Early on in my undergraduate music program, in music history class, I was introduced to Missa Prolationum by Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1410 - 1497). It is a setting of the Mass Ordinary as a series of prolation canons. At the time, I didn’t give it much thought; I only studied the brief example in my Norton Anthology of Western Music so I could recognize it on an exam. Years later, in 2012, I found myself listening to it almost by accident, when I fell asleep with my iPod playing on a long bus ride. As I awoke, I heard a ripple of beautiful melodies undulating like the surface of a calm lake, seemingly free of time, and I took notice of the voices imitating each other but at different speeds, and then at the same speed. At the time, I couldn’t have described it as I just did, but I heard and knew what was happening. It mystified me to hear something that I both intuitively understood and had no words to express.
Possibly a portrait of Johannes Ockeghem by an anonymous artist.
Soon after that, I was in Barcelona touring the major architectural attractions of the city designed by Antoni Gaudí (1852 - 1926), a major figure in Catalan Modernisme. A striking decorative feature on most of his works is the mosaic style of trencadís, which is made from broken shards of ceramic or glassware. As I toured Park Güell, La Sagrada Familia, Casa Battló, these mosaics overwhelmed me with the sense that there is more to them than simply what is on the surface. I imagine the original tiles from which the shards came, the destructive act of breaking them, and how the shards have been assembled into a new creation. It gives me an experience of excess: I imagine seeing more than what is presented. It stretches across time too, when I think about how these tiles were designed in different eras, from traditional to modern. I then began thinking about how to do something like that with music.
An example of trencadís
These experiences set me on the path I have been on ever since. That is why you will not find any of the music I wrote prior to 2012 on this website or anywhere else. The creative space I am currently operating in began around that time and it embraces Gaudí’s sentiment, “originality consists in returning to the origin.” This could be taken many ways. After all, what is the origin? Gaudí was an architect, and Nature was the origin of building for him. Another architect might look to the earliest structures of human kind. The origin is not a fixed point. It is more like the cornerstone of one’s creative outlook.
For myself, I am constantly returning to the well of plainchant and Renaissance polyphony as the origin. Plainchant is the earliest recorded origin of Western music, and the polyphony of the Renaissance that followed the medieval era is the original multi-voice music of Western history. The rhythmic freedom found in these styles intoxicates me with its vibrancy and unpredictability. Melodies unfold with the unfettered rhythm of prose rather than the constrained manner of verse, which helps make them sound archaic to us, along with their use of modes.
All of the works you can listen to here have these two features in common: they are all non-metric and modal, though you won’t hear any traditional modes. I prefer to create my own. These characteristics are so fundamental to my practice that I often forget to remark on them, but they are omnipresent.
Among the common features I do often think about, the basic practices of material generation are the most consistent. I begin each work by composing something that sounds antiquated, something that evokes the origin. This becomes the source from which all other material is derived. How the original is treated to derive new material differs a little from one work to another, but the most common is my trencadís technique, in which I break up the origin material into several short melodic shards to be recombined in diverse configurations.
I have included some early work here on the website, and some recordings that may not represent the compositions as best they could, but as you listen I hope you have an experience similar to those I had rediscovering Ockeghem or pondering over trencadís.