This isn't silence was written in 1998 with assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts. At the time I was interested in things that grow and change: a musical idea will sometimes grow and grow until you think it can't grow any more, then grow a little more. I wondered if it were possible to push it over the top. The title comes from a direction in the score where, at the climax of the work, the only player with an empty bar is one of the percussionists, who needs to change instruments. In his one blank measure I found that I had written, "this isn't silence". The present version, revised over the summer of 2001 and premiered by the Oakland Symphony, is about three minutes shorter than the original 1998 version.

For the Time Being was composed for the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne during the fall of 1999. At the time I was interested in creating a piece that was very textural and goal-oriented, music that was always going somewhere. There are three sections of roughly equal lengths. The first slows down, the second speeds up and the third remains steady. At the end of each of these, there is a climactic area where a wash of ensemble-wide gestures lurch and drift in and out of major chords. The major triads are not there so much as functional harmony (although this inevitably occurs) but rather as familiar or comforting sonorities, causing the ear to relax slightly as if finding an old friend amidst a sea of changing textures and clusters. For the Time Being seemed an appropriate title as it speaks of time and being and the present moment. Many thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts for their assistance in the development of this work.

Tuva is a small mountainous country nestled in the very center of Asia between outer Mongolia and Russia. 'Tannu Tuva' is a phrase in the Tuvan language meaning "country of the high mountains". The music is a reaction to first hearing the magic of overtone singing, a Central Asian technique of simultaneously singing more than one pitch at a time. The piece attempts to show that this is available to Western musicians. In fact I met Greg Silver, who overtone sings beautifully with very clear harmonics, while walking down St. Catherines Street in Montreal. Nothing in the piece is digitally enhanced or altered and all players perform acoustic instruments live. The work is scored for male voice (singing the text in the Tuvan language), male overtone singer (singing both the drone and the high whistle-like melody at the same time), bassoon (at times blown like a didgeridoo), banjo (bowing harmonics on all strings with a cello bow) and piano (at times scratching harmonics on the inside of the instrument). The use of the banjo in this piece emulates to some extent an Igil, a bowed Tuvan stringed instrument. The text is taken from a ceremonial shamanistic "hymn to the mountains", sung in the Tuvan language, a Turkic dialect. Written here in transliteration: Eei, huhré huhré, huhrá huhrá huhrá, Eei, yorung dongdung, yorung sumhá larum huhrá huhrá huhrá Eei, huhré huhré, huhrá huhrá huhrá huhrá Eei, nanima-um lesongha larum huhrá huhrá huhrá huhrá Eei, hurum lestangha larum huhrá huhrá huhrá Eei, yorung zhustoom huhrá huhrá huhrá huhrá Eei, huhrá huhrá huhrá huhrá Eei, wingzhun-oom huhrá huhrá huhrá huhrá Eei, ashtoonga shung huhra huhrá huhrá Eei, rang támtám huhrá huhrá huhrá Eei, ashtoonga shung hué tomei hu-oom, huhrá huhrá Eei, narum, narum losoom huhrá huhrá huhrá (Score contains pronunciation instructions). In English (provided by Smithsonian/Folkways): Eei, my world, my universe, my servants... Eei, my goose, my jackdaw... Eei, my world, my servants... Eei, let all purify iself, protect all my herd... Eei, let all purify itself and let everyone be happy... Eei, look after everyone... Eei, my world, my universe, my relatives... Eei, my nomad camp, place of my birth...

The work proposes a coming together of two pianists playing nineteenth century music. Perhaps they are off on their own, unaware of one another. In attempting to discover connections between these two players and their solitude, their pieces are often sounded simultaneously in sometimes complmentary and at other times conflicting ways. This mesh creates an ongoing and dreamy haze that is exaggerated by clusters, patterns and independent melodies. One players piece is meant to evoke a Beethoven-like sound while the other pianist could be practicing something later in the century: Schumann or maybe Brahms. (promgramme notes from the score)

Slanted time is how I have been describing recent works involving continuous change in tempo. The idea is that for long stretches there is a constant and dramatic shift in speed, as if the music were written for a metronome that only speeds up or slows down. The indications accel. and rall. can therefore be found on every line of music. Some gestures accelerate into a blur and disappear (over the horizon perhaps, like a vanishing point in painting) while others form at one-half and one-quarter tempo, keeping the whole in a state a balance that never quite speeds up into infinity. Upon careful listening, one can hear - endlessly speeding up - the national anthem of the United States of America. The anthem itself is an adaptation of "to Anachreon in Heaven", a British popular song written by John Stafford Smith in 1775. The Star-Spangled Banner! (in Slanted Time) was written during a residency at the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, NY. It was commissioned as part of a series of miniatures for Toronto's Gryphon Trio with funds for the Canada Council for the Arts, as part of the Composing for a Change program.