INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC: SOLO
Too Big for the Door
:: ABOUT THE WORK ::
Through
:: ABOUT THE WORK ::
Too big for the door (2013)
for double bass

Program Notes:
Too big for the door reflects both a nightmare I had about a giant creature made of wood who was stuck inside an empty wooden room and was desperately trying to leave it. However, the door was too small and the creature wouldn’t fit through. It decided to hit its body against the walls in a desperate
dance to break itself into pieces so it could be small enough to
go through the door and escape.
This piece was written in collaboration with bassist Matt Kline.
:: VIDEO OF LIVE PERFORMANCE ::
The video below is a documentation of the premiere of the piece in 2013, at UCSD. Double bass: Matt Kline.
:: SCORE ::
Click here if you'd prefer to download the score.
:: AUDIO FILES ::
The file below is a studio recording of the piece, made in 2017.
Full piece
Through (2015)
 About Beauty - for bass flute
Watching - for flute
Program Notes:
Ine Vanoeveren had a project for a concert in which she would play all solo flute music written by Brian Ferneyhough. She then commissioned me for a work to serve as a companion piece to Ferneyhough’s flute music and gave me some sort of prompt (to “reflect” or “interpret” his music in some way). My first instinct was to ignore the prompt. I felt both honored and intimidated, excited and conflicted. Her prompt made me think about what it means to create a work that “reflects” the music of an influential composer. What does it mean to write a “companion” piece, and why did she select me for this opportunity? My reaction was to rebel against the prompt and to not compromise. I decided to neither reflect or inflect the prompt.
I decided that my motivation would be to study Ine’s relationship with the flute, which opened an entire world of possibilities to deal with virtuosity, corporeality, interpretations of femininity, vanity, insecurity, bravery, playing from the gut…

Through is divided in two movements, that can be played in any order and can also be played separately.

I. Watching
Fragments of memory and surveillance:
- During the dictatorship in Brazil, the newspapers would publish a cake recipe in the front page, as a replacement of a headline or image that was disapproved and vetoed by the military government.
- Many artists in Brazil encrypted their voices, singing about a lost love using a cheesy romantic cheesy song as a metaphor for the freedom they had lost. They sang upbeat samba about the physical exhaustion of a dancer during Carnaval as a metaphor for the physical violence against those who were persecuted by the government.
- In the year I was born, the best-selling single in the US was a pop song about stalking (and perhaps love). Every Breath You Take, by The Police,
- In 1938, Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal composed I’ll be seeing you, a jazz standard that became an anthem for Americans serving overseas during World War II.
- There is such a thing as a socialist anthem. Is there a capitalist anthem?

II. About Beauty
The fact that music is not and could never be a language,
 combined with the
(perhaps naive) desire of “communicating” and creating meaning through music, and with the
(perhaps futile) necessity of creating semi-reliable, seductive, solitary and semi-rational structures of abstractions,
led me to the attempt of composing a piece that could be
a reconstructed version of a language that was never spoken, never read, never written, but only felt
(do we “feel” language?)
I resent language for being a perverse, flawed and insufficient tool to produce/convey meaning;
I resent music for being so incomplete and yet irritatingly so self-sufficient.
I wanted to crash them against each other, to break them into an almost infinite amount of pieces, then to recombine them in one single piece,
and see if they can find a way to be beauty (not beautiful).
:: VIDEO OF STUDIO RECORDING ::
The video below is a documentation of the studio recording of the piece in 2016. Flutes: Ine Vanoeveren..
:: SCORE ::
1st movt.: Watching: pages 1-4
2nd movt.: About Beauty: pages 5-20
Click here if you'd prefer to download the score
:: AUDIO FILES ::
Through - About Beauty (2nd. movement)
Through - Watching (1st movement)