This arrangement draws from traditional Shaker hymns, including several associated with the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. At Pleasant Hill, unison singing was central to worship—a reflection of the Shakers’ deep belief in equality. Musical participation required no formal training; all voices were welcome, unified in purpose and spirit.

While many listeners may recognize the gentle simplicity of “Simple Gifts,” Shaker music was often far more dynamic. Some hymns were loud and ecstatic, accompanied by stomping and dancing that earned the Shakers a reputation for being rowdy and fervent in their worship.

The piece includes “Pretty Mother’s Home,” a poignant tune by Patsy Roberts Williamson. Brought to Pleasant Hill while enslaved, she was freed by the Shaker community and chose to remain, becoming a devout Shaker and prolific composer. Her voice—along with the voices of many others—lives on in this music.

Special thanks to Sarah Porter, Music Program Specialist at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, for her guidance and expertise in completing this project.

This piece follows a solitary figure walking through a frozen, snow-covered landscape. Rather than depicting nature itself, the music mirrors the wanderer’s mind as it drifts between a cold, detached outward awareness and an inward reverie colored by tender, painful memory and emotion. Icy, frosted textures reflect the external world, while slow-burning waves of heat and ache emerge as the mind slips into memory and longing.

This work nods gently to Debussy’s Des pas sur la neige, a piece that has haunted me for years, though its roots lie elsewhere. Listen closely, and you may hear a theme from my earlier orchestral work, The Arborist, The Alchemist. The walker in this winter scene is the character I’ve called the Arborist, making this piece a sibling to the earlier work: another musical scene

drawn from a long-term personal fiction project I have been developing over many years.

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Microsensorium is a five-minute orchestral composition with projected AI video, commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra for its March 2026 children’s programming. Designed to engage young audiences with imaginative, multi-sensory worlds, the work explores how timbre can convey texture, temperature, and taste through sound. Composed as five micro-scenes—Feral Furs & Teeth, Cold, Warm, Rusty Clockwork, and Bubblegum Unicorn Rainbows—interspersed with dronelike interludes, the piece uses crossmodal correspondences, onomatopoeic gestures, and cultural associations to transform experimental orchestral textures into vivid sensory experiences.

The accompanying video, created in Midjourney, shows a picture frame on a gallery wall that opens into fantastical miniature worlds, visually reflecting the sensory elements of each scene.

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ENTER[ic] PORTAL explores the enteric realm—the hidden intelligence of the human gut—as a concealed threshold into the psyche. Beneath conscious thought, the body’s interior landscape becomes a passageway where innermost thoughts, desires, trauma, and pain surface alongside older and stranger dimensions of the mind. The score blends orchestral color with electronics constructed from poetic fragments, song, AI-altered voices, and raw sonic textures. Suspended between unease and radiance, the piece leads the listener through a state of disquiet toward a fragile, unresolved peace.

nightseed is a shared, in-person VR experience first showing at the KMAC Museum on August 21 and 22, 2026. It is designed to be experienced together. You are in the same room as other people, moving through the same strange place at the same time, figuring things out side by side.

Made in collaboration with Louisville Makes Games and the Louisville Orchestra, the piece places a small group inside a dark forest filled with the remains of a lost civilization. What is left behind are fragments of cultural memory stored as sound on petrified tree seeds. No written language, no spoken words. Just music.

As you explore, you find these seeds left by a civilization that crumbled long ago and bring them back to a central tree. When activated, they reveal pieces of a culture that believed sound was enough to carry everything that mattered. Story, feeling, history, identity. It is all there if you listen.

The work is about discovery and a little bit of trust. Try something, see what happens. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and that’s part of it. I hope people walk away with a sense that meaning does not always need words, and that what we choose to preserve says a lot about who we are, even long after we are gone.

For brass trio. Written for the Louisville Orchestra's Once Upon an Orchestra series. Based on the book by Arnold Lobel.

• Thursday, September 11, 2025 | In Harmony Commonwealth Tour | Shaker Village (Pleasant Hill, KY) | Shaker Hymn Medley

• Friday, October 24, 2025 | Classics: Beethoven’s Pastoral | Whitney Hall | A Hidden Sun Rises

• Saturday, October 25, 2025 | Classics: Beethoven’s Pastoral | Whitney Hall | A Hidden Sun Rises

• Thursday, November 6, 2025 | Music Without Borders: Pictures at an Exhibition | The Jeffersonian | Jupiter, Colossus

• Friday, November 7, 2025 | Music Without Borders: Pictures at an Exhibition | Neighborhood House | Jupiter, Colossus

• Wednesday, February 25, 2026 | In Harmony Commonwealth Tour | Madison Southern High School (Berea, KY) | Shaker Hymn Medley

• Thursday, February 26, 2026 | In Harmony Commonwealth Tour | Western Hills High School (Frankfort, KY) | Shaker Hymn Medley

• Friday, February 27, 2026 | In Harmony Commonwealth Tour | Norton Center for the Performing Arts (Danville, KY) | Shaker Hymn Medley

• Wednesday, March 18, 2026 | MakingMUSIC | Whitney Hall | Microsensorium

• Thursday, March 19, 2026 | MakingMUSIC | Whitney Hall | Microsensorium 

• Friday, March 20, 2026 | MakingMUSIC | Whitney Hall | Microsensorium   

• Saturday, March 21, 2026 | OrKIDStra | Whitney Hall | Microsensorium

• Friday, April 10, 2026 | Classics: Appalachian Spring | Whitney Hall | ENTER[ic] PORTAL 

• Friday, April 10, 2026 | Classics: Appalachian Spring | Whitney Hall | ENTER[ic] PORTAL 

• Friday, August 20, 2026 | KMAC Museum | nightseed

• Saturday, August 21, 2026 | KMAC Museum | nightseed

• Saturday, January 16, 2027 | Classics: Music of the Mines | New Work