Commissioned for Elinor Armer’s 75th Birthday Celebration

Program Note: When presented with the opportunity to write for Elly’s festivities, overwhelmed ridiculosity ensued. There were too many options. I would have loved to work on a grand opera that reached the absurd puns saturation point, but time and instrumentation restraints brought me back down to
earth. Elly helped instill a love of plundering other composers’ work. This inspired my tinkering with Bach’s “Gavotte in G Minor BWV 822”. The arrived at dance has little in common with the baroque gavotte. Instead an attempt at rhythmic, Milhaudian joy is offered in celebration of the greatest mentor, composer, inspiration and friend.

Recording Coming Soon

This album is in memory of my grandfather Albert Sever. Each track is my own personal representation of a different approach to cope with his passing. Part notated ambience and part process derived descant, this is my best attempt at emulating the repercussions from losing a great man. 

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clarinet, violin, cello, piano, field recordings + processing

Between three and four in the morning, the awakening of birds: a solo blackbird or nightingale improvises, surrounded by a shimmer of sound, by a halo of trills lost very high in the trees. Transpose this onto a religious plane and you have the harmonious silence of Heaven. -Olivier Messiaen

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handbell choir, recorders, melodica, piano, spoken word, field recordings + processing

Based on the poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
Dedicated to Becky Reilly

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synthesizers + field recording

“XXII” (The Red Wheelbarrow) from the anthology “Spring and All”

by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

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