Composing
As a composer, I’ve focused on the voice, where I have the most familiarity as a performer. I’ve sung in choirs most of my life, currently in the baritone section of the semiprofessional choir Vox Venti.
I’m one of a handful of composers selected by the Ear Taxi Festival of new music in Chicago to compose a new work for the Kaia String Quartet and voice, scheduled to premiere in October 2025. My piece will set poetic fragments of the ancient Greek poet Sappho for the quartet and mezzo-soprano.
My arrangement of the French Advent carol “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” premiered on Vox Venti’s holiday program in December 2022.
My setting of the John Keats sonnet that begins “When I have fears that I may cease to be” won a composition contest put on by the San Francisco-based women’s choir Musae and was recorded on their album Five.
For my college a cappella group, the Princeton Katzenjammers, I arranged “A Foggy Day” and “Autumn Leaves,” both of which appear on the the group’s 2001 album Autumn Leaves.
In college, I studied composition and orchestration with Steven Mackey, Barbara White, and Judith Weir.
Compositions
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I’m one of a handful of composers selected by the Ear Taxi Festival of new music in Chicago to compose a new work for the Kaia String Quartet and voice, scheduled to premiere in October 2025. My piece will set poetic fragments of the ancient Greek poet Sappho for the quartet and mezzo-soprano.
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The French Advent carol “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence,” based on the hymn tune Picardy, is the rare Yuletide song in minor. The choir I sing in, Vox Venti, premiered my arrangement, which the director called “haunting” in his introduction, on our holiday program in December 2022.
Recording from premiere performance, Vox Venti, St. Chrysostom’s Episcopal Church, Chicago, Ill.,
December 10, 2022 -
During a childcare-induced hiatus from composing, I kept my skills up by writing choral miniatures—averaging around a minute each—on very short texts. The shortest piece runs maybe 35 seconds; the longest is just over 2 minutes. The texts comprise works by Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Li Bai, Bashō, Marianne Moore, François Le Lionnais, Langston Hughes, Zinnia Meyer, Ezra Pound, Angelica Weld Grimké, Emily Dickinson, and a poet credited as Nael, age 6. Some movements of this suite have been performed in private. The work is awaiting its public premiere.
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The San Francisco–based women’s chamber choir Musae held a composition contest in 2008. This piece for unaccompanied SSAA choir, based on a John Keats sonnet with the first line “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” won the contest and premiered in concerts in May 2009. The group then recorded it for its fifth-anniversary album.
Recording from Musae’s album Five, released November 2009
