Amalgam

"I wrote a piano quartet, Amalgam, in the Spring of 2024 for the Yellowbarn festival. In the work I began to experiment with ideas of idiosyncratic phrases, which are just as musical as those that are not but catch attention because they don’t feel as natural. The relationship between traditional idiosyncratic and natural phrase structure is one of the ‘amalgams’ that I play with throughout the work - another one of them being the old versus the new. Old phrase structures and musical ideas are sieved through a modern lens, and vice versa. Moderation is extremized and extremities are dampened, so to speak. It also functions as an amalgam of various different themes that may have similarities or be completely different, but they are always in dialogue with each other."