(recording is of the orchestra version) This Bass Clarinet Concerto is virtuosic, but not necessarily in a typical concerto sort of a way. Rather than lots of flashy runs and fast passagework, it features a virtuosically wide range of colors and approaches to the instrument, from aggressive grooving to lyrical soaring to altissimo wailing. Like […]
Saxophone Double Concerto: Piano Reduction
An arrangement of the Bass Clarinet Double Concerto, for solo baritone and tenor saxophones with piano reduction. My basic idea for the Bass Clarinet Double Concerto was of Weber’s clarinet concertos meeting heavy metal. I am intimately familiar with both genres, through extensively practicing the Weber concertos in high school, and performing heavy metal bass […]
Saxophone Double Concerto
An arrangement of the Bass Clarinet Double Concerto, for solo baritone and tenor saxophones with saxophone choir. My basic idea for the Bass Clarinet Double Concerto was of Weber’s clarinet concertos meeting heavy metal. I am intimately familiar with both genres, through extensively practicing the Weber concertos in high school, and performing heavy metal bass […]
Trio for violin, bass clarinet, and piano
(recording is of Piano Trio version) This is an arrangement of my Piano Trio, with bass clarinet in place of cello. It is an epic four movement work combining austere minimalism with emotional romanticism and dramatic narrative. Movement 1: A slow, ponderous opening gives way to feverishly undulating figures in the piano under sighing melodies […]
Light Cathedral
Light Cathedral is inspired by the many great European cathedrals that I was fortunate to visit during my four years living in England, with their paradoxical combination of massiveness and lightness. The guiding image is of a huge structure, heavy and earthbound; yet instead of stones or bricks, the building blocks are shafts of colorful […]
Fantasy on Five
Fantasy on Five is a double concerto of sorts for solo soprano and baritone saxophones with wind ensemble. It plays with the idea of “five-ness” in several different ways. First, much of the work is in a five-beat rhythmic meter. This is a particularly rich number of pulses to have in a measure, as it […]
Bass Clarinet Concerto: clarinet choir version
This Bass Clarinet Concerto is virtuosic, but not necessarily in a typical concerto sort of a way. Rather than lots of flashy runs and fast passagework, it features a virtuosically wide range of colors and approaches to the instrument, from aggressive grooving to lyrical soaring to altissimo wailing. Like many performer-composers before me, I sought […]
Bass Clarinet Concerto: Piano Reduction
(recording is of orchestral version) This Bass Clarinet Concerto is virtuosic, but not necessarily in a typical concerto sort of a way. Rather than lots of flashy runs and fast passagework, it features a virtuosically wide range of colors and approaches to the instrument, from aggressive grooving to lyrical soaring to altissimo wailing. Like many […]
Bass Clarinet Concerto
This Bass Clarinet Concerto is virtuosic, but not necessarily in a typical concerto sort of a way. Rather than lots of flashy runs and fast passagework, it features a virtuosically wide range of colors and approaches to the instrument, from aggressive grooving to lyrical soaring to altissimo wailing. Like many performer-composers before me, I sought […]
Skip to my Hocket
A fun little minute-long duo, composed as a Kickstarter reward for Larry Brown.
Bass Clarinet Double Concerto: Piano Reduction Version
My basic idea for the Bass Clarinet Double Concerto was of Weber’s clarinet concertos meeting heavy metal. I am intimately familiar with both genres, through extensively practicing the Weber concertos in high school, and performing heavy metal bass clarinet tunes as a member of the Edmund Welles bass clarinet quartet. When it came to writing […]
Bass Clarinet Double Concerto: Chamber Ensemble Version
My basic idea for the Bass Clarinet Double Concerto was of Weber’s clarinet concertos meeting heavy metal. I am intimately familiar with both genres, through extensively practicing the Weber concertos in high school, and performing heavy metal bass clarinet tunes as a member of the Edmund Welles bass clarinet quartet. When it came to writing […]
Bass Clarinet Double Concerto: Wind Band Version
My basic idea for the Bass Clarinet Double Concerto was of Weber’s clarinet concertos meeting heavy metal. I am intimately familiar with both genres, through extensively practicing the Weber concertos in high school, and performing heavy metal bass clarinet tunes as a member of the Edmund Welles bass clarinet quartet. When it came to writing […]
Bass Clarinet Double Concerto: Chamber Orchestra Version
My basic idea for the Bass Clarinet Double Concerto was of Weber’s clarinet concertos meeting heavy metal. I am intimately familiar with both genres, through extensively practicing the Weber concertos in high school, and performing heavy metal bass clarinet tunes as a member of the Edmund Welles bass clarinet quartet. When it came to writing […]
Quartet for Four Clarinets
I wrote Quartet for Four Clarinets for my undergraduate senior thesis. In it, I wanted to achieve a synthesis of many of the fundamental skills I had been working on as a student. As my compositional thinking tends to be very harmony-based, I especially wanted to try to develop my contrapuntal chops. I studied a […]
Groove
Groove is the result of feeling stuck, frustrated, irritated and annoyed. In the fall of 2001 I was hard at work on an Epic, Serious, Important solo piano piece, when I hit a wall and simply could not get anywhere with it. Then one night I went to a classical chamber music concert by San […]
Claremont Suite
Claremont Suite was composed for the 2011 Claremont Clarinet Festival, where I was Composer-in-Residence, and premiered by the festival’s clarinet choir. The first movement is an arrangement of a wind octet I wrote earlier in 2011 (2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns), which was composed as a companion piece to Mozart’s C minor […]
KlezDuo
KlezDuo was my attempt to bring together two musical worlds that are very important to me as a performer, but that are normally kept separate: klezmer music, and my bass clarinet duo, Sqwonk. It was great fun to combine these elements together into this raucous and joyous piece. SHEET MUSIC FOR THIS PIECE CAN BE […]
…and the Beast…
…and the Beast… began its life as an exercise in tuning perfect fifths that grew and morphed into a depiction of a day in the life of the common beast. Each movement depicts a different action of the Beast — waking up, creeping, dancing (or trying to), attacking, and finally going to sleep. SHEET MUSIC […]
Runion
Runion was composed for the Edmund Welles bass clarinet quartet, and it is heavily inspired by the music of its bandleader and composer Cornelius Boots. Boots’ music, due to his heavy metal roots and many years of experience with the rich, deep sound of four bass clarinets, has a visceral and sonic directness and intensity […]