus, who (in one of many adventures) fell in love with a girl in a dream and pursued her for years. But it’s eclectic rather than faithful: according to Yeats, the direct inspiration was a Greek folk poem. Some of the images are invented, and the silver and golden apples at the end recall both Greek and Irish stories.
It’s a showpiece for Yeats’s extraordinary ear. As with “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, his most famous poem of this period, the rich balancing of every vowel and consonant makes a hypnotic effect, almost burying the content of the lines. (This is a quality he took up from Swinburne and other predecessors, and made his own.)
But for a composer, an even more striking feature of the poem is its rhythmic regularity. Every line has eight syllables (with an exception for “flickering”, “glimmering”, and “brightening”, which have an optional short vowel in the middle), divided in four iambic feet. And the verse is “end-stopped”, i.e., the last word of each line ends a phrase. Yeats took these patterns from Scots and English folk ballads, but carried them out here with unusual consistency.
In setting the poem, I decided to lean into this regularity. Each line of the poem becomes a separate phrase for the singer. The phrases link up into a tune, which repeats for each stanza with small variations. Each time it reaches the end of a stanza, the tune opens out from the short phrases into freer ornamentation. The violin and piano back up the singer’s melody, and frame the stanzas with interludes in a more through-composed style.
