About
At a young age I was fascinated with creating simple melodies on the upright piano in our home. This was probably my first exposure and experimentation with music composition. Later, In my high school years, I had the good fortune of attending a magnet school for the arts where I took my first formal music composition class. This developed my love of creating music. As my schooling progressed I realized that composition was something I wanted to study as a career.
Under the tutelage of David Burke and Lynn Purse, I found my compositional voice. Many of my pieces have a darker undertone and exude tense emotions. I like to experiment with layering melody lines, minimalism, and mixed media collaborations. In the fall of 2010, I was asked to provide an original piece for the Future Tenant Gallery in Pittsburgh, PA as part of their D0.YoU.nd3rst@nd?: Communication Through Technology exhibit. Each participant shared a personal view on how technology was affecting communication skills amongst people. My contributed piece was a collaboration with dancer and videographer Maddy Landi in which I created a two movement piece entitled How Much We've Changed depicting my thoughts that technology can hinder closeness between individuals and their communication with each other.
Currently, I am in the process of working on new pieces for solo flute and flute choir. As a flautist myself, I find that the repertoire is lacking when it comes to these two areas. So far I have contributed one flute choir piece to the community entitled The Ripple Effect (available for listen in the media section). I would like to see less pretty flute pieces and more gritty flute pieces enter the repertoire. I plan to experiment with overtones and extended techniques and have recently become fascinated with beat box flute.