This is a collection of chamber music I've written over the last few years. Several of these pieces came out of classes I took at UC Riverside in 2018-2020 with Dana Kaufman on composition. I am greatly indebted to her mentorship, patience, creativeness, and lively energy for helping me along.

String Quartet No. 2 came out of a collaboration with the Ann Arbor-based Room 1078. I had previously done string arrangements for a project Hanna Rumora was in, with singer-songwriter Rebecca Rosen, whom I had met in Detroit. She liked my arrangements and decided to reach out to ask me to write a string quartet. I decided I would write the bulk of it in Paris, where I was to spend several weeks with my girlfriend at the time in 2019. I wanted to capture a sense of the arc of moving from imitation, exploration and discovery in life to an engagement with traditions and systems of knowledge established in one's culture, to finally a consideration and meditation on one's heritage and the impact one's life had and will have once one is gone. This was definitely one of the most ambitious and difficult pieces I've ever written (maybe too difficult) - and though I was very trepidatious at the time of writing it, it was also at many times a great joy, when I felt it was really coming together. It was one of the first pieces I'd ever written that I deeply tried to imbue with a sense of playfulness and the experience of childhood.

Evening Snow at Kanbara was inspired by a Japanese block print from the Edo period. I've always loved the block prints by the great Edo masters such as Hokusai and Hiroshige, and this piece was an attempt to capture the quiet solitude of this particular print.

The Raven was inspired largely by John Cage's piece "In a Landscape." I loved how in that piece Cage weaves a mysterious journey and mood that is essentially ambiguous. This piece is a bit less meditative than that, but I wanted to similarly capture the feeling of being on a journey and not knowing what one is encountering.

Les Marées was inspired by the tides I experienced in Brittany in 2019. The tides there stretch for seemingly impossible distances, and it's truly wonderful to see the waves come up with crashing intensity at times right up to the walls of houses and buildings and other times seeing the waves in the far off distance. I wanted to get a sense of that incredible dynamic and its intensity.