I’m thrilled to share that my piece Violent Shadows will be performed by two of the greatest trombonists on the planet, Dr. Denson Paul Pollard (professor of trombone at Indiana University and trombonist in the Metropolitan Opera) and Brian Hecht (bass trombonist of the Atlanta Symphony)!!! Paul performed the piece last Monday night as part of a zoom recital of new music with his students at IU and Brian will be premiering a new arrangement of the piece with brass quintet accompaniment in the summer with the Lithuanian Symphony Brass Quintet! I’m absolutely honored, humbled, and frankly a little starstruck to be working with such phenomenal musicians!

A big squinty-eyed smile about my upcoming collaboration with Jessi Wallace and her band students at Decatur Middle School! I’m very excited and grateful to work with Jessi and her students on this new piece, the first middle school band piece I’ve written in over two years (wow, time really flies)

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I’m excited to share the socially-distanced premiere of my reed quintet piece, Shockwave! Many thanks to the Civitasolis Quintet, not only for inspiring me to write the piece in the first place with their ‘Call for Miniatures’ project last year, but for their continued support and wonderful 2020-style performance of the piece. I’m grateful I had the opportunity to work with you five!

More information about the piece available here.

I had a blast writing this piece for Trio h3líos!!

It’s such an amazing feeling knowing that the musicians you’re writing for won’t just be able to play anything you throw at them, but will knock it out of the park. I’m so grateful to this incredible ensemble for asking me to write this piece for them and can’t wait to hear what they do with it!

Now to switch gears to writing a piece for middle school band, so I probably can’t get away with writing as many 13/16 measures.

First double bar of the new year!

Resurgence is a story about resilience in the face of adversity, inspired by Dr. Jeremy Marks’ experience struggling with and ultimately overcoming Bell’s palsy, a neurological paralysis to the left side of the face that caused him to be unable to make a sound on the trombone for months during his undergraduate degree as a music major. The soloist directly represents Jeremy’s actions and mentality during this trial through three connected movements, entitled ‘Revelation’, ‘Recovery’, and ‘Redemption’, that help describe the timeline of events and narrative arc of this story.

I’m honored that Jeremy wanted to collaborate with me on a project of such importance and meaning to him and am eager to hear his interpretation of the piece later this year!

(Also, it’s taken me literally ten years of writing music in Sibelius to experiment with a title font that’s not just the default one, and I’m way too excited about how clean and sleek this sans-serif font looks!)