I am currently working on making all of my scores available for purchase at the Canadian Music Centre. In the meantime, please contact me directly using the button below if you are interested in purchasing a score or commissioning a new work.
ROY G BIV uses an ambient light sensor attached to an alto saxophone to measure changes in both colour and light intensity. Although difficult to perceive via video, gradual fluctuations in light intensity increase or decrease the amount of signal processing (distortion, reverb, delay etc.) applied to the saxophone.
Scored for alto flute and fixed electronics, Breathing Room is a sonic collage comprised of recorded sounds I made of the environment around me over the past seven years living in Toronto, Ontario. Throughout these seven years, the sounds of my city have changed drastically. In 2020, the global pandemic disrupted the the sonic landscape, with much of the vibrancy and life being leeched from the city's character as we all retreated into our homes.
Plant Music began as a pedagogical exercise in learning how to work with Arduino microcomputers, and to achieve a modest artistic outcome from this process. The piece soon burgeoned into a larger multimedia project involving video, live electronics, found percussion, and touch sensitive houseplants. Additionally, the pedagogical nature of the piece grew, with explorations into graphic notation, aleatoric writing, and live-sampling all adding to the overall creation of the work.
Coded | De(c)oded, originally came out of a question. What would 1980s cassette data tapes sound like if played on a regular audio playback device? The discovery that data was stored through analogue sound-waves encoded in magnetic tape led me to begin exploring the spectral possibilities found in encoded visual data from early 1980s video games. Through spectral-imaging software I extracted audio samples from a number of well-known video games from the era, including: Pac-Man, and The Legend of Zelda.
An early exploration of mine into combining a solo instrument with live electronics, Mobius Fragments examines the sonic textures and spectral multiphonics found in the bass clarinet and amplifies them through distortion and delay processing. The piece should be played freely and not bound by any sort of metric time structure.
Four Folk Tales is a set of pieces based upon four Hindu legends that I found to be intriguing for either their fascinating descriptions, or philosophical content.
Throughout BIO[Sonance] I sought to create and maintain an information-based conversation between ‘players’, and between player and listener, without relying on pitch/harmonic activity to drive musical discourse and complexity. This was an attempt to capture an arrhythmic, emergent rhythmical structure emulating the sound of insects, and of the emergent night right after dusk.
As our lives become increasingly digitally linked, what is the current relationship between us and technology, and is there a possible point of mutually beneficial convergence? Using homemade percussion instruments constructed from industrial springs, boxes, and elastic bands, paired with a beat-boxer, Torsion comments on our constantly shifting perception towards our relationship with technology, through the interaction between ‘the human’ (beatboxer), and technology as embodied by the created percussion instruments.
Our planet is approaching a precipice. Climate change, deforestation, and pollution are leading to mass extinctions, natural disasters, and human migration. We plunder the earth's resources, consumed by greed. And yet, these resources are finite. Our planet is finite.
Written as a part of the 2018 Montreal Creative Music Lab, Fantasia | Aphantasia is based upon a recently defined condition, Aphantasia, where one does not possess a functioning mind's eye. Trying to apply this condition to sound seemed like a fascinating exercise. Since the root of the word Aphantasia comes from a similar place as the musical form, Fantasia (fantasy), seemed like a natural starting point in which to examine it from a musical standpoint.
An early work of mine incorporating live performers and fixed electronics, Solid State is an examination of the increasing permeation of technology in all aspects of our lives. Composed entirely out of manipulated recorded sounds by the cello and violin, combined with a live cellist and violinist, I attempted to twist the acoustic recordings into digital corruptions of their acoustic counterparts.
I wrote my first major String Quartet in my final year living in Winnipeg and during a transitionary period from film music into contemporary concert music. Containing influences from my film music background and minimalist composers such as Glass and Reich, each movement represents a different aspect of our amazing universe, and explores relationships between celestial bodies and phenomenon through a dialogue between the instruments.
As a millennial, I was among the first generation to grow up fully online and in the digital age. As I entered my teens and early adult years, it continued to grow as a source of news, entertainment, knowledge, and a place community — its impact growing on my life and others over time. While this brought with it countless benefits, exposing my generation to new ideas and creating relationships with people around the world, it has, especially in recent years, become more and more of a detriment to my own and others’ mental health, and impacting our outlook on the future of our species. Gen(Self) is a self-portrait. Following in the tradition of many visual artists, this self-portrait examines my personal experiences and reactions to changes in society brought about by rapid technological change.
Lost Tapes is a collection of environmental soundscapes, sonified image data, electromagnetic distortion and snippets of my own compositions, combined to form an auditory collage of a musical life before the collapse. Sounds were gradually layered onto a 90-minute tape over six months, with intentional gaps between additions to avoid any sense of directed composition. This non-intentional approach allowed the composition to evolve organically, constrained by the limits of human memory, with the inherent destructive qualities of tape recording being leveraged to deliberately obscure musical form.
As the second part of two works of mine exploring digital connectivity and musical Artificial Intelligence systems, This [BLANK] has been deleted draws from a variety of inspirations including, glitch, horror, and cinematic sound design. Thematically, the piece explores concepts around the ephemeral yet consequential nature of our modern digital lives, as well as examining the hidden online rage that emerges from the protection of anonymity.
SAD or ‘Internet Separation Anxiety Disorder’ is a colloquial term used by some online to describe the anxious feelings associated with being separated from the digital world for an extended period of time. During the pandemic, this digital separation manifested with very real consequences — as any loss of signal led to a loss of communication with other humans entirely.
(Co)Axial began out of some guitar sampling sessions I did over the summer of 2020. Due to the global pandemic, I was examining new ways to generate material for pieces that did not involve other human beings. My acoustic guitar, which I had yet to learn beyond a basic understanding of major/minor chords became a source of inspiration, as I found that my lack of skill on the instrument did not preclude me from generating interesting textural and harmonic material.
Stock {Yards} is an audio-visual work, created for online distribution, that is designed to be experienced with headphones and in a dark listening environment. Both the audio and visual components have been derived from footage and recordings taken in the Stockyards neighbourhood of Toronto during the months of lockdown in 2020.
Created as an inspiration soundscape companion piece to my choral work Grand Scale, Disappearing Night was created out of sound recordings I made of the night time over the past decade, along with other recordings of the night from around the world, sourced from the public domain.
Synchro (Cicada) was written after reading about the incredible emergence of Brood X, the latest Cicada hatching in the spring of 2021. This rare event, occurring every 17 years, is rivalled in its visual impact only by the cacophonic song produced by the rapid buckling and unbuckling of drum-like tymbals in the Cicadas’ abdomen.
In 2022, almost 80 percent of North Americans can no longer see the night sky. Artificial light from cities has created a permanent skyglow at night, obscuring our view of the stars, and the full wonder of the Milky Way Galaxy. In addition to losing access to the night sky, light pollution is intrinsically linked with energy waste, sleep disorders, and animal and insect disruption.
Based on the poem of the same name, Δώρια [Doria] by Ezra Pound, the piece seeks to examine the management of emotion during a battle with depression. Contrary to popular belief, depression often yields an absence of emotion rather than an intense sadness, and when experiencing this emotional numbness, one often wishes for a return of intense emotion unobtainable whilst depressed.
Created for Pro Coro Canada as part of the CLC's 2020 PIVOT Program, 'What Time Is Left' is a commentary on the dangerous and unprecedented times we live in at the beginning of the 21st century, as we battle a human-created climate crisis threatening all life on this planet.
Created using nonsense syllables, Li Ngu Weko is a piece that should be sung with energy and a strong sense of groove or rhythm. Inspired by my upbringing in South Africa, the piece incorporates some general elements of Southern African choral music, as well as the western classical choral repertoire.
Written for the Central Bucks High School West choir, conducted by Joseph Ohrt, The Way Through The Woods is based on Rudyard Kipling's poem of the same name. Broadly, the poem examines both the healing power of nature, as well humanity’s damaging legacy.
Winner of the 2017 Frances Seaton Choral Competition, The Dream is based on a poem of a similar name, A Dream, by American poet Edgar Allan Poe. Written shortly after his wife’s death in 1847, Poe speaks of how the reality of life is at times intensely painful. He would rather dream and avoid the reality of life because of how reality has beaten and shaped him — a dream of a better world, a better reality for us all.
When I started this piece in 2017, I was determined to try something a little different. There was so much serious choral music out there, including my own, that I decided to write something a little humorous. Spanish speakers will notice that the title translates as: “To a Man with a Large Nose’. This 16th century poem by the Spanish poet Franciso Villegas, was written about his literary rival at the time, the poet Luis de Gongóra, and comments on the many facets of his oversized nose.
Created as part of the 2018 CMC Art Song Lab, Waiting is based on a poem of the same name by Japanese-Canadian poet Kagan Goh. While its origins came from a unique and tragic event in Canadian history as described in Kagan’s book Surviving Samsara, the themes of loss, and longing are universal in their impact.
A long time resident of the prairie province of Canada – Manitoba, I found the landscape change to be quite striking upon moving to Toronto in 2015. Where there was once flat grassland, there was now wild, rocky landscapes with endless trees and beautiful lakes.
Based on a poem by Robert Frost, Acquainted with the Night explores themes of darkness and the night-time, as the flute and voice weave and dance in counterpoint with each other. I use a range of extended techniques on the flute, including frequent use of multiphonics to start and end the piece.
One of the first pieces I wrote for voice and piano, Kyoto is the first movement of a two-part Art Song set named Songs of the Earth. The set explores themes loss of spirit, and the sadness felt around the impending environmental catastrophe that is occurring as a result of our continued actions.
[STATIC] Desire is my first major attempt in implementing a post-cinematic practice in a large ensemble composition of significant length. Post-cinematic concepts around non-linear, modular formal structures were implemented throughout, exploring musical continuity and discontinuity between sections, and technological tools and methodologies indicative of the cinematic practice were used throughout the creation process.
A dense and angry piece by design, [STATIC] Desire explores a personal and emotion reaction to what I perceive to be a failure of our public institutions to the recent pandemic and ongoing climate crisis. [STATIC] Desire examines this emotional reaction through a Hauntological lens, which itself examines the paradoxes found in our postmodern and hyper-connected contemporary culture.
I began my work on what would become Telephonic after reading a news article on recently discovered early audio recordings from the 1860s. Through the use of modern computer and laser-scanning systems, we are now able to playback some of these early recordings that would otherwise be inaccessible due to the fragility of the playback cylinders. I was overwhelmed by the idea of hearing human voices from over 150 years ago, and the beauty and imperfect nature of these early recordings strongly resonated with me.
Conceptually based off of the 19th century poem 'Ozymandias' by Percy Blysshe Shelley, this composition is one piece out of a set of three that I composed around the poem’s many themes.
Building on the central theme of the poem, which explores the idea that all empires and their leaders inevitably decline despite their pretensions to greatness, I attempt to examine the concepts of monarchical/colonial musical deconstruction, fragmentation, juxtaposition, and evolution, and attempt to create the psychoacoustic elements needed for these abstract concepts to register with listeners.
Iconoclasm deconstructs material derived from G.F. Handel's 4th movement of 'Music for the Royal Fireworks.' This piece of music, written to celebrate the end of the War of Austrian Succession in 1749, exemplifies music created in the name of extreme nationalism, and monarchical servitude. Iconoclasm is the condition of attacking or assertively rejecting cherished beliefs, established values, and practices.
The LithoPhone Project began out of a desire of mine to extend my practice to the art of instrument building and sound installations, attempting to create unique sonic textures through unusual and novel uses of existing technologies paired with creative instrument designs. The LithoPhone is a custom-built sound box, which combines an electrical motor, stylus, and amplification chamber to produce and enhance the natural resonances and harmonics found in stones. The box is amplified through use of a contact microphone, with the captured audio being processed through an Ableton Live patch.
