A Lost Winter was composed during the 2023-2024 winter season, the warmest winter in U.S. history since record keeping began. Lost winters are characterized not only by warmer temperatures but by the lack of cold, snow, and ice. The distress of winter fundamentally changing is expressed in this piece. At the beginning, the flute represents an imaginary bird, calling for its expected winter conditions. The call eventually becomes an agitated and frustrated theme, broken down into small motives, and expressed throughout the ensemble. A middle section features searching and sustained solos from different members of the ensemble. The piece finally ends with a mournful lament, while the original bird call of the flute has been replaced by a more mechanical and artifical sounding motive in the piano, which gradually fades away into nothingness.
In the Absence of Snow (2023)
Instrumentation: for nine players (two flutes, clarinet, bass clarinet, trombone, piano, violin, viola, and cello)
This piece is based on the potential of future low-to-no snow events in the North American Cordillera, which is the continuous collection of mountain ranges in the west, starting in Alaska and ending in Mexico. Scientists are anticipating that in order to prevent a low-to-no snow event, we must prevent the level of global warming from reaching +2.5 degrees Celsius. Much of the musical materials located in the piano were created from mapping US average annual maximum temperature data onto musical pitches and registers. About two-thirds of the data is presented before the music changes, representing our anxiety and frustration with the potential low-to-no snow events. Finally, the rest of the data is revealed, emphasizing the rising maximum temperatures as it moves higher through the ensemble.
Lilliputian Arctic Deviation is a work for sinfonietta inspired by average snow and ice extent in the Northern Hemisphere. The Rutgers University Global Snow Lab records weekly snow extent averages for the Northern Hemisphere from 1967 until the present day. This work focuses on the summer months and uses musical materials to reflect two characteristics of the data collection: a significant decline in average snow extent from 1967 to 2015, and a transition from drastic yearly differences in the late 1960s through the early 1990s, to more consistent and predictable values in the late 1990s to 2015. Similar yearly average data values are reflected through shared musical materials. Data regions are grouped into eight regions, and data points falling within the same region share motivic, melodic, harmonic, and timbral materials.