Princeton Composition Ph.D. Portfolio

Copper Ouroboros (for tuba and electronics)

Copper Ouroboros is the beginning of my experiments with a small speaker inside of the tuba. The playback above will start at the climax of the piece, from 4’30” – 7’00”. This section is realized on pages 2-3 of the score.

Amateur Geology (for string trio)

Amateur Geology started as an attempt to reconcile with the violin’s E string. It always scared me as a tuba player. The piece starts with a sort of battle between the violin’s open string and the 5th harmonic of the viola’s low C – a reference to a common tuning problem in string chamber music. The audio above will start at the chorale section at 4’11”. This is rehearsal G on page 5 in the score. This section continues through page 6, or 7’04”.

Normalization of Deviance

Normalization of Deviance is my first work that uses SuperCollider with an ensemble. Using the Fluid Corpus Manipulation project’s toolset, I use the electronics to splice and manipulate recordings of live musicians. The first movement, from 0’00” – 3’58” is the clearest representation of the sociological theory for which the piece is named.