Composed in 1991, revised in 1993.
Student premiere in 1991, University of Toronto, with myself conducting (badly! I was studying composition, not conducting!) Professional premiere Feb. 4 and 6, 2000, Earshot Concerts, Music Gallery.

This work uses a 24-tone row composed of a series of alternating perfect and augmented fourths.

In 1991 I composed incidental music for a production of Jean Anhouilh’s Antigone. I performed and conducted this music for three weeks during the play’s run. This music (Antigone Quartet) is the music which we played while the audience was being seated. It is very slow, spacious and cellular, and was designed to be able to be played for any length of time. (A typical performance would be about thirty minutes.) A shifting pattern of cells allows for nearly infinite combinations.

This was a clever little piece for small ensemble that worked with repetitive, shifting patterns and additive rhythms. Never performed, and now lost.

A very short, simple, and pretty piece for my wife.

Written in 1994, revised in and finally performed in 2001 in Toronto, subsequently in Edmonton. The Toronto premiere featured Kristin Mueller-Heaslip as soprano, and myself struggling gamely with the clarinet part!

This is a setting of a poem by Lillian Necakov, a Toronto-based surrealist poet. The River was originally published (I believe) in her collection The Sickbed of Dogs.

A neat idea, but I imagine that this would be virtually impossible to play. Listen to the MIDI recording and judge for yourself.

Winner, third prize, ECCS Young Composer Competition (1995). Premiered in Edmonton, 1995. Subsequent performances, 2000 (Earshot Concerts), 2005 (Continuum Contemporary Music.)

Composed using a cellular process, recorded on the Clef Records CD, Brief Confessions.

An orchestral miniature, premiered at the Edmonton New Music Festival, 1997. The raw material for the work derives from that sentence you learned in typing class: “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”

A very simple but effective structure, similar to (but more complex than) the “monoprojections” of composers like Piotr Grella-Mozejko. Premiered by the Composers Orchestra (under Gary Kulesha) in Toronto, 1997.

Perhaps my best work to date, five short movements for string quartet. Premiered in Feb. 2000 at the Music Gallery.

As a part of the Ontario Millenium celebration, I was commissioned by exhibit designer Wayne Friesen to do a sound installation in the travelling exhibit called It’s About Time, which explored various aspects of time (geological time, chronology, calendars, perception of time, etc.) The following two electroacoustic pieces were to be played continuously.

Calendar, a 17 minute work, was a sonic superposition of many different world calendars.

Orrery, a much longer work, clocks in at one hour. It is a sonic representation of the orbits of the planets, a real music of the spheres.

A pretty unremarkable work for brass quintet.

My most performed work, with performances in Toronto, Edmonton, Poland, Russia. Premiered in 2001 in Toronto by John Kameel Farah. Four short movements for piano, each movement for a member of my family, and based on their names.

Premiered in Feb. 2002 at the Music Gallery by the Sky People Sax Quartet. This work is based on an iterative process which derives order from randomly-generated sets of numbers. Inspired by an essay from Douglas Hofstadter.

An electroacoustic “remix” of Mobile, which served as the background music for the award-winning website www.unpluggedtv.com for a time.

A bit of a failed experiment, this was a set of eleven interlinked miniatures.

Seven limericks written at my expense were used as base material for this short trombone work. The limericks themselves were very funny. The repercussions of my writing this piece were not. The composition of this work marked a sea change in my life.

Premiered in Toronto in 2003.

A nifty work for accordion, performed by the amazing Joseph Petric.

A short little miniature, performed in 2003.

My first attempt at a jazz chart. A cool little number, not too bad, but difficult to solo over because of its unusual chord progressions.

A much better chart, this one is a an inversion of Crazy (yes, the one made famous by Patsy Cline.) Since major turns to minor (and vice versa) when you invert a melody, we end up with a moody jazz ballad.

A semi-improvised piece, the material is derived from my courier travels of one day (Oct. 4, 2004). This material was then used to manipulate a text by Edgard Varèse. Premiered in November 2004 by Kristin Mueller and Rob Mosher in their concert Soprano/Soprano.