The premiere of Re(new)al in 2017 marked the beginning of an extended artistic inquiry—one centered on renewal as both musical idea and compositional process. Conceived at a moment of searching, the piece became a catalyst: an opening gesture that set in motion a body of work shaped by reinvention, return, and transformation. It thus opens this album not as a retrospective, but as the seed from which everything else grows.

Across Renewal, the idea of renewal unfolds in multiple, interconnected ways. Some works embody it sonically, transforming familiar instruments and sound sources into something newly imagined. Others reflect renewal through revision, reshaped years later with the perspective gained through experience and continued collaboration. Still others approach renewal through memory, returning to earlier musical ideas that evolve as they pass through cycles of grief, healing, and time. Taken together, these works trace a continuous arc of rising and falling, of loss and return—where echoes recur not as repetitions, but as opportunities for discovery.

This album represents a culmination of that process: a unified artistic statement shaped by long-term collaboration, iteration, and trust. I am deeply grateful to Maestro David Alan Miller, whose belief in this music has been constant; to Sandbox Percussion and tubist Justin Benavidez for their extraordinary artistry; to Silas Brown for his remarkable work in capturing these performances; to Derek Smith for his tireless artistic and logistical leadership; to the musicians of the Albany Symphony; and to the orchestra’s audience for sustaining this journey since the first performance of Re(new)al. My hope is that Renewal embodies its title not only in sound, but in spirit—standing as a testament to how music, like life, can continually be reimagined through care, collaboration, and return.

• Albany Symphony, David Alan Miller, conductor (all tracks)
• Sandbox Percussion (tracks 1-3)
• Justin Benavidez, tuba (tracks 5-7)
• Engineering, editing, mixing, and mastering by Silas Brown.
• Released December 12, 2025 on Albany Records.
• Recorded April 15, 2024 & March 13, 2023 at Troy Savings Bank Hall in Troy, NY.

I have tremendous respect for renewable energy initiatives and their commitment to creating a new, better reality for us all. Re(new)al is a percussion quartet concerto similarly devoted to breathing new life into traditional ideas. The soloists perform not only on standard instruments like snare drum and vibraphone, but also on “found” objects such as crystal glasses and reusable compressed air cans. Even familiar instruments are transformed: a vibraphone prepared with aluminum foil recreates the crackle of electronic sounds, and a single snare drum is shared by all four players. Conceived in close collaboration with the incomparable ensemble Sandbox Percussion, the work is an exploration of reinvention—of finding new energy in unlikely places.

Cooperation is another central theme. The four soloists always play in hocket, dividing single musical ideas so intricate that the music can only function through their synergy and equal dedication. They share instruments, trade impossibly fast drum set patterns, and, at the very opening, toast crystal glasses together. A toast is never made alone, and this gesture became my way of celebrating collective effort.

Structured in three continuous movements, the concerto reflects the forces of hydro, wind, and solar power. The hydro movement transforms ringing glasses into hand bells as the orchestra engulfs the quartet in sound. The wind movement turns the soloists into blades of a turbine, propelling 1990s-inspired drum and bass rhythms. The final solar movement evokes a radiant sunrise, with metallic percussion shimmering like sunlight. The piece’s opening also adapts material from one of my earlier works, Water, Wine, Brandy, Brine, as a meta-gesture of renewal, of harnessing the potential of older ideas to create something new.

The original version of Re(new)al was commissioned in 2017 for Sandbox Percussion and the Albany Symphony’s Dogs of Desire. The full orchestral version, premiered in 2018 by Maestro David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony, marked the piece’s second life. It has since become one of my most enduring works, with five different settings for orchestras and wind ensembles of varying sizes, culminating in a final revision in 2024 of this orchestral version. I am deeply grateful to David, to Sandbox Percussion, and to the Albany Symphony for their role in this piece’s journey, and it feels especially fitting to open this album with Re(new)al—the seed from which so much else has grown.

The title of Next Week’s Trees comes from Mary Oliver’s poem Walking To Oak-Head Pond, And Thinking Of The Ponds I Will Visit In The Next Days And Weeks. During the days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was deeply inspired by Oliver’s words—words that are a gentle reminder of the future’s uncertainty, the confident hope of the present, and the propulsive force of life that drives us through any doubt that a new day will arrive. In a way only Mary Oliver can, she assures us that the trees will still be there next week.

That balance between uncertainty and hope shapes the music. The piece begins with an extended use of echoing pizzicato, as if holding the listener in suspension, delaying what feels inevitable for a string orchestra: the warmth of bowed, arco sound. When this finally arrives, it feels like a release—both continuity and trust are restored. From there, the strings branch outward in waves of both fragility and fullness, circling back and pressing forward like the seasons themselves, which, without fail, return with each passing year.

Commissioned by the California Symphony as part of their Young American Composer-in-Residence program, Next Week’s Trees is a meditation on the persistence of hope in an ever-fragile world. I revised the work in 2023 with insights discovered while writing a sister work, Now and Then, a Neo-Baroque work for harpsichord and chamber orchestra composed during a residency with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Since its premiere, I have reimagined Next Week’s Trees in new forms: as a percussion quartet for Sandbox Percussion, a marimba-and-cello duo for New Morse Code, a double string quartet for Kronos Quartet, and even as Heart on Fire—a piece for winds inspired by another line from the same Oliver poem—where the themes themselves travel into “next week,” and are cast in a new, searing light.

Higher Ground begins and ends with a chaconne, a musical form where a repeating bass line gradually blossoms into something larger. I have long been drawn to chaconnes for their ability to make bass lines sound melodic through sheer persistence. This reverses the roles we often expect in music, where higher voices typically carry the tune and lower ones provide support. The tuba, the lowest of brass instruments, rarely stands at the center of the stage, so I found the chaconne to be a fitting way to highlight its voice—one that grounds the ensemble yet carries its own capacity to sing.

The concerto unfolds in three movements: the opening chaconne, an abrupt interruption that gives way to a slow, spacious canticle inspired by Palestrina, Gabrieli, and Vaughan Williams, and a final movement that picks up where the first left off. I think of the middle movement as the heart of the work, where the tuba has room to sing as a soprano might in an aria. Throughout, the music rises: from textures surging upward from bass lines, to harmonies in endless ascent through Shepard tones, to melodies that climb even as the ground beneath them descends.

This obsession with rising gave the concerto its title. Higher Ground reflects both the ground bass of the chaconne and the music’s continual striving upward. It is, for me, a way of celebrating the tuba—an instrument whose lowest notes provide the foundation from which everything else can grow.

The concerto was first written in 2019 for tuba and wind ensemble, commissioned by a consortium led by Dr. Dan Tembras and tubist Chance Trottman-Huiet. In its first iteration, the concerto planted seeds of harmonies and ideas I have since honed through iterative work during the intervening years—especially Vital Sines and Full Circle, a short piece that cultivates some similar ground. By 2024, I was ready to return to the concerto with more mature ears, revising and rewriting it extensively for orchestra in collaboration with the Albany Symphony and tubist Justin Benavidez. For this album, the new version—Higher Ground—stands as both a revision and a renewal: a work that honors the original while expanding its voice, just as the tuba itself transforms when lifted from the ensemble’s foundation into the spotlight.

Orbital is part of a sequence of works that began with Sanctuary (2020), a piece I wrote for soprano saxophone and piano during the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. In those months, I returned to the simple, diatonic progressions that had brought me comfort as a child. Later that summer, when my father was hospitalized and intubated, unable to speak to me, I played Sanctuary and other pieces at his bedside. This became the last way I could communicate with him before he passed away. My father was my biggest fan, the person who believed in my talent when I wanted to quit music altogether, so his loss left me with a pain deeper than anything I had ever known. In the immediate aftermath, I poured my energy into honoring him by finally completing my PhD and writing Vital Sines, where I found genuine healing. But grief is rarely linear. It returned like the longest, coldest winter, as I struggled to accept that he would never again celebrate my successes with me—or ever hear another note I wrote. That realization left me silent at the piano for many months, and I felt my creativity sinking deeper and deeper, weighed down by the pain.

Out of that silence, Deciduous eventually emerged for wind ensemble. Built from the musical DNA of Sanctuary, it uses the image of a tree shedding and regrowing its leaves to reflect the cycles of grief and healing. Orbital continues this thread but widens the lens: if Deciduous traces the seasonal renewal of a single tree, Orbital looks outward to the very motion that brings those seasons about—the Earth’s orbit around the sun. By reimagining this material on the larger scale of the symphony orchestra, the music expands in scope and resonance, transforming familiar gestures into something broader, more ambitious, and, ultimately, more powerful.

Echoes lie at the heart of these works. Orbital is an echo of Deciduous, which is itself an echo of Sanctuary—each return altered by time, growth, and forward motion. Grief, too, has revealed itself to me as cyclical: not something endured once and left behind, but something that is continually relived, re-experienced, and reshaped. I had never before understood pain in this way. Yet by circling back through this musical material—some of the last notes I ever played for my father—I felt lighter. In the same way that music comforted me as a child, it was now healing me as I wrote, pulling me from silence each time I felt the grief echoing back at me. It is natural, then, that my music has absorbed this impulse: written-out delays and canons have become a hallmark of my work, and in Orbital they are omnipresent, embodying both the literal and metaphorical cycles at the work’s core.

At its heart, Orbital is music of cycles—of seasons and planets, of memory and return. It is both a reflection of my own journey through the last several years and a testament to how music can carry us through our struggles and triumphs. And it feels especially fitting that this album, which opens with Re(new)al, closes with Orbital. Not only do both works speak to the theme of renewal, but Re(new)al was my father’s favorite piece of mine, and ending here feels like an echo of his presence—one that continues to guide me still.