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I spent New Year's Eve 2018 in Nye, Montana, visiting family and friends.
  One of those friends is an imaging specialist who regaled us with an
  explanation of his most recent project, which he described as
  "calibrating the moon". Specifically, he was talking about the NASA
  ARCSTONE mission to calibrate the moon's reflectance to use as an accurate
  reference, primarily in climate science. The idea is that we have all this
  data about global warming and atmospheric changes, and a lot of that data uses
  the brightness of the moon as a control variable, but we don't actually have
  a precise definition of how bright the moon is. Ever since I was a part of
  that conversation, I knew that I wanted "calibrating the moon" as a
  title, and everything that came after that plays with the idea of moon themes
  or of doing big impossible-sounding things. When Connor Challey approached me
  about writing for tuba, Calibrating the Moon was an obvious choice.
    
    
    
    The work opens with Syzygy, a term describing the straight line between the
  sun, moon, and Earth that occurs every new and full moon. The movement starts
  dark and brooding, moves to an energetic middle section, and returns to being
  mysterious, kind of like a lunar cycle. Fun fact: This movement's theme is
  actually a tuba setting of the phrase "Calibrating the moon."
    
    
    
    The Second movement, Spectral Reflectance, is slow and shiny. NDSU was
  fortunate to have portfolio tubist (and Connor's mentor) Sam Pilafian as a
  visiting guest artist for several years, and I finished Syzygy around the
  time of his passing. I spent a lot of time thinking about Sam while putting
  the second movement together, and I quoted a couple of his favorite tuba concerti.
    
    
    
    The work ends with Libration. If you were to watch a time-lapse video of a
  lunar cycle, you'd notice that the moon not only transitions from new to full
  to new, but also sort of oscillates or wags. That's Libration. The movement
  is likewise off-kilter, playing with the listener's sense of time through
  alternating time signatures.

Calibrating the Moon

Tuba Solo with Piano

Foi dans l'aleatoire is what emerged after I was asked to write a French conservatory-inspired work. Largely utilizing an octatonic scale, it is written in a binary form. The piece is written in several different time signatures, creating an overly uneasy feel, hence the English translation of the work to "Faith in Randomness." �The "A" Section starts with longer notes in the flute, and 32nd-note runs in the piano, creating a nervous anxiety that continues to the transition into the "B" section. The "B" section is significantly faster than the beginning section, and expresses a mix of emotions ranging from anger to frustration to despair, and finally to hope. The transitions in this section are generally jarring, enforcing the theme of randomness in this piece.

Foi dans l'aleatoire

Flute Solo with Piano

Voice

Letters to the Poetry Editor is a setting of some of Mark Vinz's poems from the book of the same title, loosely based on the kind of letters received by poetry magazine editors. Scored for tenor, piano, and clarinet.

Letters to the Poetry Editor

Tenor Trio

Joyride is a saxophone duet that oscillates from being loud and raucous
  when it thinks you're not looking to well-behaved and almost polite when it
  catches you watching. The back-and-forth motive suggests either a lack of
  control by either player or a complete abdication of any responsibility.
  Sure, there are some nice chorale-sounding moments, but even those get a
  little out of hand when in the hands of these two. Seriously, don't trust
  them. Years later, they'll look back on this and say "It seemed like a
  good idea at the time."

Joyride

Woodwind Duet

<p>I wrote Drift during my second winter in Fargo, while the snow in my yard was easily four feet deep. The piece started with other ideas, but after weeks of working through them nothing really worked, and I found myself spending a lot of time looking wistfully out the window as the snow continued peacefully falling, marveling at the novelty of snow and thinking ahead to warmer weather. This piece is that feeling. Drift calls forth the dual recollection of snowdrifts experienced on a lazy weekend and the aimless drifting one might do down a river in the summer.</p>

Drift

Bass Clarinet Ensemble

So um y'know how some people can't function without their morning coffee? I'm kinda like that when composing. It starts out kind of slow. After the first cup things start to come together. Have a few more cups then the mind starts to energize. A few more and then it's all like COFFEECOFFEECOFFEECOFFEEWHEEEEEEeeeeeee crash. Yeah it's sorta like that only played by saxophone quartet.

Caffeination

Saxophone Quartet

Ping &amp; Peal is a piece for finger cymbals and tape that I wrote for Creativity November--an extended version of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) that I participate in with several friends from grad school. The rules are simple: Pick a creative project. Work starts on the first of November and must be completed by the third of December. Projects have to be started and finished within that time frame. Status updates are over doughnuts at 10 PM on Tuesday nights. Anyone who doesn't finish their project owes the rest of the participants a cake.

I like to use this time to try out new tools and new techniques, and in 2018 I chose to play with some notational techniques I started using in Austerity. The tape part is notated in the sheet music much like it appears on computer--as a collection of waveforms showing volume across time. Both the live sounds and the pre-recorded sounds, with few exceptions, come from a pair of finger cymbals, which are struck together, dampened, scraped, and subjected to a number of digital manipulations.

Ping & Peal

Percussion Solo

A revelry in one half of the day/night equation, the listener joins the process. Each player is introduced one by one to showcase the elements featured in the cycle to come: the common shapes of the daytime still familiar yet oddly twisted as night comes on. The clarinet, piano, and violin share the main theme as the shadow of evening rushes on, each lending its unique timbre to tangled arpeggios as the day fades.

And the Leaves of Falling Darkness

Clarinet Trio

Voice Category

Composers and audiences both rely a lot on memory. Whether it is an earlier theme, or an expectation that is met in an unexpected way, or writing in a style reminiscent of times past, we rely on memory to keep things straight. Fittingly, Mnemosyne, by the American poet Trumbull Stickney (1874-1904), is named after the Greek goddess of memory and the mother of the nine Muses. Stickney tells a story of remembrance and nostalgia, relying on our own memories and supplying us with more, with a refrain of homesickness.

Mnemosyne

SATB

I've written pieces about daydreaming beforenostalgic, yearning reveries. This isn't that kind of daydream. This is the sort of overstimulated thinking process with too many ideas and not enough time, jumping from thought to thought, sometimes speeding through motives just to get to the next one, and occasionally taking a breath and restating the theme. It's a musical distraction, and it has rhythms only a saxophonist could love (my apologies to the accompanist).

Head in the Clouds

Soprano Sax Solo

Format

Pipe Dreams is melodically obsessive and rhythmically fluid, pushing
  onward with an exuberant, overcaffeinated optimism.

Pipe Dreams

Concert Band Score & Parts

In 2021, I took some classes in publishing, which required that I learn how to use some printing equipment from the 1890s and earlier. Through this, I discovered the world of steam thresher's reunions: annual regional meetings of steam engine enthusiasts that draw thousands across the upper midwest. Combined with news stories about various billionaires funding space travel, I found myself wondering what space travel might be like if the space race happened several decades earlier. What if the same technology that modernized agriculture took us to the moon? What might rockets powered by steam sound like? Steam Powered Rocket is a bit of alternate history, taking us from liftoff to orbit and back to earth.

Steam Powered Rocket

Flexible Instrumentation Score & Parts

Memorandum to all performers: Due to the recent increase in fiscal downgrowth, the composer must unfortunately expand cost-saving efforts to include an expansion of our downsizing endeavor. Staff members in positions that are not being phased out may experience alternative conditions of performance, including but not limited to: an increase in notational responsibility; expanded interactions with mechanical or automated co-performers; heavier reliance on benchmarking, and a decrease in overall compensation. It is the composer's aim that this proactive approach to talent management will stimulate our entrepreneurial spirit, thereby resolving our fiscal difficulties without any major adverse effects.

Austerity

Saxophone Solo

I started writing what would become One Sows for the Benefit of Another Age in 2013, as I was sketching ideas for what became a piano trio. I liked what I had created, but two things became evident: The piece was destined to be for orchestra, and I was not good enough as a composer to finish it. Over the next seven years, I kept returning to this piece in my spare time, adding some sections, tweaking some others, and at some point I gained the experience to finish it. But the trade-off was that I no longer had the time. At least until Spring of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic put most of my projects on hold, and I was able to return to--and finish--the work. The title came last. My ideas while I was writing centered around Americana (I was listening to a lot of Copland, Barber, and Ives) and infusing my history and experience in the Ozarks and on the plains. I knew I wanted to make use of the idea of illumination, of dawn. I wanted to start in the shadows and end aglow. The darkness was such a defining feature that my working title was Aegri Somnia, loosely translated from Latin as "troubled dreams". As I continued working, I realized that the focus wasn't the darkness--the focus was the change. I discuss change a lot in my teaching. Students often see change as transformative change--massive, radical, sweeping change, like winning the lottery, or winning an audition. Transformative change is easy--it usually involves hoping for a situation or a Deus ex Machina, and if it happens, it benefits us immediately. Iterative change, however--small, repeated, incremental change that builds up over time--is hard. An extra half-hour of work every day, a little extra contributed to savings every month, these changes add up over time and become significant. But it requires intention and action, and it doesn't reap immediate benefits. It may not end up benefitting us at all. One Sows changes iteratively. It starts from a dark place, but is sprinkled with seeds of hope. A descending motive introduced in the violins brings us out of the darkness, albeit slowly. The idea spreads, develops, and eventually becomes part of a new idea, a new paradigm, that takes over. In searching for a title, I came across "Serit ut alteri saeclo prosit," North Dakota's Latin state motto, whose English translation is the title of this work. It's a recent addition to the North Dakota statutes, but a timeless message. Our work isn't finished yet.

One Sows for the Benefit of Another Age

Full Orchestra Score & Parts

Earmarks is a musical (and hopefully humorous) view of some of the issues  in today's political climate, designed to make you make you laugh--or to make  you think. And definitely to make you talk.                It starts out with Echo Chamber, where everything you hear is everything  you want to hear. As we move more and more of our lives online, we're at the  mercy of algorithms that try to deliver more of what we like--and give us  options for removing that which we don't. The more time we spend in these  echo chambers, the less we hear from dissenters. (The piano tries to come in  with a new idea later in the movement, but is largely ignored).                The second movement, Filibuster, does what I initially intended. Although  all three instruments do get to play, it's a lot of repeated,  pleasant-sounding milquetoast stuff without a great deal of substance that  never really resolves. And it has a repeat sign at the end that allows it to  be played as many times as the performers wish. How long this movement is  depends entirely on the whim of the pianist.                A swing state is a state with a similar level of support for both parties  that can go either way during an election. Likewise, Swing States is a piece  for saxophone and piano, and a piece for clarinet and piano, and it's a  struggle to see who's going to win. Will they sort out their differences?  Will we?

Earmarks

Woodwind Ensemble

Crosswinds represents a melding of the traditional woodwind sound of the  clarinet with digital live electronic techniques, and the piece explores the  potential for this relationship in three parts.                From a sustained breath and a single sustained note at the beginning of the  piece, the computer derives all the subsequent elements it will play. The  stage performer then leads the digital elements, playing a virtuosic and  haunting theme which mentors and is augmented by the electronics. Even as the  relationship between the live performer and the digital components is  established patiently throughout, the listener is invited to consider the  interplay between them.                Crosswinds is, in many ways, an experience of the history of our music  through the relationship between traditional clarinet and modern digital  techniques: the common elements they share, the singularity of their own  particular strengths, and the beauty that can be experienced when they  collaborate.

Crosswinds

Clarinet Solo

"Notes of Daybreak" is a four movement song cycle for high voice and piano based on the poetry of Walt Whitman. Songs include: That Music Always Round Me; I Heard You Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the Organ; The Last Invocation and I Hear America Singing.

Notes of Daybreak

High/Medium Solo Collection

When I moved to Oklahoma from Missouri, I was amazed at the variety of colors in the sunsets over the Great Plains. These sunsets served as the basis of <i>Under the Oklahoma Sky.</i> My aim was to represent a day through several sections, dawn, sunrise, morning, clouds, rain, rainbows, evening, and sunset. In addition to original melodic material, the work also uses the SLANE hymn tune, most familiar as the tune to "Be Thou My Vision" to represent feelings of awe when experiencing the sublimity of nature.

Under the Oklahoma Sky

Piano Solo

"Over Every Open Field" was inspired by Ed Ruschas painting No Mans Land, which pairs an outline of the state of Oklahoma with a distended question mark. This leaves the work ambiguous and open to interpretation; I attempted to capture this uncertainty by writing a melody that was questioningly optimistic.

Over Every Open Field

Trio

This advanced work for orchestra (2121-2111, timp+2, str) is a thoughtful, optimistic work with myriad opportunities for displaying orchestral color.

Program Note: "The Uncertainty of Joywhat kind of title is that?" you might ask yourself. "Joy is joy." Well, maybe. But sometimes you find yourself in a gleeful situation with a bit of gravitythe sort where maybe the terrific is tinged with a little trepidation, and the carefree comes with consequence. The sort of situation that you know is sublime, but one that changes everything. The joy is real, but so is the realization that things will never be the same again. In those moments we're faced with the Uncertainty of Joy.

The Uncertainty of Joy

Score & Parts

Global Sections - CORE [DO NOT TOUCH]*

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