Music Compositions

Pizzicato

This was written the morning of October 29th, 2005. It is something like a cross between a canon and a chaconne for string quartet. This piece is entirely in pizzicato, which is plucked strings, mainly because I thought the string sound on my computer was awful and the "Pizzicato Strings" instrument sounded much better. This was probably my first composition before I studied some music theory. The MP3 recording is by computer and is kind of quiet.

Score — MP3

Meagan has a Knack!

This was written with my cousin Meagan on October 7th, 2006. It is for violin with piano accompaniment. We needed to think of a title before we started work on the piece, so she came up with "Meagan has a Knack!" which later received the subtitle "Adventures in Meaganland" because it seemed to follow a small story: Meagan is bored, she finds a new secret place, Meaganland, which is playful and happy, she has to then leave, which is sad, and she ultimately is thinking about the past fun, ending on an ambiguous chord. This story was retrospective, after we wrote the music. Again, this is a computerized performance.

Score — MP3

Adventures in Meaganland

After we made "Meagan has a Knack!", that same day I decided to reorchestrate it for string orchestra. I later got a few people together to sight read and record it June of 2007. It was surprisingly difficult in some spots, especially the offbeat chords in the playful pizzicato section. The recordings are my friends David and Julie on violin, Kelsey on viola, myself on cello, and Christian on bass.

Score — MP3 — M4A (iTunes)

Dissonance

This was an experiment in dissonance that I originally wrote for piano during a car ride home from my cabin on October 8th, 2006. Later, I decided to turn it into a string orchestra piece so I could submit it for the MMEA compositional contest. It is a really interesting piece that is kind of crazy sounding, but seems to have its own internal logic. The performers in this recording are the same as those in "Adventures in Meaganland."

Score — MP3 — M4A (iTunes)

String Quartet No. 1

I wrote this string quartet between November 2006 and June 2007 partially based on themes I had written when reading a book on music composition. It is my longest composition with a duration of about 15 minutes. The first movement is in sonata-allegro form, the second is a slow chaconne, the third is something like a scherzo, and the fourth is in a modified sonata-rondo form. The performers are David and Julie on violin, Kelsey on viola, and me on cello.

Score and parts — MP3 — M4A (iTunes) — Youtube

Piano Sonata No. 1

I wrote this between October 2006 and June 2007 with most of the composition of the final two movements between October and December. It loosely follows the classical sonata form for piano in three movements. I've submitted this work as well for the MMEA composition contest.

Sheet music and recordings

Kazoo Concerto No. 1

Being a high school senior in my orchestra, the conductor kindly let me compose something for the final concert of the year. After having to listen to a violist friend play "Over the Rainbow" on the kazoo during break for an entire semester, I decided to make a short piece featuring her playing the kazoo as a serious solo instrument. The score is a slightly older version than what was actually performed.

Score — YouTube

The Elephant

Also for the final orchestra performance of the year, a bassist was performing a piece with prominant bass solo, which was L'Éléphant from Carnival of the Animals. Since the bassist would have been completely overpowered by the full orchestra, the conductor asked me to arrange the piece for the smaller same chamber orchestra, which performed the kazoo concerto.

Score and parts

The Great Book Chase

My brother was making a movie for the Eden Prairie Library video contest during the summer of 2008, and so he asked me to make the music for the movie (of course, after putting my name in the credits). I'm not sure what happened to the scores, though. I believe my brother may have them. More information about this can be found on the Great Book Chase page.

Staplers and Cans

For a project in my introduction to music composition course, we had to do something in the style of musique concrète, which, in essence, is taking everyday sounds and combining them to compose music. This style is completely different from anything else I had done before. Because I didn't want do deal with Audacity, I instead developed my own system of using a command line utility called arss to convert the sounds I had recorded (of myself playing with a stapler, a soda can, and swiping my fingers across my laptop keyboard) into images which I then manipulated with an image editor. The score below is a PNG of the actual BMP image I fed into the arss program.

score — easier-to-read score — M4A

The Ode to the Progressively Sadder Pennies

For the final project of my introduction to music composition course, I decided to write some work for piano and cello. Lacking a better name, I named it after my Progressively Sadder Penny museum (which was a series of pennies in varying degrees of being melted. I wanted to see if I could get a lighter to melt the zinc, and it could). When questioned about the name in class, I said it was metaphorical. The MP3 is my attempt to perform the piece with myself, but the intonation isn't always quite there since I had just learned the piece on the day of recording, and because I played the cello part first.

Score — MIDI — MP3