Statement

I am an interdisciplinary artist with a lexical approach to sound, space, and language in the context of musical composition. Equally but not opposingly, I am a performer and enthusiastic collaborator. I am equally a composer, improvisor, saxophonist, and visual artist.  These interests and pursuits inform each other in an ecosystem that has direction and meaning, and the ability to work in these modalities affords me the great privilege of getting to work and connect with many different kinds of creative communities. 

As a composer, I approach sound-making as an exchange of mutual collaboration. As a sound artist, I curate timbres and ideas to create a living landscape. It is by the same compositional method that artists populate a canvas as composers populate a staff and improvising musicians sculpt new meaning by defining positive and negative space in an open sonic environment. Highly inspired by map-making techniques and Xenakian gestalt, I like to think of my compositional process as the cartography of thought. 

Creating work centering connection, gift, and exchange in contemporary music is the inspiration underlying my work. I have been developing my own understanding of the potential of the musical score as an art object as much as a notated intention for performance/action and building connectivity. I design scores as intermediaries between idea and action, between visual and aural, and between myself and others.

The medium of composing graphically has been a freeing tool for my expression. I thank the Civic Orchestra of Chicago for jumpstarting my foray into this domain with their curation of my 2016 piece, Snaefellsnes, into their program.  The most exciting freedom in using my own frameworks to represent sound is not that there might be no rules or complete anarchy, but from the potential proliferation for new realms of precise, exacting rules to create or discover order in a new theoretical field. Coming from a fine art background in addition to a musical one, I see composition as organization in a field of space (be that space time, a flat plane, an empty timeline, a blank page, etc). This applies regardless of the nature of what’s added or augmented. I’ve found that composing in this modality has yielded some special results when it comes to accessibility and working with musicians and artists from a variety of backgrounds and experiences. When I am working with ensembles and musical interpreters, I prefer to get to know the people involved and their unique approaches to interpretation.