• Book 1: (2012-2024)
• Book 2: (2012- Ongoing)

Music for Beginning is a collection of progressive pedagogical piano pieces primarily designed for adult or young adult learners. This set of piano pieces incorporates some of the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) with the intent of supporting diverse learners and diverse learning approaches through performance and play. It integrates improvisation, harmonic exploration, historical context, imagery, and diverse styles and forms to help develop technical skill,  provide a general understanding of Western musical traditions, and foster individual creative expression. I also hope this music serves as a valuable and enjoyable sight-reading resource for pianists of all levels.

These three works for the keyboard are key pieces in the development of my musical language The first piece, A Brief Gesture is the oldest in the collection, dates to around 2013 or 2014. The other two were composed between 2016 and 2018. These works are more technically demanding and expressively ambitious than any of my earlier compositions for piano, and they are primarily intended as concert works (though not necessarily to be played together).

Memorabilia is a set of pieces centered on a past sense of place, specifically the region where I grew up and went to university: the suburbs and the city of Seattle. The earliest version of this work dates back to the late 2000s, while I was in college and was given the title Music for a Suburban Scene. By the time I began fully writing these pieces out in 2015 or 2016, my style had already begun to shift.These pieces were substantially revised in the early 2020s. They were originally written with a personal nostalgia in mind, and by the time they were revised they had by then become personal relics themselves. The pieces generally reflect a transitional musical language I no longer use. The set is held together by an idée fixe that threads its way through each piece.

This set of five short piano pieces offers a small snapshot of the musical language I began developing in the mid-2010s and continue to explore. With the exception of the first and fourth pieces, the works came together gradually—often left unfinished for long periods before eventually being completed. During the 2020 pandemic, I returned to many of these unfinished piano works (including the second, third, and fifth pieces) and brought them to completion.

I consider this set to be the first coherent expression of a musical language that I have continued to refine and develop.

Two Baroque Dances represents my attempt to distill down a musical language I had been developing while also looking back towards older musical forms from the Baroque era. Neither piece is loyal to the traditional dance rhythms (The Sarabande with its halting start-and-stop rhythms and mixed meters and the Courante in 5/4), but I aimed to capture some of the spirit of those dance forms while applying a somewhat stripped-down musical language.

This set of short piano pieces is dedicated to my friends, and were designed essentially as little birthday presents. The concept and title is a direct reference to Leonard Bernstein’s set of the same name. The pieces in the set were written sporadically, with most composed between 2017 and 2022.

Each piece in this set is based around a line of poetry written by an old friend who passed away in 2020. In 2020, following her death, I found a number of lines of poetry and began crafting structured improvisations around these lines. I expanded these improvisations into piano pieces in 2021/2022.

During my study abroad in undergrad I had the privilege of playing warm up piano music for a group of dancers at the university. I simply improvised the music and followed the instructions provided by the dance instructor. This was a very fun and rewarding experience, and it was deeply rewarding to see dancers reacting and working with the rhythms and musical motifs I was creating on the keyboard. This set of 5 short dance-like pieces was written as a reflection on that experience.

I began writing this piece for the piano salon gatherings in Washington, D.C in the mid 2010s, an informal group of gay and gay-friendly pianists and musicians who met several times a year in one another’s homes  for potlucks and to share music. Hoping to build my technical skills at playing duets, I decided to write a piece for piano four hands (the first movement) to perform with another attendee, which we played at one of these gathering in 2015.

Over the next few years, the rest of the sonata gradually came together, evolving through many changes and edits along the way. These pieces draw on a wide range of influences, from Stravinsky and Steve Reich to Thurston Moore, and tend toward an angular, rhythmic and modernist tone, more so than most of my other work.

The six duets included in this set were initially written around 2013 as an exercise for myself to improve my skills at playing together with another pianist. Since I have had limited experience performing duets and I found much of the piano four hands literature either a bit too challenging for sight reading, or not to my interest. I set about writing the first of these two duets around 2013. A couple years later I realized these two brief duets would be too short to feel like a complete set, and then decided to continue writing them. I completed the next 4 duets gradually over the next couple of years, intermittently developing on or editing the pieces.  

All six of the duets are intended to be relatively straightforward and easily playable for intermediate level pianists.

I wrote this piece for clarinet and piano as a birthday present for my friend Ari Lipman in 2012. Since Ari plays clarinet, I had originally proposed writing a duet for him. His interest in klezmer music influenced the work, though I aimed to incorporate in the musical ideas I was exploring at the time. This is one of the first works where I felt I was beginning to find my own musical voice, which is why I still include it among my listed works. The title of the work is inspired by the music venue (Le) Poisson Rouge, a lively and eclectic contemporary space where I envisioned this music might belong.

The music is intended to be both rhythmic and lyrical, with a strong sense of momentum and forward energy.

The pieces in the suite are re-written and reformulated versions of early solo piano works I originally composed for Music for Beginning, a set of pedagogical pieces for beginner pianists. Most of the content of these pieces dates back to the early 2010s. While working Music for Beginning, I found that some of the pieces I had written didn’t quite align with the rest of the set and for years I set them aside. In 2024, as I finalized Book 1 of Music for Beginning, I revisited several short piano pieces that no longer fit into the set and imagined a new form for them. With their clear right-hand melodic lines, these pieces naturally lent themselves to simple instrumental duets.  The clarinet immediately came to mind as an ideal instrument for many of these melodies.

A palimpsest is a text which has been over-written with new text, though often the older texts can be deciphered underneath. I felt that my reworkings of these pieces were similar to writing over the works I had originally written for piano solo. The works are light I hope offers performers a set of technically accessible and enjoyable pieces to play.

This set of solo cello miniatures was written as my first foray into non-piano instrumental music. These pieces were written as essentially experiments in mapping out a musical language I was working with on the piano onto the cello with the intention of making the music idiomatic for an instrument I don’t play.  These miniatures have their origins in the early 2010s but were revised and rewritten multiple times over several years. It is difficult to assign a set date for writing in these circumstances, but the most significant re-working of the pieces came during the pandemic in 2020 when, like most Americans, I found myself with lots of time sequestered at home.

In the mid-2010s Jim and Susan Catlette hosted several piano salons in their beautiful home, a former chapel that had been transformed into an elegant and spacious residence. Their home included a pair of impressive grand pianos. This often inspired members of the salon group to perform works from the two-piano repertoire.

Motivated by these gatherings and by the opportunity to perform a two-piano piece for the first time, I began composing the first piece in this set, Fremont and 43rd. Its modest technical demands and straightforward rhythms were intended to make it manageable for a quickly put together performance or even sight-reading at one of these evening salons.

Early on, I recognized the nostalgic, almost backward-looking character of the piece’s mood, which reminded me of my final undergraduate years in Seattle. The title refers to the intersection in the Fremont neighborhood where my best friend lived at the time.

The second movement, which was originally conceived as an orchestral work, also reflects on my college years. During that time, two friends rented an apartment in the University District. This movement may be the most explicitly somber piece I’ve written. Although that apartment, where my friends lived was the setting for many happy memories, it was also a place marked by conflict and the eventual loss of a friendship between two people I cared about.

The final movement, the most exuberant and overtly virtuosic of the set, began its life as a solo piano work composed during my college years. I revised it several times in the years that followed. I was never fully satisfied with it as a solo piece, since the musical ideas and patterns I wanted to explore felt better suited to a two-piano format. The title of this movement refers to the street I lived on during my first two years in college, and this title (which dated to the original solo-piano piece) helped shape the extra-musical associations behind the other two pieces in this set. Its allusion to New York is a clear nod to my favorite American composer, Steve Reich. The music also reflects the influence of Reich and Terry Riley, two composers whose work I first encountered during my undergrad program at the University of Washington.