Selkie: A Sea Tale

Selkie sprang from the imagination of soprano Misha Penton, the whirlwind force behind Houston’s Divergence Vocal Theater. She wrote a series of poems that weave Celtic folklore with her own impressions of the Pacific Northwest, and handed them off to me for the dark-and-stormy treatment.

The Rake's Progress

We imagine that, at the end of Stravinsky’s opera, just before surrendering his sanity, Tom Rakewell experiences one burst of blinding clarity. Our Rake’s Progress telescopes that moment into a half-hour lucid dream, in which kaleidoscopic Tom confronts his past selves in a torrent of words – merciless self-recrimination, apocalyptic fantasies, furious debates, theatrical dialogues, twisted catechisms, cycles of sonnets, lays and villanelles.

The Metropolis Ensemble commissioned this live version for the 2011 MATA festival:

Ladies and Gentlemen

From the program note:

In 1967, Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges gave a series of lectures at Harvard.  In them, he radiates his love for literature with a humility that models, for me, the goal of the creative life: the mastery that is ever in service of wonder.

Another Borges reader might point out several plausible parallels between this work and his — a certain terseness, the proximity of the fantastic and the banal, the flexibility of time, ephemera, multiplicities and mirrors, a fondness for antiquarian forms and undramatic endings, a certain resemblance, in the middle movement, to, perhaps, The Garden of Forking Paths.  But, to be honest, one may count as many disjunctions, for these resemblances are as likely accident as design.  His stories, seeping into my dreams, are not so much recipes as marinades.

I’ll leave you with my favorite passage from the prologue to his book In Praise of Darkness.  Though he is writing about poetry, we might say the same of music:

“Poetry is no less mysterious than other elements of our orb.  A lucky line here or there shouldn’t make us too proud, because it is the gift of Chance or Spirit; only the errors are our own.  I hope that the reader will discover in my pages something worth remembering; in this world beauty is so common.”

Games in Pairs

Parable of the Sower / O

Recitals 07/08

Selections from various concerts given while I was an undergraduate.

Also, one video work: