not of longing (2019) for soprano and contrabass
I love vocal music that straddles the line between abstract musical object and concrete linguistic meaning. For me, writing for voice allows an opportunity to fragment and deconstruct a text like a musical motif, and to build narrative meaning out of musical phrases as if they are sentences. In not of longing, I set a tiny fragment from the last sentence of Maggie Nelson’s genre-defying book “Bluets”, an achingly beautiful set of poetic “propositions” that meditate on loss and the color blue. “Bluets” closes with the sentence “When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light,” and I adapted the second half of this line into many different splintered forms throughout the piece. The pairing of soprano and double bass might seem unwieldy, but I was actually intrigued by the seamless blend between the sounds of the voice and bass: throughout the piece, you’ll hear the bass imitating vocal sounds and the soprano mimicking string effects like ricochet and tremolo. The piece builds from sounds, into syllables, into words, into full sentences, before it retreats back into unintelligibility.

​not of longing was commissioned by soprano Anika Kildegaard and bassist Will Yager for their duo LIGAMENT, and was premiered as part of their 2019-20 season. 
LIGAMENT performs not of longing at Pinwheel Arts in February 2020
selected performances: 
         Nov. 2023 — LIGAMENT, Bowerbird, Philadelphia, PA
         Nov. 2023 — confluss duo, Kuro Kirin After Hours, New York, NY
         Nov. 2022 — Lindsay McIntyre, soprano, DMA Competition Prize Recital, Toronto, Canada
         Oct. 2022 — LIGAMENT, New Music DC, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
         Sep. 2021 — LIGAMENT, The Englert Theater, Iowa City, IA
         Jun. 2021 — LIGAMENT, Kansas City Contemporary Music Festival, Kansas City, KC
​         Mar. 2020 — Paul Novak's Senior Recital, Shepherd School of Music, Houston, TX
         Mar. 2020 — Architecture Arts, Anderson Hall, Houston, TX
         Mar. 2020 — LIGAMENT, University of Iowa Recital, Iowa City, IA
         Feb. 2020 — LIGAMENT, Pinwheel Arts, Minneapolis, MN
         Jan. 2020 — LIGAMENT, Recital at UM Morris, Morris, MN