Music

La Maja Dolorosa (mp3)
This trio was originally written for a singer friend of mine for her senior recital using a text by the Spanish poet Fernando Periquet. The work is divided into three movements which blend right into each other - the first movement describes a woman who is enraged at the death of her lover, the second movement shows her hallucinating that he is still alive and the third movement has the woman coming to peace with her life and her loss. When we were set to record the work, the singer was sick, so I asked another good friend if he could play her part on soprano saxophone - it is this performance that you hear on this recording. This past January ARE performed this work in yet a third iteration...this time with Violin, Viola and Piano. The performers on this recording are David Box, saxophone, Aurélien Pétillot, viola and Reuben Allred, piano.

Epitaphs (mp3)
In the fall of 2004, I heard Luc Sante's "The Unknown Soldier" on "Selected Shorts", an NPR show that features short stories read by actors. I had never heard anything like it - it wasn't quite a poem, nor a narrative story, nor an abstract work. Luc Sante was very gracious enough to allow me to set his text to music in 2005 and the work was completed in the spring of 2006. In order to incorporate the text with the music effectively, I recorded myself speaking the text and then composed the score around that recording, allowing the spoken text to affect choice of tempo, meter, and textural shifts. "Epitaphs" was not originally written with dance in mind, but with the intensely vivid choreography of David Justin, the work has culminated into a very special collaborative event.

Elizabeth (mp3)
This recording is of a brief work I wrote for two very good friends of mine for their wedding a few years ago. When David asked me to write a solo work for ARE's first summer performances, I decided to renovate the piece for solo violin and retitled it as "...I to my Friends". Both versions of the work are celebrations of the strong friendships I have been lucky enough to have had since I first moved to Austin in 2001 to work on my doctorate.