The title of the piece is in reference to an argument between two of the composer's friends, regarding the meaning of form in new music. The piece explores this question musically: is it in ternary form or not?

This piece is the first in a series of three dealing with the ways that modern popular culture can inform Western art music. The impetus for the piece was a series of four unrelated samples (and one derivative sample) that play at various points in the music. In one way or another, the instrumental parts derive their material from these samples.

Throughout, there is a conscious attempt to avoid certain hallmarks of the Western tradition, most notably: smooth transitions between material, elaborate ornamentation, obscuring of intent, non-essential complexity, and hierarchic interrelation of elements, to name a few. Instead, Culture no.1 focuses on: immediate and simple presentation of material; clarity of purpose; the highest possible degree of simplicity in the organization of material; and musical ideas that can live "in the moment", without the need to reference large sections of the piece on multiple levels. All of these are ways in which popular music tends to differ from art music in the aesthetic sense.

This is the middle piece in my Culture series, which is an exploration of the effects that today's cultural context has on making our music what it is. The text for the piece is taken from a junk e-mail message—certainly among the more recent of literary genres. It attracted me because it is composed entirely of monosyllabic words, with no repetition; a kind of heterogeneous stream that strikes me as contemporary.

The middle section of the piece is indeterminate or open: the performers decide how the musical materials will be presented. This is also something that I take from the Culture theme, because the multiplicity of possibilities, endless variegation, and the impossibility of finding "right" answers seem to me important cultural problems today.

Culture no.3 is the last in a series of pieces that deals with the ways that modern popular culture can inform Western art music. More specifically, Culture no.3 is involved in exploring the interrelation between the visceral elements of popular music and timbre. By visceral elements, I mean, for example, the sense of motion, the forcefulness of the articulations, or the character of the rhythm or tempo, to name a few. The traditional pitch resources of the popular sphere have required that viscerality and timbre play a greater role in defining popular genres (and subsequently in determining what we find interesting within them) than is seen in the majority of Western art music. Culture no.3, with a greater emphasis on timbre and viscerality and a subsequently lesser emphasis on other aspects of the musical whole, uses the resources of the Western ensemble to feature this aspect of popular music.

I wrote this chamber opera for three singers and six instrumentalists in conjunction with Colleen Murphy for Tapestry's Opera To Go series. It tells the story of a young Eastern European woman (Oksana) who has found herself in the safehouse of an Italian priest (Alessandro). She has escaped from a pimp (Konstantin), who tricked her into prostitution, and now finds that she is falling in love with Alessandro. He in turn, despite his priestly calling, finds himself tempted by Oksana. During this scene, they dance around the complications of their situation, each one afraid to reveal him- or her- self to the other. In addition, another problem presents itself at the end of the scene.

Five Reflective Fragments is based on a sequence of very brief text fragments extracted from a much longer poetic work, entitled I Lost Everything by poet Sarah Lang. The piece always presents this series of word-units in order and without overlap. Each unit is spoken—not sung—at the beginning of a musical gesture, and always by the performer who is playing the gesture. Each unit is also repeated multiple times.

I have decided on this approach in order to distance the text from any fixed narrative. The music instead provides a space for these language objects to be observed in, and in which the listener can choose to create or not create his or her own narrative. Presented in this monolithic manner and detached from the contextualization of language prepositions, Five Reflective Fragments sets up the opportunity for a kind of mythological reaction to develop around the preconceptions of the listener. The word-units combine with the music to create hints, but hopefully hints that will take each listener in a different direction.

Flüsse-Einflüsse is German for "Streams-Influences". The concept of the convergence of multiple streams of influence is important to me, because I am a classical composer coming from a jazz and pop background. Similarly, the 2004/2005 DAAD Sound Understanding concert for which Flüsse-Einflüsse was written featured both classical and jazz performers. This idea of multiple streams converging is carried throughout the piece on several levels, from the material (taken from two of my favourite jazz tunes but reworked classically), to the interaction between performer and composer (some sections are written out, others are improvised), to the interaction of registers, textures, and formal elements.

Four Pieces for Accordion and String Quartet was written between the summer of 2002 and the fall of 2003. It was inspired by a series of poems called Swerve, by Canadian poet Sarah Patricia Lang. There are four poems in the series, which tell the story of a woman watching her lover die of cancer. Four Pieces is dedicated to my grandmother, Antoinette Schulte, who was an accordionist and died of cancer when I was a child.

What interested me about Swerve was the sensation of the passage of time conveyed by the narrator's emotions. I felt this had strong correlations with musical form, and I wanted to try to translate the emotional form of Lang's series into an instrumental piece. Therefore, each poem in the set corresponds to a movement in Four Pieces, and each movement closely follows the content of the corresponding poem in Swerve.

Four Pieces was also my first successful attempt at the purposeful juxtaposition of disparate harmonic systems. I wanted to be able to draw from a palette of functional and non-functional sonorities ranging from popular music and jazz, to medieval, classical, and twentieth-century Western music. I achieved this goal by placing harmonic and melodic ideas in new local contexts or by using the function of one harmonic system with the material from another. Examples include the ostinato 6/3 chord in the first movement, transposed up a quartertone, and the functional cadence that ends the piece, disguised by dense pitch clusters and non-triadic sonorities.

This piece reflects my ongoing interests in sectional forms, doing away with transitional material, and the challenging of aesthetic assumptions. There is no attempt to relate any of the materials of the piece over the large scale. Instead, I have focused on a broad gesture—that of a long diminuendo—that goes from beginning to end. Within that gesture are a series of thirty-one fragments, some with local relationships to adjoining fragments, some without. No structures or organizing principles have been used that are not immediately apparent to the ear, and each section is composed intuitively with regard to pitch, rhythm, tone colour, and phrasing. The piece also includes several theatrical elements, and is therefore best appreciated in a live performance.

Why call a piece "Nothing"? Well, in a word, curiosity—most of my music has as its theme the question, "What happens if...?" At the time I was writing Nothing (winter 2004), I was bothered by the almost total reliance on motivic development and form to generate local and long-term interest in Western music. I wondered if it might be possible to "hear" something as a coherent (and enjoyable) piece of music without recourse to any formal or motivic repetition. Hence, the title Nothing is a reference to the central problem of the piece: "What happens if I have nothing (in the traditional sense) to connect with?"

I have since come to view this issue as a specific case of the general problems of musical cognition and our (largely) unquestioned appropriation of organizational paradigms developed for and by eighteenth-century empiricism. Nevertheless, the result remains the same, and as anyone who has tried to compose can tell you, having nothing is the same as having everything—there are endless choices. So I had to find an alternative focus, and I decided to return to very basic methods of hearing as a way of connecting musical material. For example, instead of using melodic/harmonic motives, the opening of the piece uses a juxtaposition of pitched and non-pitched elements to grab the listener's attention. Exactly which specific pitched and non-pitched elements are used is relatively unimportant; the low-level contrast between harmonic and inharmonic sound spectra is what makes the music interesting.

Of course, this doesn't completely sidestep motivic and formal organization, but it does push it back to a level that is generally not dealt with exclusively. Motives and form become synonymous with techniques and material: pitched versus non-pitched; rhythmic versus non-rhythmic; these instruments together versus those instruments together; and so on. Nothing is not the kind of piece that is inspired by symmetrical patterns or pyramidal short-term/long-term interrelation—there are connecting links, as demanded by musical cognition, but if you come looking for developmental strategies of that sort, be prepared to end up with a whole lot of nothing.

This is the first work I did with Colleen Murphy, while we were participating in Tapestry's LibLab in August 2005. The story is about a man who has had an accident, and his unfaithful wife/girlfriend who accidentally reveals her infidelity as she tries to comfort him.

Two years' distance and fresh ears have made me decide to rename this piece, orginally called Quartet, to Short/Long. These are the titles of the two movements and reflect the kinds of articulations and phrasing that I employed.