Embrace
for bass flute (or baritone saxophone) and guitar (or bass)
Embrace (2020, 6 min.) belongs to a series of works in which I revisit materials from recent compositions and I reimagine them in the context of solos and duos for electric bass.
The main theme of Embrace comes from a favorite moment in my string quartet Your Questions Online, commissioned and premiered by the Cassatt String Quartet in 2019. Expressively, Embrace has come to summarize this incomprehensible moment in time (2020) with its burden of anxious uncertainty and our deep existential longing for the warm intimacy of our peaceful, personal, corner of civilization.
Focus Beyond Clarity
for any instrument and guitar of bass guitar (2019) 8'
"Focus Beyond Clarity", Commissioned by the Duo Montagnard - Joseph Murphy, saxophone, and Matthew Slotkin, guitar) can be played as a standalone piece or together with its companion piece "On the Continuity of Self", the order of the pieces left to the preferece of the performer.
Most traditions of popular music use their songs as a point of departure for the performers, and it is in the arrangement that artists create their sonic identity (as the multiple versions of "All the Things You Are" attest). This piece treats its materials as a "theme with which to make a version", operating as if it were a traditional song, undergoing the typical transformations of "creative arranging"
This piece makes reference to a tradition of virtuosistic South American urban folk music, where the rhythmic precision needed to perform some styles borders with the supernatural and contrasts with the theme of memory lapses present in "On the Continuity of Self".
On the Continuity of Self
for alto saxophone and guitar (2018) 5'
Most of us experience daily life accepting the idea of self-continuity, where a person at one time and a person at another time can be the same person, or the feeling that both your 10 year-old past self and your future self are still you.
Those of a certain age have likely had encounters -in themselves or in others- with disorienting moments of forgetfulness, in which a sad, calm terror threatens that continuity.
This piece evokes such moments of misremembrances, hesitations, sinuous thinking and factual errors. In other words, this humble song tries to remember itself, experiencing the sad, calm terror of losing itself at every misstep and hesitation.