Princeton Application 2025
All scores available HERE
Trio for Two Violins and Viola (2023)
Duration: 6’30’’
This piece came about because I had been wanting to write something to play with Jacob Shack, a collaborator of thirteen years and Associate Principal Viola of Baltimore Symphony. We were lucky to premiere it with Chelsea Smith at the Charles Ives Music Festival, where the three of us have been Artist Faculty every summer since 2018.
Note: I made a careful study of rhythmic development in the exposition of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in F, Op. 10 No. 2, while working on this piece. I thought I made neat observations about its progressively smaller (faster and faster) subdivisions, which I tried to imitate.
After I was in too deep with my own piece, I realized I had missed the point. The Beethoven movement’s characteristic rhythm, an eighth note pickup to a downbeat, stays consistent even as the subdivisions increase. That is, the “theme” stays the same, while the “accompaniment” gets faster. In my piece, the theme itself gets faster. But I was glad to learn the lesson eventually.
Concerto Grosso (rev. 2022)
Ensemble: string quartet solo with string orchestra
Duration: 15’30’’
This piece began as an opportunity to play with my friends in college — among them Stella Chen and Emma Frucht, who played that first version. I reworked it for this 2022 performance, which features them, Gabriel Cabezas, and myself in the solo quartet.
Note: Three connected movements are arranged fast-slow-fast, and a single melodic idea provides the piece’s material. There’s a lot of turning it around, slowing it down and speeding it up. But for reasons that aren’t always clear to me, I am proud of the middle movement’s first minute and a half, which is not so rigorously derived.
Piece for Solo Violin (2020)
Duration: 7’
Commissioned by: Katie Hyun with support from Astral Artists’ Micro-Commissioning Program
Note: Katie is a primary artistic partner of mine; I have written several pieces to play with her, including my earliest arrangements of pieces that were born as lead sheets.
She has remarkable chops and a beautiful sensibility, but she is rare among violinists at her level in that she has some exposure to fiddle players and the ways of handling rhythm that are expected in non-classical music. I love the rhythmic feeling she creates here.
Trio for Two Violins and Cello (2023)
Duration: 17’
I wrote the first movement for a residency week at Yellow Barn with my close friends and frequent collaborators, Emma Frucht (violin, Aizuri Quartet) and Sasha Scolnik-Brower (cello, now a conductor).
I wrote the second movement for the Tribeca New Music Festival, 2023.
The third was a commission by the Versoi Ensemble, late 2022.
Note: The small amount of Indian classical music I have been able to ingest shows its influence in the first movement.
Although important rhythmic landings happen on large multiples of 4 (every 16 beats, for instance), the smaller phrases are more irregular. At the beginning, the phrases could be described as 3 beats + 3 beats + 2 + 2.5 + 3 + 2.5, for a total of 16. (The final 2.5 beats is better described as 3.5, where the final beat lands at the top of the cycle.) The accompaniment plays more in 4/4, against the irregularity of the melody.
Fiddle Sample
To give context to the pieces above, here is a 30-second sample of my fiddle playing. This is an improvised solo on Bill Monroe’s “Tennessee Blues.”
Musicians L-R are George Meyer, Sam Bush, Edgar Meyer, and Mike Marshall. The clip is from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, during our 24-city tour in 2022/23.