Written in the fall of 2002, this was my first composition for mixed chorus, and my only composition to date for chorus and orchestra. At Pine View, the chorus and orchestra were to be collaborating and I was asked to write a song to be included in that performance. I chose this famous poem by William Wordsworth because of its beauty and lyrical nature.
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” received its premiere by the Pine View Chamber Symphony and High School Chorus on December 12, 2002, and a subsequent performance for elementary and middle school children on the 20th. Pardon the extraneous noise they make in the recording:
I wrote this song on a Wordsworth poem as a vocal writing assignment in AP Music Theory during my senior year of high school. It was originally for four part choir, but you can listen to it in an arrangement for solo voice and piano:
Pine View Drama Club was putting on a production of the famous Shakespeare play and they asked me to set some of the words to music. This song is a lullaby sung by the fairies to put their fairy queen to sleep. In the recording I have, there is only one singer, a friend from Pine View named Melissa Ruffalo, and I dubbed her voice over three times after we recorded all three parts. This was then mixed with a midi reproduction of the music, with a triangle added.
This set of art songs was one of the first compositions I wrote after coming to USC, composed between the fall of 2003 and the spring of 2004. I collaborated with a singer who also happened to be a poet and supplied the poems for me to set. All the poems dealt with childhood experiences.
Listen to the third song, "The First Time I Did Fly":
This song cycle was written as a project for my composition class in the spring of 2004. I set five short poems by Li Po for soprano, flute/alto flute, and piano. I experimented with some extended techniques on the piano such as strumming and plucking the strings.
I collaborated with one of my friends that I met in my dorm freshman year and set one of her poems to music as a birthday present. In it, I explore the sonorities of diatonic clusters, a unique and extremely pleasing effect when produced by a chorus of voices. Listen to a reading by the USC Concert Choir:
This choral work sets the AE Housman text, “Be Still, My Soul, Be Still.” This work is significantly denser than “Invocation,” but still very accessible, albeit difficult to perform, as the textures are often very dense.
