Aesthetics
1. Music should touch the body, heart, or soul before it touches the mind; and the more of these it touches without losing focus, the better.
This may seem an obvious point, but different musical subcultures necessarily privilege one or more of these and deemphasize the others, and in today's increasingly fragmented soundscape, it's possible for musical genres to specialize in one purpose and fall seriously out of balance. When this happens, I often feel that something is missing from the experience. I turned to dance music out of a feeling that much contemporary art music neglects the body in favor of the mind (note, though, that many composers in the last few decades have been trying to deal with this problem without falling into the trap of being reactionary). This has been tremendously valuable for my own music; yet lately, I have the feeling that much dance music neglects the mind in favor of the body. Part of my intention as a composer is to strike a satisfying balance between many facets of musical experience.Why, then, do I put the mind on a lower rung? Because music is not the most effective language with which to speak to the intellect. In those areas where the intellect can be precise, music does not have a detailed vocabulary; attempts by mid-century serialists to turn music into mathematics demonstrate this precisely in their failure to convince audiences of the power of this approach. But music carries meaning that is notoriously difficult to capture precisely in language. This is where the strength of music lies, and music should make the most of it. Still, my favorite composers are those who are evidently in contact with body, heart or soul and still manage to tantalize the mind. Bach, for example--even at its most abstruse, his counterpoint always speaks loud and clear, and its meaning can always be felt.
"Infection," the track available above for download, does this by setting up a danceable groove, but then making it so unpredictable that it's hard to continue to be physically involved. At this point, there's room for the mind to step in and try to make sense of it all, even while the texture and musical energy remain about the same.
2. Music can participate in existing traditions, or it can seek to overturn all tradition and blaze a completely new trail--but it's richest when it does both at once.
Traditionally-minded composers and listeners often dismiss the avant-garde as irresponsible garbage, while avant-gardists see music that doesn't shake everything up as boring and reactionary. I think both positions are seriously short-sighted (and fortunately, so do lots of other people). When music works within a living, ongoing tradition, such as the concert hall, jazz, rock, punk, techno, bluegrass, Indian classical music, etc., people within the culture bring expectations to the experience that help them to understand what is going on, and what the music "means."Certain avant-garde aesthetics propose that there is much to be gained, however, from a musical experience that so completely bewilders that you must reinvent your relationship to the piece, and to music in general, at every moment. A composer once put it to me that he wanted to create pieces that would leave the listener no choice but to approach the piece on its own terms. I'm not satisfied with this, because the listener always has at least one other choice: to leave, and this, in fact, is by far the most common reaction to this sort of experience, reducing the supposed political significance of the new modes of thinking inspired by music or art to private mind-games among like-minded people.
I think it's crucial to shake up the complacency of existing styles, but I think this works best when the music makes it clear what style is being shaken up. Music can tap into the kinds of interpersonal energy and cultural dialogues that take place within traditions while still questioning their premises--engaging the listener, making her want to be involved, and also making her ask "What if this style went this way, instead of that?" This is the relationship I try to maintain with popular music--in the case of which it's especially important to question explicitly whether popular genres need always to be spoon-fed to us in the ways we're so accustomed to.
3. Personal emotions in music are more meaningful when they are impersonally expressed.
I can't really claim this as universally true (although I almost wish I could). It's largely a matter of taste--I hate "purple music" as much as I hate purple prose. It tries too hard, like an actor who's indicating emotion--"now I'm telling you that this character is feeling sad"--rather than portraying it and convincing you of the reality of the emotion. When music indicates emotion, it trots out a collage of signifiers that are taken to "mean" the desired emotion, which admittedly does exert a certain pull (and can even be kind of fun, at times). However, when you strip away these relatively superficial frissons, often you're left with scarcely anything at all.Much more appealing to me are those moments when the interplay of musical ideas seems to take on a life of its own, and the music resonates with emotion(s) without actively seeking to "express." Here, the emotions come from the subconscious, and because they are less consciously directed than in the former approach, can interact in startling, even surprising ways. This is where we learn something about the human psyche, not in the musical equivalent of a Hollywood thrill ride. Bach is a master at this, as is Brahms: a merry little tune is tripping along without a care in the world, when out of nowhere, an unexpected melancholy twist, and both sensations are richer for being connected in this way.
Of course, there are always exceptions to prove the rule: Mahler, for example...
Influences
Enough of that. This is by no means a complete, exhaustive list! That would take far too long for me to write and you to read, so I'll just hit the high points:
Dissertation
My dissertation composition seeks to create a tightly woven fabric out of a few disparate danceclub genres, namely ambient, house, and drum 'n' bass, using lots of electronics (of course) and, just to be perverse, a saxophone quartet. Why a quartet? I wanted a group that could hold its own against the electronics and not sound superfluous, ridiculous, or both.
The first problem is how to distinguish what I'm doing from the kind of genre-mixing that exceptionally clever DJs do every day. To that end, I'm building in close correspondences, particularly in harmony, between the different sections of the piece, so that instead of one track fading into another track, one track will seem to evolve into another. The other problem is tempo. Each of these genres has a very different speed associated with it. To link them up, I've chosen tempi so that the speed always increases by a factor of 4/3, allowing for all manner of intricate metric modulations. With any luck, I'll be able to make a smooth transition from one speed to the next without sounding like the train wreck you get when a DJ isn't beat-matching properly.
Background
I received my undergraduate music training at Butler University (Indianapolis, IN), studying composition under Michael Schelle and flute under Loretta Contino. During that time, I was a regular participant in composers' concerts as composer and performer, and also performed flute solo literature from Bach to Davidovsky (Synchronisms no. 1). My honors thesis was titled "Idea and Image in the Religious Music of Arnold Schoenberg." I am currently in the Ph.D. program at Duke, where my teachers have been Stephen Jaffe, Sidney Corbett, and Scott Lindroth. I recently completed an article, "Delayed Gratification: Syntax in Danceclub Musics."