Works
Solo & Duo
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four meditations
for solo organ
Written for St. Agnes Catholic Church (Clark, NJ – 2025) 10 min.
A set of compositions suitable as Offertory/Communion songs. They are inspired by scenes of the Via Crucis, such as the Fall of Christ, the Mother of the Lord, Simon of Cyrene, and Veronica.
she was foam
for pipa and violoncello
Commissioned by Neal Huang (Taiwan, 2025) 9 min.
Foam is something amorphic. Like the Greek nymph Britomartis who, turned into sea foam, is doomed to constantly wet the shore as in an amorphic present, devoid of memory and expectation. ^she was foam^ is inspired by Cesare Pavese's Dialogues with Leucò, where the Italian writer envisions dialogues between ancient Greek gods. In the book, the immobility of the divine life is opposed to man’s capacity to create a personal destiny of glory or ruin. Pavese’s dialogues are pierced by a nostalgia for a life that unfolds in time, for what makes humans human.
Britomartis: Do you accept your destiny?
Sappho: Nobody is ever in peace. How can you accept this?
B: You have to. You wanted to escape from it, and now you too are sea foam.
S: But don’t you feel this tedium, this maritime agitation? Here everything macerates and foams without a break. Even what is dead seems to be restless.
from Sea Foam - Cesare Pavese's Dialogues with Leucò.
two ludes for a dreaming flute
for flute and piano
Written for Giorgio Consolati and Hui-Chuan Chen (2023) 7 min.
“The world is older than the gods. Before time was born, the earth was already filling space. It bled, it felt pleasure; the earth was the only god. In those days things themselves had power. It was things that happened. Whereas now the gods turn everything into words, illusions, threats. But the gods can only make trouble, join things together or pull them apart. Not touch them, not change them. They came too late.”
from Oedipus & Tiresias - Cesare Pavese's Dialogues with Leucò.
elegia sulle quattro note pesanti
for solo violoncello
(2024) 5 min.
This elegy is a tribute to the name of Bach - 'the four heavy notes.'
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pressioni [libro secondo]
for solo piano
(2023) 25 min.
Pressioni is a cycle that plays with the percussive nature of the piano. This second book is a journey through the chiaroscuro of the writings of Pavel Florensky and Rainer Maria Rilke, 20th-century voices of a haunted humanity in search for enduring hope.
“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so,
because it calmly disdains to destroy us.”
[Rilke’s Duino Elegies, I]
pressioni [libro primo]
for solo piano
(2022) 15 min.
Sinuous, Straight, Solar
for soprano sax and piano
Written for Tae Ho Hwang (Baltimore, MD - 2019) 8 min.
This piece is dedicated to the victims of terrorism.
Breaking the Standard
for solo piano
Written for Friends School of Baltimore (2018) 2 min.
