Video from Handgames (2016), interactive sound and video installation using the Leap motion sensor. Supported with initial funding from Sound and Music's Francis Chagrin award and developed at AYYO's Art Pitch residency.
I am a composer of concert music as well as a musicologist. As both a scholar and musical creator, I’m deeply concerned with voices, sonic aspects of text, and uses of preexistent materials of many kinds (from field recordings to motet tenors, snatches of melody to notational procedures.) In addition to chamber and vocal works, I write dramatic forms such as opera and collaborate on music for theater and dance. Besides writing for acoustic ensembles, I write often for instruments and voices with live electronics. I’m excited by the performative magic that can result from modifying the sound of a familiar instrument, using gestural interfaces to allow for dynamic sound creation with motion, and linking various media; in all of these uses of technology, though, I try to place the decisions of a human performer at the heart of what I do. I am also a poet and work often with texts, both my own and those drawn from further afield, and I love crafting music and words in parallel. Originally from St. Cloud, Minnesota, I have worked in Ireland, the UK, New York, and Philadelphia, and I’m now based just outside New York in Weehawken, NJ. (As an undergrad I wrote an opera called Weehawken about the Burr-Hamilton duel, so the massive—and deserved—success of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton and then ending up in Weehawken myself both feel like two very funny jokes the universe has played.) I admire and am influenced by a diverse range of music including 13th- and 14th-century motets and chanson, Irish and Scottish bodies of song such as sean-nós and waulking songs, American old-time, Sacred Harp singing. I aim to write music that surprises and delights.