A composer in the dark
I write for brass, piano, and the hours nobody schedules.
Pavor Nocturnus started in 2002 as a piece for brass choir. La Llorona was written for piano the year before that. The Beast of Gevaudan came the same season, and The Garden Tower the year after. I didn't know then that they were all the same night. It took twenty years and a long insomnia to see it.
That's most of what I can tell you about how this works. The pieces arrive separately. What connects them arrives much later, usually once I've stopped looking.
I studied composition at UNLV with Virko Baley, then at Arizona with Daniel Asia. Then I went back to UNLV and taught there for eight years, from 2016 to 2024, first as an adjunct instructor of music theory and then as Visiting Assistant Professor. Nine courses, from first-year fundamentals through composition workshop and up to graduate seminars in counterpoint, form and analysis, and twentieth-century technique. That's the part that actually changed the music. You can't teach species counterpoint to twenty-year-olds twice a week for eight years and keep writing carelessly. A classroom is unforgiving in a way an audience never is.
I played euphonium and baritone in the Las Vegas British Brass Band, which is why there's brass in nearly everything I write. I don't play with them any more. They perform the music instead. Fanfare for Uncommon Brass at the Clark County Library Theatre in March 2023, and Scrooge's Last Dream twice that December. Hornettes Nest I conducted myself.
What I'm after is music that goes down with you and comes back up. Not comfort. Comfort is easy and there's plenty of it around. I mean the other thing. The piece that walks into the dark with you, stays as long as it takes, and knows the way out. Descent, pursuit, confrontation, and the door on the other side. That shape is under almost everything here, including the pieces that don't sound like it.
Three albums. Fourteen scores in their original editions. And now a film: Murnau's Nosferatu, 1922, with twenty-three of these works laid under it end to end and title cards of my own. Seventy-eight minutes, finished in 2026.
Henderson, Nevada.
Pavor Nocturnus was a brass choir piece I wrote in 2002 and then didn't think about for a decade.
The other pieces on the album came one at a time, for their own reasons and for different instruments. A piano piece about a woman crying by a river. A violin duo set in a tower. A tuba piece about a storm at sea. None of them written to fit together.
Then one night I put them in an order, and they belonged together. I don't have a good explanation for that. I've stopped needing one.
Three of my brass band works have been performed by the Las Vegas Brass Band. Fanfare for Uncommon Brass at the Clark County Library Theatre in March 2023. Scrooge's Last Dream twice that December. Hornettes Nest I conducted myself, with Christin Schlicker and Tony Hussey on horns.
There is also A Medieval Fantasy for tuba and euphonium choir, played live in 2002. It is the earliest thing I wrote and the earliest recording I have of anyone playing it.
Video of all of it is on YouTube.
Twelve tracks. The earliest was written in 2001. What holds them together is a shape. Down, through, and out the other side.
This edition sounds like a record you found rather than one you bought. Same notes, same structures, same arcs. I put tape warmth and record-player noise over the top of it because the story is about something old surfacing in the middle of the night, and clean audio was telling the wrong lie.
All twelve tracks. Stream them or download the whole thing.
This music wants your attention and it will wait for it.
Nothing here resolves on schedule. Tension gathers in small moves and lets go when the structure says so, not when you'd like it to. Put it on in the background and you'll get very little out of it. Put it on with headphones and nothing else running and you'll get all of it.
That's the only instruction I have. Three minutes of your full attention. Then judge it.
Take the free companion book to the Nosferatu score. Every cue with its timing, a still from the film beside each one, and the performers. It costs nothing.
Then, if the night suits you, the film is here, and so are the albums and the scores.
If you'd rather hear the brass played live, there's video of that on the performances page.