For full orchestra. 10 minutes.

In photography, the aperture refers to the size of the hole the light passes through in the lens to strike the sensor. A narrow aperture allows in the least light, as the hole is very small. The trade off is that the tighter the aperture, the more elements of the image are in focus. Everything is in focus, but nothing is important.

As the aperture widens, we start to let in more light, and lose clarity of the less important details. The important element, the foreground, remains in sharp focus, while the background elements blur into a beautiful, soft pokey effect.

In this piece, the aperture is narrow at the beginning, with lots of objects in focus, but the image isn’t particularly striking. There is chaos, there is noise, there is jarring contrasts between ideas. But as the aperture widens, more light comes in, and the background fades away, leaving the important things in focus, and creating an ultimately even more beautiful image.

This piece takes the journey from darkness to light, traversing from the narrow aperture which only lets in a tiny bit of light, to a wide, fully open aperture, where even in the darkness, beauty shines through.

Tickets available here.

Mixed chamber sextet, commissioned by Standing Wave Ensemble. 11:30 duration.

“White is the colour of can’t remember” is a truncated quotation from the opening of Stephen King’s 2008 novel, Duma Key . The full quotation reads: “Start with a blank surface. It doesn't have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but its true name is nothing. Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can't remember.”

Duma Key tells the story of a man, who, after a terrible car accident, deals with loss of limb and a memory full of holes, distortions, and white empty spaces. The man turns to art, where he sees the white canvas as a space for memories, as well as things that are yet to come (of course there’s some supernatural – it is a Stephen King novel after all!). This got me thinking about memory as a concept in general, and this piece looks at memory as fragile institution of human experience.

Some scientists believe that we don’t just recall a memory but recall the recollection of the memory, too, which, in time, strengthens them. The more we think about them, the easier it is to recall them. However, as we age, and our brains fill with knowledge, memories, facts, dates and the like, our memory often starts to deteriorate, at least to some degree, which makes some memories harder to recall than others.

My piece looks at this aging process through a musical lens, where the memories are recalled but deteriorate a little with time. They become more and more distorted throughout the course of the piece. These distortions are discomforting, for the music wants to remember the ‘pure’ memory, the original memory. As it progresses, the music gets more and more worked up, trying to recall that perfect, original memory, but the distortions increase and grow more serious the further into the piece we travel.

Memories are fragile, and I hope this piece evokes some deep memories in each of us, while also reminding us all how precious our memories truly are.

Narrating Flutist and Piano. 7:30 duration.

The story I chose to tell is one I have heard i the LGBTQIA+ community many times. in it, a queer youth is kicked out of their home because their parents are bigots who reject the child for their queerness. The flutist plays the role of another member of the LGBTQIA+ community who takes the banished child under their wing and helps foster them to adulthood in a supportive environment. This piece is the happy ending I wish I saw more often in hearing different versions of this story.

Streaming available here.

Solo soprano and mixed chamber sextet. 20:00 duration.

Doctoral Dissertation piece.

Solo Soprano and mixed chamber sextet. minutes.

Jaded, Bitter, and Queer is a protest song. It is a piece rebelling against cisgendered (“cis.”) and heterosexual (“het.”) norms that dictate the behaviour of all members of our society, despite the advances made in gender equality. While many women have made strides towards equality, the battle of equality for all women has yet to be won. Then, the folks like me, who exist outside of the man/woman binary, are barely just beginning to attain visibility, let alone equality. The fight for equality of all genders is still relatively young, and often creates many limits and frustrations for those who are not cis./het. men.

This piece exists to express these frustrations. Many queer people have felt similar frustrations as I do, especially in the past decades, where male homosexuality – for but just one example – was sometimes equated with wanting to be a woman, which was seen as a deep insult. Of course, femininity is not a flaw at all. There’s nothing wrong with a man having more stereotypical “fem.” expression of their gender, and still being a man. All expressions of gender are valid and beautiful in their own way. Yet the prejudice against people outside the binary continues.

Jaded, Bitter, and Queer was commissioned for the 2023 Queer Arts Festival in Vancouver, Canada, andintended to take inspiration from Claude Vivier on the 40th anniversary of his passing. Vivier, a queer man, was murdered for his sexuality. I can’t help but feel that were he still alive, he would be as outspoken about sexuality and gender as I hope this piece is.

Full Orchestra. 6 minutes.

Lines: La Monte Young once wrote a piece called Composition 1960 #10 For Bob Morris, in which the entirety of the score was simply the direction “draw a straight line and follow it.” In general, I think this is good advice. I love the concepts of lines in music (although none of mine are particularly straight), and I explored as many lines as I could within the orchestra. Follow these lines and see where they take you.

Layers: I wanted to take advantage of the huge number of very talented and highly trained musicians that play together in an orchestral piece, so I asked myself how best to take advantage of this. The answer I arrived at is to give each player more independence. In writing an orchestral piece, composers often think about background, middle ground, and foreground elements, but I wanted to take this a step further and see how many layers I could explore. The lines are varied, and rarely doubled. Gestures are doubled, but the details are fuzzy. Combine the layers and see what happens.

Ligaments: In anatomy, a ligament is a piece of connective tissues holding bones together. In this piece, something needs to connect all the lines and layers, and here, the orchestra’s members all work together like ligaments do, to make a living, breathing thing come to life. Connect the lines, combine the layers, and see where they take you.

Score available here.

Solo bass clarinet and staging. 7:30 duration.

“AB S T R A C T I O N” is a work for solo bass clarinet in B flat (transposing score; sounds a 9th lower than written) and staging. It is intended to be a very theatrical work, and the stage directions are every bit as vital to telling the story as the pitches and rhythms are to making the music come alive. As a result, this work must be memorized, ensuring that the performer can play with freedom and extreme expression without being hindered by the complexity of the score and its notation.

This piece tells a story, but on a very small scale. The narrative is never entirely clear and directed like it might be in an opera, but rather, it seeks to represent a moment in time, expanded over the course of several minutes. Essentially, it is a piece about a character, and her moment of paranoia.

“AB S T R A C T I O N” begins with anxious pacing, with the character muttering under her breath. When she plays, she begins with a multiphonic, which expands from silence to an overbearing quintuple forte. She is frustrated by the sound, but also, her eyes move side to side, anxious and awkward, checking if anyone heard the unearthly sound. She then plays a run, as fast as humanly possible, from the extreme low register, to the screaming altissimo; she freezes, in stunned silence.

Then the piece really begins, on page two. She plays for a bit, before showing signs of frustration, going so far as to scowl and flap her elbows dramatically. Then, there are moments of surprise: it is as if she is taken aback by the sudden high interjections in her own playing. But that feeling of suspicion returns, and quickly turns into a moment of paranoia. This suspicion/paranoia motif repeats several times throughout the piece.

There are moments of playfulness in the third page, with the high interjection returning, punctuated by moments of seriousness in a series of low gestures. She turns to face stage right: this is done out of frustration, as though the act of playing is boring or inane. When she rotates to stage left, it is done languorously. The multiphonic returns, as she is resigned for a moment, before oscillating side to side out of frustration, conveying feelings of fidgetiness. But then there is a sudden awareness that someone may be listening. The suspicion/paranoia transition motif returns.

New material enters on page four, but our character is stuck in her paranoia, eyes wide, until a sudden jump down to the lowest register, where she tries to block out the world. However, the paranoia slowly returns. There is a sudden release, as she decides to carry on playing, but this respite is temporary. As the new material expands, her ability to focus amidst the frustration and paranoia is challenged, and she turns various directions, begrudgingly returning to face forward, and returning her focus to the task at hand.

The suspicion/paranoia motif returns as her fear of being watched returns. It is repeated several times, eventually leading to the most extreme paranoia she has yet felt, accompanied by a repeated note, very high in the stratosphere. She breaks, at this moment, and has a freak out, playing random notes, with very screechy timbres, accelerating to a quintuple forte. During this freak out, her eyes move erratically and wildly in extremes, conveying her insanity she experiences as a result of feeling watched.

Suddenly, this moment cuts out, and after a long pause, eyes wide open, one of the opening motifs returns, contracting as time goes on. She tries to shake off the paranoia, even going so far as to roll her eyes dramatically. But then there’s a scowl, and, in a final gesture, on the bass clarinet’s lowest note, she experiences a moment of anger, that transforms first into being furious, and then into anguish. In the last moment of silence, she makes a face, completely deranged with eyes wide and crazy. We are left to question if the paranoia has won her over.

Contralto and piano. 6 minutes.

Text by Leanne Boschmann.

I have forgotten the entry-code to your apartment and now on my tongue only a faint taste of jasmine tea and persimmons from that first night we stayed up until dawn.

That first night I told you about the war, my grandmother’s stories of fleeing, my sister who forgot our grandmother’s spell for releasing wandering spirits and how we stopped our sleep-walking brother from leaving.

Forgetting is a blessing, a trance, this slipping from memory, this lingering in the hallway, and on the other side of the door of forgetting are deserted battlefields beloved brothers, small white jasmine petals, musky fragrance, and the honeyed skin of fruit that will never taste as sweet again.

Double Percussion Concerto and full orchestra. 10 minutes.

Piano trio. 5:30 duration.

"The Scandal" explores the intense feelings that accompany being part of, or a witness to, a scandal. The music begins with the piano addressing the scandal, using triadic chords in non-traditional combinations. It is percussive and sparse, reflective of the breaking news of a scandal. Then the cello joins, as if trying to provide an explanation for their part in the incident. Next, the violin joins the cello, seemingly in agreement with its story, but slowly this relationship erodes. The piano continues its interjections, arguing with both the violin and the cello throughout. Things become more intense as the fallout of the scandal progresses until the end, when all three are telling different versions of the same story, at times seeming to collaborate, at others, standing in stark opposition. The ending burns out, and we are left hanging, wondering what the next wave of the scandal will bring.

Premiere performance here.

Violin and piano. 6 minutes.

Premiere performance here.

A metamorphosis is a change, and one of the most significant moments in an LGBT+ person's life is when they come out, forever changing how they are seen by others. This piece depicts the moment in which they are uncertain and scared to come out to their parents, not knowing if they will be accepted or not. Palms sweating, mind racing, thoughts bouncing off the sides of your head. It can be quite scary to face this, but coming out the other side means growth. Ultimately this metamorphosis is a good thing.

Violin and piano. 11:30 duration.

Inspired by the movie,

“Boys Don’t Cry,” this piece concerns Brandon Teena, a trans man who attempts to find himself and love in Falls City, Nebraska, but ends up the victim of a hate crime.

Following some legal trouble in 1993, Brandon Teena moved to Falls City where he presented as a cisgendered man. He made friends with John Lotter and Tom Nissen. It was through these two men that Teena met Lana Tisdel, whom he started dating. In December of 1993 Teena had more trouble with the law, and was placed in prison. When Tisdel came to post bail, she discovered Teena in the women’s part of the prison. Teena told her he was a hermaphrodite who was pursuing a sex change operation. They continued dating. Later, Lotter and Nissen discovered that Teena had a female body.

When they discovered Brandon Teena’s female body, they forced him to remove his pants, where they discovered Teena had a vulva. Lotter and Nissen proceeded to gang rape Teena. Following the rape, they forced Teena to keep silent, threatening to silence him permanently if he ever talked. Brandon went to the police, who were unhelpful and obsessed with his gender identity rather than the rape.

One week later, Lotter and Nissen shot and stabbed Teena to death, as well as Lisa Lambert and Phillip DeVine.

SATB. 4:30 duration.

Winner of the Ruth Watson Henderson Award in 2022.

Selected text from Bliss Carmen.

Score available for purchase here.

Song cycle for soprano and piano. 15 minutes.

Solo piano. 20:45 duration.

Premiere performance here by Risa Tonita.

Two oboes and staging. 6 minutes.

The inspiration for this piece comes from a dark period in the composer's life in which he went through a series of episodes of psychosis in Spring of 2020, right as the pandemic was beginning to strengthen its grip on the world. Psychosis, for those not in the know, is a mental health phenomena where one's brain disconnects from reality and starts creating its own reality through auditory and visual hallucinations.

During these episodes, Matthew-John was haunted by shadowy figures, that first infiltrated his vision from the peripherals, and began to move inwards and become more present as the psychotic episode climaxed.

They started as images on the edges of my vision, so the piece starts with both performers on opposite sides of the stage. One faces away from the audience, the other faces the audience. As the episode progressed, the shadow figures began to infiltrate my vision, and the oboists both face the audience (becoming more present in both sound colour and stage presence) and move closer together, towards centre stage, as we approach the climax of the piece.

During the climactic, aleatoric section, both oboists oscillate back and forth, spreading sound and chaos, representing the dark requests of the shadow figures. After a brief interruption, the section of the multiphonics begins, representing my distress. The opening theme returns, gradually phasing out the multiphonics, a reflection of the dissipation of the episode I experienced.

The shadow figures, aka the two oboists, gradually return to opposite ends of the stage, releasing the tension slowly, returning the shadow figures to nothingness.

Due to the nature of the staging, memorization is essential for both performers. The oboists should dress in all black, and may feel free to costume themselves in black hoodies if desired for more impact.

Full orchestra. 5:30 duration.

Premiered in 2020 by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra as part of the Composer’s Institute in the Winnipeg New Music Festival.

Mixed chamber sextet. 10 minutes.

Chromatic Aberrations are a phenomena found in imperfect lenses during photography. When the light enters the lens, each colour has a different focal point. Because of the uneven quality of the light, the image gets ghostly aberrations, giving multiple, slightly different views of the subject at the same time. This is similar to looking at a 3D image without 3D glasses. The concept comes through in the music through the use of sound colour, providing many dimensions to the same material. This allows us to hear the same motivic cells over and over again, but every time, it is heard with a new chromatic aberration, giving a slightly changed vantage point.

Alto saxophone, harp, and percussion. 9:30 duration.

Premiere performance here.

Violin and piano. 10;30 duration.

Commissioned by Gregory Lewis with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Premiered by Gregory Lewis and Frédéric LaCroix. Video here.

String Orchestra. 7 minutes.

Winner of the 2019 Call for Scores from Thirteen Strings.

Song cycle for mezzo-soprano, viola, and piano with staging. 35 minutes.