Objects that empower the individual go back centuries, fulfilling natural human desires to know, to communicate, to protect, to transform, and to create. These intriguing objects are extant in mythological literature and religious texts. Enchanted musical instruments are also commonly featured in lore (including Mozart’s Magic Flute and the entrancing music of the Pied Piper). This work is an etude exploring a gestural vocabulary on a trombone augmented with wireless sensors, mapped to control a variety of sounds. The sound quality of the video, unfortunately, does not reflect the spatial effects of the etude in which the orientation of my instrument physically projects my amplified trombone sound and other various sonic effects to exact locations in the concert hall using loudspeakers.

A work for Saxophone Quartet inspired in part by electroacoustic processes (granular synthesis) and spectral aesthetics. Performers Zenith Quartet: Don-Paul Kahl, soprano saxophone; Taylor Barbay, alto saxophone; David Santiago, tenor saxophone; Joshua Bond, baritone saxophone.

- n (in Jewish legend) an artificially created human being brought to life by supernatural means [from Yiddish goylem, formless thing]
   Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition.

"The Native American Trickster is a figure who defies category. He is at once the scorned outsider and the culture-hero, the mythic transformer and the buffoon, a creature of low purpose and questionable habits who establishes precedent, dabbles in the creation of the world that will be, and provides tools, food, and clothing to the people who will inhabit that world. He may assume an array of contradictory personae in the course of a single narrative, moving from one to the other with the skill of a practiced shape-shifter while tripping on his tail at every turn. Trickster creates through destruction and succeeds through failure; his mythic and cultural achievements are seldom intentional. 'Defining such a various creature,' writes Jarold Ramsey, 'is a little like trying to juggle hummingbirds.'" - Larry Ellis
Wakdjunkaga, the coyote, is the mythological trickster of the Native-American Winnebago tribe. The saxophone part is an attempt to musically approximate a variety of coyote vocalizations that I had recorded. The goal was not to reconstruct a coyote sound using a soprano sax per se, but to use an external source to inform the gesture, contour, and timbre of the musical phrases. The role of the saxophone and the degree of effect it has on the electroacoustic sound is always in flux. As the piece unfolds, the saxophone converges closer and closer to the coyote vocalizations until moments of almost-counterpoint between these two voices can be perceived. This piece was commissioned by the SEAMUS/ASCAP Student Competition and is dedicated to Saxophonist Susan Fancher.

This work is comprised of a single sample of my electric stove-top coil heating up and then cooling back down which is then used to drive spectral impulse responses of a kalimba and a temple gong. The harmonic reconstruction of the kalimba and temple gong evolves in complexity, pitch range, and density over the duration of the piece. To me, the work operates on several levels: aleatoric, surreal, and spectral.

"... [The Lord] set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and fourth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. ... As I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone." - Ezekiel 37.

This piece was commissioned by: Trombone Professor Mark Hetzler. The only condition was that the work needed to explore the 4 elements so my mind went immediately to alchemy and its aspirations to ritualize, transform, and experiment. The "character" of the trombonist is an alchemist who engages in pseudo-shamanistic rituals to conjure up and experiment with the elements. Mid-way though the piece, the performer becomes transformed into the elements themselves. The focus becomes not just conjuring up the elements from a distance, but rather the physical embodiment of each of the elements through the trombone itself. After this complex timbral development, a cadenza between the trombone and the sympathetic piano brings us back to the very beginning as a moment of respite and to reflect on how far the trombone had become removed from itself. The work ends with one last ritual simultaneously conjuring up all of the elements.

As a child growing up in my rural hometown, torrential summer downpours were very common. Some of my favorite memories were running out to the fields or through the forest floor after these storms to see what interesting treasures the rain had revealed on the surface of the earth. Things like: flint arrowheads, railroad spikes, broken pottery, colorful glass medicine bottles, and rusty logging equipment of all shapes and function could be discovered - with a good eye. Wiping away the dirt, I couldn't help but feel the shadows of the people who left these things behind long ago.
• In collaboration with Video Artist: Laura Oxendine, This work became a multimedia presentation. Many thanks to Laura for her expertise and sensitivity to every musical nuance. To see more of her work, visit :: her site here ::

The Uirapuru is a bird native to Brazil's Amazon region and has inspired many composers including Heitor Villa-Lobos and Luiz Gonzaga. It has the most beautiful and haunting song, a melody that I transcribed to serve as the pervasive theme throughout the work. Uirapuru is a Travelogue piece inspired by a service trip that I took into the heart of the Amazon River basin in Brazil. A large riverboat was the only form of transportation available to get us from one place to another and a branch of the Amazon River, a deep and black expanse called the "Negre" and its vast ever-changing network of canals called "Parana," was our only road. My total experience is quilted out of seemingly contrasting individual episodes in my memory. I recall several moments realizing that if the boat were to go under or if I were to fall overboard, it would mean certain death, and then turning around and finding myself engulfed in what seemed like millions of fireflies or watching schools of elegant pink dolphins (I’m not lying!) break the surface of the same menacing water for air. There are moments of confusion and awkwardness that comes with the territory of being a "stranger in a strange land" contrasting with moments of comradery and acceptance as we labored together and participated in song and dance. A Native guide through the Rainforest showed us a tree whose sap could treat all kinds of diseases and then an anthill at the base of the tree where a bite from a single inhabitant would be painfully debilitating. This work progresses much like my journey. A special thanks to Dr. Paul Richards, my composition professor, and a very special thanks to Dr. Welson Tremura - professor of Music and Latin American studies. Your suggestions were extremely insightful and when I could not go back to Brazil, you brought it to me.

Down a long dirt road far in the middle of pasture and dotted forests resides Wolf Park, a nonprofit education and research facility in Battle Ground, Indiana. Experiencing the power and the majesty in the way the wolves move, the haunting beauty of their chorus howls, and the sense of respect and fear during their occasional aggressive displays amongst themselves; I could not help but be intimately moved inside. This piece is in dedication to the people at Wolf Park, who devote their lives to educating the public on these beautiful, powerful, and often-misunderstood animals. Vocalizations functions on many simultaneous levels. It is a chronicle of my experience with these wolves, a celebration of the unique qualities present within the wide variety of their utterances, a location-specific documentation of their aural environment, and a response to the ever-expanding repertoire of wolf-based pieces.

Eine Kleine Froschmusik for trombone quartet and electronics - using harmonic formulas of an 18th century mathematician, masquerading around as a 19th century Romantic genre, and driven by a 21st century compositional perspective - attempts to open an interesting musical discourse between the past and present. The harmonies used for this work are based on a treatise written by 18th century mathematician, Leonhard Euler, called Tentamen Novae Theoriae Musicae where he proposed a mathematical approach to discerning the consonance and dissonance of various combinations of pitch intervals as an alternative to more aesthetic and subjective methods of the time. Using his formulas, the harmonies are generated in real-time during the performance. The title, meaning "A little frog-music," stems from a long tradition of the Nachtmusik, Nocturne, and Serenade genres (the terms are often used interchangeably). Eine kleine Froschmusik essentially turns the traditional concept of Nachtmusik on its head, literally utilizing the ‘sounds of night’ to place the focus on the natural sound environment of the evening hours. The result is a blurring of the line that divides 'night song' and 'night sound.'

Originally composed for Saxophone performer Timothy Robinson and Pianist Kama Rasmussen. A painting created by Bill Stoneham in 1972 entitled, Hands Resist Him, depicts a self-portrait of the artist at age 5 in an eerie, flat, surreal style -standing in front of a glass-paned door. Behind the door we see nothing but darkness, an almost new moon, and tiny hands (what the artist calls "the other lives") seeming to claw and tap at the all-too-thin glass that divides what lies unknown and the boy. Beside the boy stands a doll-like figure the size of a little girl. This girl-doll, the artist describes, "is the imagined companion or guide through this realm." Score is transposed.

Songs without words, Lieder ohne Worte, were part of the Romantic tradition of writing short, lyrical songs for piano, composed most notably by Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847). This particular song without words is much different and is not a part of this tradition. The programme behind this piece is based completely on a love poem, Here Comes written by Michael Dattolico. The words of this poem were directly transformed onto a lyrical melody, which serves as a unifying thread shared and traded off by the individual instruments throughout the piece. Score is in concert pitch.

The rhythmic and harmonic/melodic structures are based on the prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7. The structure and development of the piece is about exploring the dichotomy between linear arpeggiation (movement in time domain) versus stacking (movement in the frequency domain) using the above numbers' ratios and rhythmic combinatorial resultants. The hand clapping intro and coda are commentaries on applause and how each piece of music is framed within this traditional sonic event. The intro is to begin after the stage is set up, but before the applause for the entering percussionists subsides. Ideally, player1 should begin the piece during the peak of the applause while the percussionists are walking out to their places.

This is my first attempt at writing for the massive force that I grew up performing in: the Wind Band. It functions as a memoriam of sorts for a friend. Many thanks to the University of Florida Wind Ensemble for the Reading/recording secession!

(de)rail(ed) is an algorithmic piece based entirely on the deconstruction, harmonization, reconstruction, and development of a single sound sample. The original sound comes from connecting a contact microphone to a guardrail while rubbing my finger up and down this guardrail to excite its natural resonant frequencies. After this, I generated a spectrograph of the sound so I could deconstruct it into its individual pitch components. This allowed me to visually observe each frequency's relationship and compute the ratios in between the significant frequency bands. Next, I utilized PVC to generate thicker and richer harmonies within the sound, constructed on the ratios that I had computed above. I then used a performance algorithm in Supercollider to explore these newly developed sounds and their relationships with one another by progressing between each sound in its entirety and deconstructing the sound into its significant frequency bands (using bandpass filters). Speeding up and slowing down the rate at which the frequencies are excited create a kind of progression to and away from a sense of timbre and a sense of a melodic series of pitches, much like Jean-Claude Risset's Mutations. This creates another illustration of the construction versus deconstruction paradigm that drives the piece.