in the end, everything is bare

Written in 2023 for piano with tape and open ensemble (20 minutes)

I wrote this piece for a short tour I did throughout the Midwest in the Summer of 2023. Playing shows in Texas and Kansas and then a residency in Nebraska before hitting up Chicago through Iowa and then up through Wisconsin and Minnesota. This piece, specifically, was written for a show in Iowa City with the Christine Burke Ensemble at Trumpet Blossom. Christine and I had gotten to know each other at the end of 2022 because I had released an album of her music on Sawyer editions; an album that is probably one of my favorites so far from Sawyer Editions in general. Anyway, I wrote this piece at the Homestead National Monument while I was in residency there, thinking about harmony and the open instrumentation of the ensemble and especially how I could write a piece that would fit in with some of her work and the work of some of her friends in Iowa.

That said, I was and still am interested in figuring out ways of fitting electronics in with my work. While I honestly have little to no interest in writing electronic works that have a ton of processing or effects, I'm very interested in finding ways of fitting sine waves and pink noise into my music - something I've taken a lot of influence from Michael Pisaro-Liu and Sergio Cote Barco. Working on this reminded me that I'm not particularly good at working in MAX/MSP either; there is a much higher paid German guy whose job it is to make sure that this convolution reverb business works better than anything I could build myself, and while I greatly respect that process, I'm just not quite convinced how much of that works within my own artistic vocabulary. Still, I think there's a ton to explore here with sine waves and pink noise with my acoustic work and I really want to keep revisiting this and building on it in the future