Princeton Portfolio
Piece 1: Clockwork (2025)
Instrumentation: pierrot sextet (fl, bcl, vln, vlc, perc, pf)
Premiering group: Collage New Music
Downloadable score PDF: click here
Downloadable audio: click here
Short Explanation:
This work was written for pierrot sextet as part of my fellowship with Collage New Music under the ensemble’s Julie I. Rohwein Fellows Program for their 2025/26 season. This piece is a colorfully orchestrated telling of how we can construct the ever changing idea of home using the metaphor of a clock.
For this piece I tried to explore aleatoric notation, relentlessly alternating time signatures, and a complex number of trading gestures amongst other techniques to create the idea of this ever-evolving mechanism we think of as a clock during its moments of function/malfunction and constant winding/unwinding.
Score Follower
Program Notes:
Clockwork explores the delicate process of assembling and disassembling memory. Much like a clock or any other instrument that marks time, we construct the idea of home and our relationships from countless components. Each piece is constantly shifting, being taken apart, and pieced back together. Life and home demand constant attention. Maintaining equilibrium means we must repeatedly take things apart to understand where maintenance is needed, then reassemble them with new insight. Yet, every time a gear or cog is replaced, the machine continues to function, but it is never quite the same. With each repair, the clock evolves in small ways. It might still keep perfect time, but the finish may change color, the glass may cloud, or the weight may shift... perhaps after that time you swapped a fine brass gear for one of a cheaper material. Decades afterward, the clock your grandfather gave you may look almost unrecognizable. To you, it remains the same. Each replacement part, every moment spent polishing the brass, every anxious glance as you waited for the chime to tell you to take your kids to school, is a memory layered into this ever-evolving machine. Somehow, despite all the changes, it’s still home.
Home is an ever-evolving concept. To resist change is like refusing to maintain your clock. Eventually, the mechanism falters, time slips, and you end up running through your morning routine, blissfully unaware you’re already ten minutes late for work. The desire to keep things as they are can be comforting, but it comes at the risk of stagnation. Keeping equilibrium is not about preventing change, but about tending to the shifts that inevitably occur. Home will change, friends will grow and drift, and we must always be willing to recalibrate. In this ever-evolving process, we must not find solace in the perfection that once was, but in the care and memories we hold going forward.
Piece 2: A Pocket of Light (2024)
Instrumentation: string quartet (2 vln, vla, vlc)
Premiering group: Dior Quartet
Downloadable score PDF: click here
Downloadable audio: click here
Short Explanation:
This piece is a work for string quartet written for the Dior Quartet at the 2024 Mostly Modern Festival and The Rhythm Method at the 2024 Lake George Music Festival. The work is a narrative heavy meditation on rediscovering joy and light within a colorless landscape. The form is mostly through-composed with many recurring elements being thought of as a glass mosaic; with recurring ideas being segmented and fastened together in a loose array while still creating a unified idea.
Piece 3: Eureka (2025)
Instrumentation: orchestra (2(picc).2.2.2.-4.3.3(btbn).1.-hp-timp-3perc-str)
Premiering group: Orquestra Sinfônica do Teatro Nacional Cláudio Santoro
Downloadable score PDF: click here
Downloadable audio: click here
Short Explanation:
This work is a colorfully scored orchestral arrangement of my previous string quartet from 2024. The original string quartet version explores childlike wonder as a way to commemorate my work with music education through my fellowship with Eureka Ensemble from 2022 to 2024. The original orchestral work was presented for a reading session at the Mostly Modern Festival in 2024 with a full premiere by the Brazilian National Symphony in 2025 for the Brasilia Orchestra Summit.
For this piece I worked on trying to create as many orchestral colors as possible from the material the quartet edition afforded me. This often meant exploring the extremes of register and sound through intricate embellishments, instrumental pairing and percussion writing.
Score Follower
Program Notes:
This piece came to me at a time of significant change and strife. It was two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, a point at which many of us could relate to feeling tired and hopeless. I was no stranger to this, and I was additionally in a transitional time of finishing school and moving across the country to an unfamiliar environment. It was a confusing time that even left me wondering what music meant to me anymore.
It seemed as though the entire world had lost color to me. The area of North Texas I was living in also did not help, as the landscape was more or less the same shade of brown in all directions for miles.
One day, I looked into this endless brown landscape and noticed that if you looked closely, there were tiny variations in this coloration. They were subtle but were there. I then challenged myself to look out into the landscape every day and find more and more subtle variations in the tones of the environment. The more I practiced, the more differences I could see. After many repetitions of this exercise, I could soon see drastic differences between these shades that seemed almost as stark as blue against yellow or red against green. Noticing the occasionally truly yellow or white flower became an even greater delight in this. This eventually brought back the color to the world that I had lost.
This piece is, hence, an ode to this practice and to rediscovering that color that brings joy to the world.
Score Follower
Program Notes:
This piece is an orchestral arrangement of my quartet by the same name. The original quartet version was commissioned by Alan Toda-Ambaras for Eureka Ensemble's string quartet residency program. Eureka Ensemble is an organization that prides itself on using music to initiate greater social change and bring attention to pressing issues in our world. In my time as an artistic fellow with them, I helped run their Women's Chorus program in partnership with the daytime shelter Women's Lunch Place and their Desear Soñar program in collaboration with the immigrant rights organization La Colaborativa. When Alan approached me about writing this piece, he asked me to create something that celebrated these two programs' significance in the local Boston community. The most striking image that came to mind in making a direct connection in a thematic sense was the guitars we used to teach music to the children in Desear Soñar. When not playing rhythm games or doing songwriting activities, we always had the kids learning basic strumming patterns and chord sequences in groups. The strumming motion of the guitars and fun music we learned in those classes is the heart and soul from which life breathes in this piece.
Supplementary
Listed are a few links to suggested supplementary portfolio materials, should they be need.
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