I write music that seeks to engage, enrich, and disturb.
For me, music is not only about beauty, craft, or expression. I want it to demand attention and create an experience that lasts beyond the performance itself. Sometimes that means drawing a listener toward something unfamiliar; sometimes it means challenging what they thought they understood. These three ideas—engage, enrich, and disturb—have become the foundation of how I think about my work.Grab the listener and don't let go.
I want listeners to find a way into my music, whatever their familiarity with contemporary classical music. A melody, an insistent rhythm, or an unusual instrumental sound can make that first connection. From there, I’m thinking about how to hold their attention: how long to stay with an idea, when to interrupt it, and what might make someone curious to hear what happens next.
Leave the listener with something lasting.
Some music stays with me because of a single passage. Other pieces take several hearings before I begin to understand why they affect me. I hope my own work allows for both experiences.
The subjects I write about often become personal in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. In Book of Spells, the rituals I was reading about took on a different meaning during my father’s final illness. I hope listeners can feel something of what was at stake for me and find their own connections to the music.
Challenge convention and expectations.
I’m drawn to music that makes something familiar feel strange. Sometimes that unease comes from the subject itself. Monument, for example, grew out of my experience of the Confederate monument in my hometown.
In other pieces, the disturbance happens within the sound: a texture becomes distorted, a pattern breaks, or a harmony gradually loses its footing. I’m interested in how those moments affect our hearing of what came before, and what follows.