Originally written in 2000 for the Maffei Dance Company's dance Multimatrix, the St. Olaf Percussion Ensemble commissioned me to reorchestrate for their November 17, 2005 performance, which I conducted.

Kelip-Kelip is a Malay word for "fireflies". This was the premiere performance, for a trio version of Numinous, at Roulette in NYC. Features Dan Willis (flute), Amanda Monaco (electric guitar), Deanna Witkowski (piano). also see video for interactive performance

I was always the Usian Bolt in school until 6th grade, when that new boy who should have been in 7th grade was left behind a grade, beat me in a race...this composition has nothing to do with that traumatic memory. Features John McNeil (trumpet) and Pete McCann (electric guitar) as part of the Pulse project, The Eloquent Light.

Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta was one of the most widely traveled explorers of the 14th century. This near contemporary of Marco Polo covered over 75,000 miles during his years (far more than his famous predecessor). Visiting places such as West Africa, Pakistan, India, the Maldives, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Palestine, China, Malaya, Cambodia, and Persia, Ibn Battuta was the only traveler known to have visited almost every Muslim land of his time. Several years after returning, Ibn Battuta dictated an account of his travels to Moroccan scholar, Ibn Juzay al-Kalbi. The subsequent documentation, A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling, became known as simply the Rihla. While often fictional or exaggerated in places, the Rihla gives a rich report of life in the lands of Islam during the Middle Ages.

Today rihla has taken on different meanings. Not only does it refer to the actual Ibn Battuta book, but depending upon the context, it can also signify a journey (physical or spiritual) and a documentation of one’s travels.

Rihla is inspired by a trip my wife and I made to Malaysia in February 2007. While we spent our first and last days in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, we spent most of our time in less urban settings, riding public buses to and from destinations around the country. On one particular day we traveled between Kuala Selangor and Lumut on at least 5 different buses! Usually the only foreigners on board, we saw evidence of kampung (village) life and spirit in the places we passed through and stopped in along the way. Throughout our travels in Malaysia, experiences such as riding around Pankgor Island on a rented motor scooter, observing frolicking monkeys in the trees along (and sometimes in) the road, witnessing contests of Sepak Takraw (a game similar to volleyball except players can only use their feet and head instead of hands), eating local cuisine at Malay restaurants, visiting the mountainous Cameron Highland region, and watching Islamic school children boarding the bus in their colorful clothing, inspired me to want to create a sort of musical travelogue of our journey. While not trying to directly interpret our trip in any programmatic way, my attempt with Rihla was to create a musical impression of the many wonderful emotions and feelings experienced while moving from place to place within Malaysia. This performance at Roulette in NYC was part of the Pulse project Sihr Halal and featured: Ben Kono (clarinet, dizi, soprano saxophone) Steve Kenyon (clarinet, oboe, bass clarinet) Meg Okura (violin, erhu) William Martina (violoncello) Jacob Garchik (laptop) Yumi Kurosawa (koto) Michael McCurdy (percussion) Justin Ahiyon (percussion)

Originally the title of a 1963 retrospective exhibition of Ansel Adams, The Eloquent Light explores the interplay of illumination and shadow. Featuring John Abercrombie (guitar) and John McNeil (trumpet) from our standing-room only performance at the Puffin Room in SoHo.

Solar sailing...large starships powered by photons and winds from stars. Very cool and not quite science fiction any longer... Performed at the Little Stone House in Park Slope, Brooklyn by the Pulse ensemble featuring Chris Howes (violin) and Lis Rubard (horn).

With three friends I was on a townhouse roof in Brooklyn early in the evening of September 11, 2001. Surveying the entire lower Manhattan cityscape for the first time, I watched as a distant flickering mass seemed to be coming closer toward us from the World Trade Center site. At first it looked like a swarm of white butterflies, glittering in the evening sun, but as it got closer we realized that it was paper floating toward us from lower Manhattan. It was a quite beautiful and ethereal sight with the swarm coming directly over us and many of the pages from law books and computer printouts, landing all around us on the roof. We all watched as the swarm passed over us and quietly continued further into Brooklyn. No more than five minutes, this small and ephemeral moment, still resonated with me three years later, as I began to write this composition. The original lyrics are inspired by a short poem by Li Po: High in September's winds Drifting white butterflies Passing silently by With a shadow of autumn in their eyes we may never know (http://numinousmusic.blogspot.com/2009/09/spell-of-vanishing-loveliness.html) Performed at the first Pulse concert and features Amy Cervini (voice), Diana Herold (vibraphone), Sebastian Noelle (guitar), Jody Redhage (violoncello).

This rare, recently discovered field recording of me playing saxophone...playing one of the first pieces I ever wrote that I still like. for Alto Saxophone and Violoncello, featuring me (saxophone) and Aylssa Moquin (cello)

My last year of college I wrote an opera (unfinished) based on Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher. For our Chamber Pulse project featuring the group Triocracy, I decided to use the opening motif from that opera and construct a series of variations on the motif.

Morton Feldman meet Me’shell Ndegéocello... The performance was from the May 24, 2010 Numinous show at Brooklyn's Tea Lounge. The soloist is Scott Tixier on violin.

Listening to this composition will help you understand the concepts of quantum theory... From the premiere performance featuring Charles Porter on trumpet and Ben Kono on alto saxophone.

What's up with the cat on the Tapestry album cover? This January 24, 2004 performance at the Renee Weiler Concert Hall in Greenwich Village, NYC was the CD release for the first Numinous recording (the so-called "white album") and features Nick Mancini (vibes), Deanna Witkowski (piano), Ben Kono (soprano saxophone)

Like the detective in Erik Skjoldbjaerg's great movie "Insomnia", I'd probably have a difficult time trying to sleep in a true Arctic winter, but I'd probably get a lot of composing done... Features Noriko Ueda on bass.

“Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together – surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth.” – Carl Sagan Thanks Carl. Commissioned and performed by the St. Olaf Band, April 19, 2009, with me conducting. Also see video of the performance

I first heard J.S. Bach's cantata Ich habe genug BWV 82 in the hauntingly beautiful version sung by mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson on her much praised 2003 Nonesuch recording. The German title, which translates as "I have enough," is a sublime spiritual expression about fulfillment and acceptance of the life waiting beyond the living. I first heard Donny Hathaway's Someday We'll All Be Free sung by Aretha Franklin on the end credits of the great Spike Lee movie Malcolm X and later found the original on Hathaway's last studio album, Extensions of a Man. Whereas the words and music of the Bach and Hathaway reflect a faith in salvation in the hereafter, my Miserere does not seek any kind of religious statement or connotations. While most Miserere's in music come as a setting of the 51st (or 50th) Psalm ("Miserere mei, Deus", translated as "Have mercy on me, O God"), I am using miserere in one of its other non-religious meanings: as a vocal lament. In ancient Greek drama and later in operas, the lament was a moment of focused expressive intensity in the overall formal structure of the drama or opera. Taking inspiration from the Bach, my original lyrics open with "I have had enough" and continue to expresses a weary frustration and doubt in the ability to solve or come to terms with the many struggles and problems facing us. Although like the Hathaway song, with its optimism that someday will come, I do convey a muted sense of earthly hope in the face of a seemingly increased hopelessness; and perhaps it is by that hope in hopelessness and doubt, that we will "emerge from all the suffering that still binds [us] to the world." Miserere is one part of a larger, as of now untitled, mixed music composition that will be recorded next year.

"...may your generation see wonders undreamt." -Carl Sagan, The Pale Blue Dot Dreams of Wonders Undreamt is another part of my dance project, To Begin the World Over Again, based on the writings of Thomas Paine. For this new piece, I set some words of Paine from Common Sense ("...the sun never shined on a cause of greater worth") in counterpoint to a passage from John Wintrop's City upon a Hill sermon from 1630 (the famous "we shall be as a City upon a Hill" that Ronald Reagan made famous) and Nicholas Black Elk's On the Battle at Wounded Knee from Black Elk Speaks ("Now that I can see it all as from a lonely hilltop...", describing the terrible massacre in 1890, this last major battle in the "Indian Wars"). Dreams of Wonders Undreamt takes its title from the dedication Carl Sagan wrote to his son at the beginning of his book The Pale Blue Dot. Where he envisions for his son a more global hope of future wonders, I have translated the phrase to a more local level: the wonders and potential that the promise of America presages, and of which, by implication, has not fulfill. This might seem a critique on the state of America, and in many ways it is. However, Dreams of Wonders Undreamt does not come from a place of political polemics, where any critique or questioning is an apostasy. Rather, my composition is a love song to the promise of America, to that unbound potential and ideal that Thomas Paine wrote and spoke about so eloquently and which I believe all Americans would like to see it be even more worthy to.

“…we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.” James Baldwin, from An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis 19 is inspired by two, seemly disparate sources: Arnold Schoenberg's Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke Op. 19 from 1911 and James Balwin's An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis from November 19, 1970. The initial musical impetus was with the Schoenberg, specifically it was one of my "what if" questions, where I challenge myself with a compositional quandary. In this case, can I make Schoenberg funky? But the emotional timber of 19 comes from the Baldwin letter, which while condemning the arrest of Angela Davis a few months before the letter, also goes on to describe, in biting and incisive commentary, the state of racial dynamics in the United States. 19 is one part of a larger, as of now untitled, mixed music composition that will be recorded next year.

from Numinous performance of Vipassana on September 22, 2010 at the Brooklyn Lycuem recorded by Craig Slon (http://slon.s5.com/)

featuring Amanda Monaco (guitar), Carman Staaf (piano) and Tom Beckham (vibraphone)

featuring Becca Stevens (voice) and Rob Mosher (flute)