Approximately 635 million years ago, the greatest glaciation period, fittingly named the Cryogenian Period, ended, allowing the simple, single-celled lifeforms that existed at the time to prosper. Over the next almost 100 million years, these cells would begin to evolve and combine, eventually creating the first multicellular lifeforms. This immense span of time is known as the Ediacaran Period, and led up to the more well-known Cambrian Explosion, where life truly began to flourish. This piece conveys a brief overview of this period, with several basic motifs that, much like the single-celled lifeforms of the time, combine to form more complex phrases as the piece goes on. 

In the beginning, all that existed was water. One of the first beings born from this ocean was Cipactli, a primeval embodiment of chaos – a crocodilian monster with mouths on every joint of its body and a constant, insatiable hunger. As the gods began the process of creation, they concluded that Cipactli would need to be destroyed, else it would consume anything that they would create. Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, gods of knowledge and war, planned to draw the beast to them and defeat it in combat. Using Tezcatlipoca’s foot as a lure, they confronted, battled, and overcame Cipactli, turning its head into the heavens, its tail into the underworld, and its body into the earth. 

This work was written for the 2025 PAS Composition Contest. 

Whether it be through records being lost to time, accidental omission of details, or intentional misinformation, our world’s history is warped and biased. Consequently, there exist countless things – artifacts, people, languages, etc. – that are completely lost to time, and are misinterpreted as they are rediscovered. In this piece, the xylophone is treated as an unknown artifact, with the performers exploring how it may have been played. The title and timbres created allude to geological structures, and how, much like our history, it will be forgotten or eroded beyond recognition unless we choose to preserve it, especially with the amount of intentional misinformation being spewed about today. 

Before writing this piece, I had noticed an unusual lack of experimentation using the xylophone in contemporary music, compared to other percussion instruments. Similar instruments to it, such as the marimba and especially the vibraphone, have seen rapid development of novel playing techniques and styles, whereas the xylophone seemed to be stuck in the stereotypical “xylophone” soundscape. With this work, I sought to make a work for xylophone that utilizes next to no standard playing, instead finding new timbres and techniques to expand the scope of what the instrument is capable of. 

This work is dedicated to my friend Sarah Hertenstein, who helped me in the discovery of many of the extended techniques found in this piece. 

This past winter, I watched all of my family’s home videos, from when I was born until New Year’s Eve of 2023. Over the course of these videos, I remember being able to separate my life into distinct episodes – my entertaining baby years full of subtle background references to my current life, my fascinating but painfully nostalgic childhood years, the period from about 2nd grade until high school where I struggled to watch some of the embarrassing things I chose to do on video. It led me to contemplate how I ended up here, and at what point I was no longer the kid in those early videos. When I was living that life, I didn’t even think about how it would be remembered, but looking back and remembering only the most important, nostalgic moments makes those moments feel so much more integral.

        This piece operates in two sections. The first section, representing life as it is lived in the moment, is essentially a tumbling train of thought that spews out new ideas and melodies in djenty, unpredictable bursts. The second section, representing life as it is remembered, takes a handful of ideas from the first section, spinning them into a melancholy, nostalgic chorale of sorts, representing our biased, rose-tinted view of the past.

There was a documentary that I once watched that depicted the rest of the lifespan of the universe. In the documentary, the rate of time began parallel to our own, but every five seconds, this rate would double. Even with this rapid acceleration, it was only about five minutes into the half-hour documentary that the last stars had died, and all that remained was black holes. Like the documentary, this piece doubles in tempo every several seconds, beginning at about 45 bpm, and ending at about 25 trillion bpm, depending on when you consider the tempo to stop increasing. The piece operates as a rhythmic Shepard tone, inducing an anxious sense of constant speeding up. There are nine sections in the piece, each representing a different time scale through the notes used and contour patterns, from the time scale we exist in from day to day, to the lifespans of stars, to the infinite amount of time after the last black hole evaporates where entropy renders time meaningless. 

I wrote this piece while I was in a very stressful place. The first of my graduate school auditions was about a week away, I was getting bogged down by school work, and I struggled to find any time to relax. I was in a practice room working on one of my marimba solos, but my mind was racing and I just couldn’t focus on what I was playing. After about a half hour of frustration, I decided I needed to relax or I wouldn’t end up getting anything done, so I turned off the lights and just played whatever came to mind. The swirly, playful textures I was messing around with that evening sprouted into this work.

The evening before I left for my freshman year of college, some of my friends and I had a small get-together at one of our homes. As a gift, one of my friends, who shared my affinity for geology, gave me a small rock with the words “See You Soon” written on the side. It was a small and unassuming gift, but it was a nice reminder of my pre college life and the friends I had back home. As a sort of homage to this nostalgia, this piece is a reimagining of some of the first things I had written back in high school, that until now, I haven’t had the opportunity to implement into a larger work. 

This work is dedicated to Jennifer Upcott.

Cuttlefish are a genus of aquatic mollusk that are well-known for their advanced camouflage abilities, which are among the most complex in the animal kingdom. This piece emulates the concept of camouflage through the usage of repetitive, hazy patterns that give rise to more elaborate melodies and textures through different accent patterns and timbral changes. 

Nearly every aspect of this work is up to the performers, from the instrumentation, to the tempo, to the style. With this in mind, every performance of this work is meant to be played with a completely unique soundscape in mind, so that each performance stands on its own as a distinct creation.

This piece is sort of a spiritual successor to a marimba solo I made earlier this year, Shattered Quartz. As I was writing that piece, I had a lot of ideas that I wanted to put in it, but many of them proved to be too complicated for a single player. Rather than throwing away these ideas, many of which I really liked, I mixed them into this piece. The title alludes to how the pressure and atmosphere of Neptune allows it to rain diamonds, suggesting a shimmering and vibrant atmosphere. Similarly how the solo this work was based on alluded to quartz crystals, this piece revisits that same crystalline vibe influenced from EDM and video game soundtracks, albeit in a more turbulent and intense context. 

This piece revolves around the concept of consciousness. By consciousness, I don’t mean the simple act of being awake. I’m referring to the experience of existing, of seeing and living through your material body. There is no scientific reason for consciousness to exist. The course of history would function exactly the same whether or not consciousness was a factor, as, on a molecular level, all that happens in the material universe is a result of interactions between atomic and subatomic particles. Humanity would evolve and do the exact same things, the only difference being that nobody would be experiencing their life, as humanity would just be some complex chemical reaction.

  So, if consciousness has no necessary or meaningful impact on the universe, why does it exist? This is another difficult question, as we can only speculate at the answers. The best we can do is acknowledge our consciousness and marvel at its existence. If humanity can function exactly the same without consciousness, and we experience living through experiencing consciousness, are we truly human, or are we some being experiencing the mind of a human through the usage of consciousness? 

Alright, that’s it for my existential monologue. This piece is about coming to terms with your consciousness, and coming to a fuller understanding of what their life is. The piece introduces several miniature motifs, whether they be short melodies, rhythms, or chord progressions, and over the course of the piece, weaves them together, showing the gradual “piecing together” of one’s understanding of life and purpose. I hope this explanation made sense. 

Existential topics are difficult to talk about in a way that makes sense, so congratulations if these program notes were comprehensible! 

This work is based on Howard McCord’s collection of three poems, Three for Colman. As such, it is split into three different sections, each capturing the atmosphere of one of the poems. 

Commissioned by and Dedicated to Evan McCord

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Commissioned by and Dedicated to Emma Zemancik

This piece is based on my experience making it. I had written the first minute or so, but after that, I had no idea what to do next. I kept trying different things, but nothing really carried in a satisfying way. Over time, I stopped working on it because it simply wasn’t working. But then, I considered forming the piece around this unsureness and loss of motivation I was feeling, and started to work on the piece once again. This overarching concept was all I needed to become motivated again and get the piece finished. In short, this piece shows both the process of losing motivation through doubt and the rekindling of it through a fresh perspective.