My creative work includes composition, arranging, and guitar performance across concert, popular, and media contexts. As a composer, I have written works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, voice, guitar, and electronic media, with interests ranging from contemporary concert music to film and media music. As a guitarist, my performance work includes classical repertoire, jazz, and popular music.
Selected Compositions
Undertow (2023)
for orchestra
Undertow was inspired by an experience in which my sister was caught in a riptide while swimming in the ocean. After initially panicking as the current pulled her away from shore, she remembered our father’s advice: rather than fight the current, conserve your energy, move with it, and gradually work your way free. The music traces this experience through moments of turbulence, release, renewed struggle, and eventual escape.
MIDI realization
Wynken, Blynken and Nod (2017)
for mezzo-soprano and piano
Written for Heather Normandie, Wynken, Blynken and Nod sets the first three stanzas of Eugene Field’s fanciful poem about three children sailing through a dreamlike night sky. The music uses Lydian harmony, recurring musical ideas, and word painting to evoke the poem’s imagery. When the moon “laughed and sang a song,” the piano introduces a quotation from Claude Debussy’s Clair de lune, linking the moon’s song to the work’s dreamlike musical world.
Hunter and Prayer (2011)
for string quartet
Composed for the independent film Hunter and Prayer, this music accompanied the film’s opening credits. Scored for string quartet, the piece establishes the film’s musical world through an intimate chamber ensemble and served as part of the original score.
Promptings of the Spirit (2010)
for stainless steel bowls, marimba, and mixed percussion
Commissioned by percussionist Tyler Smith, Promptings of the Spirit explores contrasting musical paths through an unusual collection of pitched stainless steel bowls, marimba, and mixed percussion. Inspired by reflections on spiritual prompting and the different paths that result from responding to it, the work began as a visual drawing of two diverging and intersecting paths that was subsequently translated into musical contours and gestures.
Reconciliation: III. “Tearing the Curtain” (2010)
for mixed chamber ensemble
Reconciliation is a three-movement work exploring separation and reunion. The first two movements divide the ensemble into distinct instrumental groups; in the final movement, “Tearing the Curtain,” those groups are gradually brought together, ultimately forming a unified ensemble while retaining their individual musical identities.
Suite for Logic and Economics: III. “Traffic Recollections” (2009)
for electronic media
“Traffic Recollections” reconstructs a song I had previously helped write and perform in a rock band, using the original recording as the source for all of the movement’s sounds. Through electronic manipulation, fragmentation, and repetition, the music reflects the ways memories can become altered, obscured, and reconstructed over time.
Piano Suite: I. Fast (2006)
for solo piano
An earlier work exploring a chromatic language through four-part writing, with individual voices moving primarily by step and expanding and contracting through contrary, similar, and oblique motion.
Xu-Duong Khuc, piano
Guitar Performance
“Dies Irae”
Arranged for guitar by Ken Hummer, from Ancient Chant and Hymns for Guitar by Gerard Garno. The “Dies Irae” (“Day of Wrath”) is a medieval chant associated with the Requiem Mass whose distinctive melody has been quoted and reinterpreted extensively in concert and film music, including works by Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt.
“Montemayor (Romance de los Pinos)”
A lyrical twentieth-century work for classical guitar by Spanish composer Federico Moreno Torroba (1891–1982), “Montemayor (Romance de los Pinos)” is part of his Castillos de España (Castles of Spain). The piece contrasts flowing melodic passages with more animated sections, exploring shifts in texture, register, and musical character.
Robert Normandie, guitar
“Django Bells” — “Jingle Bells” in the Gypsy-Jazz Style
Arrangement for two guitars by Robert Normandie. This arrangement reimagines the familiar holiday song in the gypsy-jazz style associated with Django Reinhardt.
Robert Normandie, guitars
Historical Performance
Matteo Carcassi — Selected Pieces from Méthode complète pour la guitare, Op. 59
These recordings explore historically informed approaches to the guitar music of Matteo Carcassi (1792–1853). The works are performed on a Panormo-style Romantic guitar by Bernhard Kresse using techniques described in early editions of Carcassi’s Méthode complète pour la guitare, Op. 59 (1836). These include nail-less right-hand playing, anchoring the little finger near the bridge, historically prescribed right-hand fingerings and articulations, and arpeggiating chords rather than performing them simultaneously.
Larghetto, Op. 59, Part III, No. 37
Gallop, Op. 59, Part III, No. 50
Robert Normandie 