I was commissioned in the summer of 2007 by Jeffrey Bishop, a well-known music pedagogue and high school orchestra director, to write a five-minute piece for his high school string orchestra at Shawnee Mission Northwest. The name came significantly after I had finished the piece, translating to “Sea of Tranquility,” the famous area on the moon where Apollo 11 landed. The music captures a dichotomy of emotions – tranquil beauty and restless isolation. Mare Tranquillitatis was premiered on February 12, 2008.
Listen to the recording of the Premiere, with Jeffrey Bishop conducting the Shawnee Mission Northwest High School Orchestra:
I finished the opening movement of this symphony during the summer of 2003, in between high school and college. Since then, I have started working on other movements, but I do not think I will use them unless I receive a commission to finish the symphony. So for the time being, it is a complete work in one movement.
The string writing is somewhat virtuosic and the quick parts of the music are packed with meter changes. There are sweeping melodies and rich harmonies in the slower sections.
Listen to a computer synthesized recording:
I wrote this piece over a weekend for Ken Bowermeister and the advanced string group at the FWCS Summer at the Symphony program during the summer of 2002, the title playing on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer-night’s Dream. Less than a week later, we premiered it on July 19, 2002. After a few revisions, A Midsummer’s Daydream received its second performance by the Pine View Chamber Symphony on October 10, 2002.
Listen to an computer synthesized recording:
Written between the summer of 2001 and spring of 2002. Mahler’s 6th Symphony inspired this composition significantly.
Listen to an computer synthesized recording of the Adagio movement:
This is my first large-scale work. I wrote this between 2000 and the spring of 2001, and the music is influenced most by Brahms and Beethoven. The scherzo, which can stand alone, is a cute four-minute movement, premiered by the Pine View Chamber Symphony on May 25, 2001 and subsequently performed on a Florida West Coast Symphony family concert by the FWCS Chamber Orchestra in the spring of 2003. Listen to the family concert recording, conducted by Kenneth Bowermeister:
My first serious composition, written in the spring of 1999 when I was 14 years old. I worked with my friend Jeremy Halpern, a bassist, and he came up with the themes and I developed them and orchestrated it. We showed it to the orchestra director, Kenneth Bowermeister, and he saw something in it, and helped me shorten it and had the PV Chamber Symphony perform it on the spring concert in May, 2000. It was a thrilling experience, and I knew I wanted to be a composer from that day on.
