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Oracle Machines (2026)
large ensemble and electronics
Set the Sun (2025)
piano and electronics
Tectonics (2023)
ensemble and electronics
Seeker (2022)
orchestra and electronics
The Atens (2022)
reed quintet and electronics
Star Taker (2019)
saxophone, violin, cello, piano, percussion, and quadraphonic playback
Actuate/Resonate (2018)
large ensemble with electronics
Lines on Black (2018)
for voice, flute, violin, saxophone, piano, percussion, and electronics
binary/momentary iii (2018)
cello and electronics
for Delia Derbyshire (2018)
bass, guitar, and electronics
Matrix for George Lewis (2017)
2 electronic silent brass trombones
binary/momentary ii: flow state/joy state (2017)
Trumpet, 2 trombones, piano, and percussion
binary/momentary logics: flow state/joy state (2016)
String quartet
delay/line (2016)
Flute and delay line
Seven Systems (2015)
2 piano, 2 percussion quartet with electronic playback and actuated snares
Points Against Fields (2015)
Bassoon and playback
hydra (2015)
Violin, piano, fixed media, and live electronics
MODULES (2014)
Brass quartet, percussion, analog synthesizer, and live electronics
Four Sixes (2014)
Percussion Sextet
Chain Reactions/Five Events (2013)
String quartet and live electronics
Sixty Cycles (2013)
Sopranino saxophone soloist, feedback televisions, violin, and cello
Broken Symmetries (2012)
Violin soloist, feedback electronics, flute, tenor saxophone, piano, and percussion
Machine Language (2012)
Percussion soloist, 2 percussion, 2 violins, 2 bass clarinets, accordion, and fixed sine tones
Portraits/Self Portraits (2011)
Violin soloist with large ensemble
ATD V (2010)
Saxophone and electronics soloists with small ensemble
Tile Mosaic (after Chagall) (2010)
Two pianos, two percussion, and resonant pails
Standing Waves (2009)
Medium sized ensemble and electronics
Matrices (2009)
Percussion trio and electronics
Signal Flow (2009)
Percussion quartet and electronics
Lyra (2007 rev. 2010)
Amplified string quartet
SWITCHES (2007)
Distorted, amplified cello and drumset
American Tokyo Daydream IV (data structures/monoliths) (2007)
Saxophones, electric guitar, and accordion
A Circle of 8 in a Prime of Primes for Sara (31), by Sam (29)
Sheng, pipa, suona, handbell choir, and live electronics
7:6 (2006, rev. 2010)
Distorted, amplified cello
American Tokyo Daydream III (The Surprise) (2006)
Piano, string quaret, and live electronics
noise + mobile (2005)
Piano and electronic playback
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Tectonics (2023) was made possible by the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In 2006, while I was a student at the University of Birmingham, our studio performed Nick Collins’s pioneering work Pea Soup in an old factory in downtown Birmingham. This was a seminal experience for me, as it pushed me into a lifelong engagement with feedback systems. Collins’s work, using (originally) pre-computing technologies, allows feedback to develop in a room, and when it detects a buildup of feedback at a certain pitch, uses phase adjustments to reject that pitch from feeding back further. Due to the harmonic nature of a rooms, once one pitch is rejected from the room a new one will inevitably emerge to thusly be squashed again by the software/hardware. The result is an emergent sonic sculpture, where the software, room, and performers interact in an ever evolving system.
Around 2008 I developed my own feedback control system using FFTs to measure magnitudes across a spectrum. First written in SuperCollider and then ported to a C++ UGen, this system mimics Collins’s, but with more granular analysis capabilities and more rapid control over emerging harmonics. I used this software in my 2012 compositions Broken Symmetries and for Brad Garton, and the installation American Idols from the same year.
Tectonics is a work that uses feedback in many approaches. In the final two movements, my C++ plugin controls feedback that is flowing through different resonant objects: a saxophone and two teapots. In both of these movements, the saxophone and teapots act as resonant filters, and the performers exert some control over the system by adjusting their fingerings, in the case of the saxophone, or the opening of the teapot lid and an eq in the case of the teapots. However, because the software is constantly listening and adjusting, neither the software nor the players have total control over the system. Furthermore, in the saxophone movement, the clarinetist is also asked to improvise with the saxophone, playing tones near to those of the feedback. Their sound interacts with and pushes the system in further different directions. The results are cybernetic systems, where the machine and human performers listen and adjust to create music seemingly out of nothing.
In the first movement, Digital Feedback, I use a different approach. A complex and chaotic digital feedback network is triggered intermittently, adjusting 50+ parameters to random values to result in a new sound on each trigger. Microphones pick up the signal coming out of the speakers and feed it back into the digital network for added variation. The ensemble accents each trigger with randomly generated tutti attacks which themselves are the result of listening to and reacting to the previous state of the environment.
In the inner movements of the work, feedback is used as a non-realtime device for ensemble composition. Algorithmic text scores create cybernetic acoustic composition machines that guide the ensemble to build vertical structures one element at a time. Each layer of the sound is the result of feedback from each previously constructed layer, and each movement is built through a process of listening and creating.
Feedback systems are incredible muses. When set up in certain ways, like with reverbs or filters, they give us predictable outcomes. When set up in other ways, they become expressive cybernetic creation machines. Tectonics is a set of studies of approaches to the latter (though the former is of course used in the software as well).
View the Complete Score
There is an upcoming video recording of Tectonics that will be available at some point in the future.
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