CWP Portfolio
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1. Orchestral Piece
A Dance With You for Chamber Orchestra
Elaborate here.
Score available here
2. Advertisting Music
Description here
Commercial 1
Commercial 2
3. Vocal Group Piece
Wild Geese for SATB Choir (3 min)
Text used with permission for educational purposes, score and audio not to be published publicly
Wild Geese is a setting of the Mary Oliver poem of the same name. For this performance, the choir consists of eight vocalists, two per part.
Score available here
4. Contemporary Electronic Track
A Dangerous Expanse
Elaborate a little bit here
5. Ensemble
Stars for String Orchestra (time here)
This recording of Stars is a hybrid production. It consists of multiple layers of a string quartet, plus multiple MIDI libraries of strings.
Score available here
6. Artistic/Personal Project
The Mouse - EP
The Mouse is a project very near and dear to my heart. It started as a pitch in my CW-422 class for the capstone project. I insisted to Nicole Kwan that I was going to make a multi-song EP in the style of Alan Parsons Project based on the novel Nova by Samuel R. Delaney, and I was going to do it in six weeks. She cautioned me against this (for which I’m grateful) and suggested I focus on one song. So, I created “Fate” for the capstone project. I was very happy to get to return to The Mouse this semester to re-mix “Fate” and bring something like the original EP concept into the world. In the end, the EP is no longer a series of character studies from Nova, it’s much more of a mishmash of moments from my life, my thoughts on politics, and concepts from the book.
“Fate” almost directly retells the tarot-reading scenes from Nova, but the ambiguity of the characters in the song is intended to allow it to speak more broadly to the political and economic climate in the real-world right now. The gamblers in “Fate” are partially the crew of Von Ray’s ship in Nova, but they’re also the politicians and billionaires who tell us they know what’s best for us when they take us to war, gamble our economy on AI, and cut us out of the decision-making process. Are they really looking at the logic of their decisions? Who are they trusting to read their tarot? Should they be trusted to read it?
“Synthetic Sounds” will bear resemblance to scenes from Nova for anyone who has read the book, but they’ll also notice that it includes details that don’t match the book at all. This song is the most personal or autobiographical song on the EP, combining parts of my own life with the themes of Nova.
“Phone Call” is where the EP finds itself the farthest from Nova. Certain themes in the song are reflections of the novel, but the song mostly deals with the real-world effects of the excessive force, interrogation techniques, and immunity of law enforcement, the rising use of facial recognition technology by those agencies, and the lack of federal privacy laws in the US. Vote for your right to privacy, call your politicians, and make sure your friends and family are aware of their rights.