Music Catalogue

Talking in Circles was written for Kate Stenberg and Sarah Cahill with the generous support of Intermusic SF. It is a piece written for any instrumentation, between 1-5 players, with electronics. For a long time, I’ve been interested in how musical…

Don’t Look At is an expansion and recomposition of my short trombone duet Puppies!!! Written for the same instrumentation as Stravinsky’s Octet for Winds, it takes the materials from the earlier piece and reinterprets them for larger forces. Puppies…

Prescription Drug Nation is an evening-length music and dance production in six parts, exploring how society’s ever-increasing reliance on prescription drugs affects our daily lives. Each segment portrays the effects of a particular drug: Adderall…

Work Around the World is the third Around the World piece that I have written, taking a single word—in this case work—and presenting it in a wide variety of languages. In each piece in this series, I explore the nuance of meaning that the word has…

Schizo Psycho is based entirely on material from Bernard Herrmann’s score to Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Psycho. A 40-second clip of the movie plays repeatedly, with the ensemble providing different “personalities” on each repetition. All material is…

Disney Princess Distasters is a humorous take on three traditional fairy tales about princesses. In the same way Disney changed these fairy tales to suit their own needs, I modified the stories from their original versions in order to create a series…

Written for the Quatuor Bozzini, the title of this piece can be loosely translated as “To go around oneself, to conform oneself”. Those concepts play a role in the musical material on several different levels: harmonic material, rhythmic structure…

Credit for the idea of a Halo ballet goes to Gregory Oh, who commissioned the piece and arranged for me to work with choreographer Julia Aplin. To complement the unusual dance environment of the piece, I chose an unusual musical environment that is…

Kiss Around the World was commissioned by New Works Calgary and the Canada Council for the Arts for Ensemble Resonance. It is the second Around the World piece that I have written, taking a single word—in this case kiss—and presenting it in a wide…

This is the middle piece in my Culture series, which is an exploration of the effects that today’s cultural context has on making our music what it is. The text for the piece is taken from a junk e-mail message—certainly among the more recent of…

Recy­cled 80s Live is a col­lage of small frag­ments of ‘80s pop songs, recom­posed and recon­tex­tu­al­ized into a new, larger work. I chose this approach because artists have always bor­rowed mate­r­ial from one another, but copy­right is increas…

Only a small part of music is actually about sound. The majority of music-making has to do with social interactions more than anything else. Music fulfills certain functions (usually pre-determined) within certain social situations, or serves as a…

Jackhammer Lullaby is an arrangement of Community-Normed, which was commissioned by the Continuum Ensemble in Toronto in 2008. I’ve become increasingly interested in presenting pieces in multiple versions and combinations. Jackhammer Lullaby, with a…

This piece reflects my ongoing interests in sectional forms, doing away with transitional material, and the challenging of aesthetic assumptions. There is no attempt to relate any of the materials of the piece over the large scale. Instead, I have…

Five Reflective Fragments is based on a sequence of very brief text fragments extracted from a much longer poetic work, entitled I Lost Everything by poet Sarah Lang. The piece always presents this series of word-units in order and without overlap…

Two years’ distance and fresh ears have made me decide to rename this piece, originally called Quartet, to Short/Long. These are the titles of the two movements and reflect the kinds of articulations and phrasing that I employed.

Four Pieces for Accordion and String Quartet was written between the summer of 2002 and the fall of 2003. It was inspired by a series of poems called Swerve, by Canadian poet Sarah Lang. There are four poems in the series, which tell the story of a…

An early piece for voice and chamber ensemble, based on a text by Sarah Lang.

Prescription Drug Nation is an evening-length music and dance production in six parts, exploring how society’s ever-increasing reliance on prescription drugs affects our daily lives. Each segment portrays the effects of a particular drug: Adderall…

Credit for the idea of a Halo ballet goes to Gregory Oh, who commissioned the piece and arranged for me to work with choreographer Julia Aplin. To complement the unusual dance environment of the piece, I chose an unusual musical environment that is…

Talking in Circles was written for Kate Stenberg and Sarah Cahill with the generous support of Intermusic SF. It is a piece written for any instrumentation, between 1-5 players, with electronics. For a long time, I’ve been interested in how musical…

The idea for Percussion for Apartments came to me a few years ago when percussionist Justin DeHart and I were talking about collaborating on a solo percussion project. My instrumental background is in percussion, but starting in college I often lived…

An ensemble of four unaccompanied singers is not a particularly common arrangement nowadays, but it just happens to have been one of the most popular configurations of medieval Europe. Therefore, when I started on Longuement me sui tenus, I decided…

Work Around the World is the third Around the World piece that I have written, taking a single word—in this case work—and presenting it in a wide variety of languages. In each piece in this series, I explore the nuance of meaning that the word has…

Schizo Psycho is based entirely on material from Bernard Herrmann’s score to Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Psycho. A 40-second clip of the movie plays repeatedly, with the ensemble providing different “personalities” on each repetition. All material is…

Video and recording available by request Much of the concert experience is visual, even though we come “to hear the music”. The athleticism of performance, the split-second coordination required to make a piece of music come together, the thrill of…

This piece was commissioned by AVE for a concert to take place on the date of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In his honor, we decided on a piece that was based on his presidential speeches, since works of the US government are not covered by…

Credit for the idea of a Halo ballet goes to Gregory Oh, who commissioned the piece and arranged for me to work with choreographer Julia Aplin. To complement the unusual dance environment of the piece, I chose an unusual musical environment that is…

I wrote Hockey Story for Brazilian-Canadian pianist, Luciane Cardassi. Luciane had immigrated to Canada a couple of years beforehand and was interested in exploring the hockey culture of Canada. She was also looking for a piece that involved…

Culture no.1 is the first in a series of three pieces that deal with the changing role of music in culture, and I wrote it while working on my Master’s degree at UC San Diego. The impetus for the piece was a series of four unrelated samples (and one…

Two years’ distance and fresh ears have made me decide to rename this piece, originally called Quartet, to Short/Long. These are the titles of the two movements and reflect the kinds of articulations and phrasing that I employed.

One of my first electronic pieces, an interactive sound game for audience volunteers.

Break Up Make Up exists essentially because two Vancouver groups—the Nu:BC Collective (piano trio) and Turning Point Ensemble (chamber orchestra)—wanted to perform together. They approached me to compose a piece that would place Nu:BC as concerto…

Video and recording available by request Much of the concert experience is visual, even though we come “to hear the music”. The athleticism of performance, the split-second coordination required to make a piece of music come together, the thrill of…

Much of my recent work deals with the issue of reappropriation. Where do we get our ideas? What do we owe, if anything, to our sources of inspiration? Historically, composers have stolen ideas from each other regularly, reworking these into their…

Love in the Time of Connectivity is a collage. In fact, even the title is a collage: I took the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, and combined it with a reference to the culture of Internet file sharing. I have…

This piece deals with my interest in both transitional musical materials and the transitive nature of sound itself, which disappears almost as soon as it is created. I have conceived the form of the piece as an exploration of transition, presenting…

Culture no.3 is the last in a series of pieces that deals with the ways that modern popular culture can inform Western art music. More specifically, Culture no.3 is involved in exploring the interrelation between the visceral elements of popular…

Desde was written in the summer of 2004 and is my first orchestral work. In several of the pieces leading up to Desde, I had begun experimenting with ways of dealing with the problem of culturally biased musical perception, which colours all musical…

Why call a piece Nothing? Well, in a word, curiosity—most of my music has as its theme the question, “What happens if…?” At the time I was writing Nothing (winter 2004), I was bothered by the almost total reliance on motivic development and form to…

An opera in one act, The Havester is based on a play by the same name by Paul Van Dyck. The story is set in a dystopian future where people have developed a technology that allows them to live forever but that requires tremendous resources to operate…

The opera is set in 1997. Sex trafficking from Eastern Europe has started to pick up steam but is not as well known a threat as it is today. A teenage girl from Ukraine, named Oksana, is recruited by a pimp from Russian Georgia, named Konstantin. He…

I wrote this chamber opera for three singers and six instrumentalists in conjunction with Colleen Murphy for Tapestry’s Opera To Go series. There is also an alternate orchestration for two singers and three instrumentalists, prepared for Bicycle…

This is the first work I did with Colleen Murphy, while we were participating in Tapestry’s LibLab in August 2005. The story is about a man who has had an accident, and his unfaithful wife/girlfriend who accidentally reveals her infidelity as she…

A short opera scene that I wrote for an undergraduate opera program. Score available upon request.

Talking in Circles was written for Kate Stenberg and Sarah Cahill with the generous support of Intermusic SF. It is a piece written for any instrumentation, between 1-5 players, with electronics. For a long time, I’ve been interested in how musical…

I wrote Puppies!!! for Elevate Ensemble’s “Stravinsky: Reconstructed” program. The task was to create a short duet for trombone and bass trombone, showcasing the characteristics that make the trombone unique. Of course, I turned to glissandi (sliding…

The idea for Percussion for Apartments came to me a few years ago when percussionist Justin DeHart and I were talking about collaborating on a solo percussion project. My instrumental background is in percussion, but starting in college I often lived…

Who Made the Inch of Grass was written for Corey Hamm and Nicole Li as part of their Piano and Erhu Project, and they recorded it for Volume Two of their project compilation, released on Redshift Music in January 2015. This was my first time writing…

I wrote Hockey Story for Brazilian-Canadian pianist, Luciane Cardassi. Luciane had immigrated to Canada a couple of years beforehand and was interested in exploring the hockey culture of Canada. She was also looking for a piece that involved…

This piece is based on the sound of the word shit in twelve different languages. It travels from west to east geographically across the world. The languages were chosen either because I speak them, or because I could find a native speaker of that…

Always on. Instantaneous. No down time. Available. Abbreviated. Abuse of exclamation marks. Multi-tasking. Fragmentation. Illegal? Dangerous… In-the-moment. Multiple directions. Too many variables to consider at once. Impatient. Faster. Abstraction…

Culture no.1 is the first in a series of three pieces that deal with the changing role of music in culture, and I wrote it while working on my Master’s degree at UC San Diego. The impetus for the piece was a series of four unrelated samples (and one…

Flüsse-Einflüsse is German for Streams-Influences. The concept of the convergence of multiple streams of influence is important to me, because I am a classical composer coming from a jazz and pop background. Similarly, the 2004/2005 DAAD Sound…

The title of the piece is in reference to an argument between two of the composer’s friends, regarding the meaning of form in new music. The piece explores this question musically: is it in ternary form or not?

This is the earliest piece in my catalogue that I would want performed again. I originally wrote the following about it: This piece explores the process of learning the “hard way”, which is frequently a painful journey, but which in most cases…

An ensemble of four unaccompanied singers is not a particularly common arrangement nowadays, but it just happens to have been one of the most popular configurations of medieval Europe. Therefore, when I started on Longuement me sui tenus, I decided…

Work Around the World is the third Around the World piece that I have written, taking a single word—in this case work—and presenting it in a wide variety of languages. In each piece in this series, I explore the nuance of meaning that the word has…

This piece was commissioned by AVE for a concert to take place on the date of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In his honor, we decided on a piece that was based on his presidential speeches, since works of the US government are not covered by…

This short song was written in conjunction with librettist Royce Vavrek, a fellow Albertan now residing in New York. We had been trying for years to find a collaboration together, and finally this came through, for a concert at the National Opera…

Kiss Around the World was commissioned by New Works Calgary and the Canada Council for the Arts for Ensemble Resonance. It is the second Around the World piece that I have written, taking a single word—in this case kiss—and presenting it in a wide…

Love in the Time of Connectivity is a collage. In fact, even the title is a collage: I took the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, and combined it with a reference to the culture of Internet file sharing. I have…

Recy­cled 80s Live is a col­lage of small frag­ments of ‘80s pop songs, recom­posed and recon­tex­tu­al­ized into a new, larger work. I chose this approach because artists have always bor­rowed mate­r­ial from one another, but copy­right is increas…

I wrote Sensational Revolution in Medicine in 2008, and it was premiered by Xin Wang and Gregory Oh at The Music Gallery in Toronto. The text for the piece is derived from spam emails—which, admittedly, is no longer all that novel in terms of…

An early piece for voice and chamber ensemble, based on a text by Sarah Lang.

This is one of my first vocal pieces, a song cycle that I wrote for my sister Zohreh based on texts written by a colleague of mine, Emma Hooper. This was an early piece and in many ways an exploration of what I saw as the possibilities of the artsong…