Chamber Music
Music for most ensembles larger than two players but too small to be classified as a “large ensemble.”
Music by Kurt Mehlenbacher
Dance of the Muse
Dance of the Muse was written after a prolonged absence of compositional inspiration. Those who I pulled my energy from were no longer available, and I found myself with nothing but a mud puddle to try and secrete the waters of creation from. Searching high and low, I could not seem to find any ideas in my immediate surroundings, so I decided to plunge myself back into the world in which my mu ...
Everchanging Light: String Quartet No. 4
This is my second work written for a collaboration with the Phoenix Art Museum, the fourth string quartet written during my studies at ASU, and my first completed piece of 2010. I was one of four composers selected to write a work that reflected a permanent piece in the museum galleries entitled Mohl ip by James Turrell. As the museum describes it on their
Mutant Tadpole
There just is not enough music with contrabassoon in it. I’m primarily a contrabassoon player, so I wanted to write something that had a contrabassoon in it. This piece came simply from that desire. It took me almost three months to figure out exactly what the mutant tadpole was, but in the end, I think the three-eyed, nine-legged, no-toothed amphibian finally came to the surface. Yo ...
String Quartet No. 1
This piece is quite unusual, in my opinion, and very special to me. I wrote this after being exposed to a series of books titled Composers on Composing, which have essays on the art of composition written by some of the most influential composers I’ve been exposed to (Karel Husa, Frank Ticheli, Robert Kyr). To say the least, these essays helped me rediscover and reaffirm why I had chosen ...
String Quartet No. 2: Pisa II
This work is my second go at this standard ensemble. It is a single movement work that is an aural representation of the painting Pisa II by Al Held. Originally, the work was supposed to be integrated with a poem, but due to a series of unfortunate events, the wider scope of the project was never realized.
Regardless of what it could have been, the piece focuses on three aspects of the paintin ...
String Quartet No. 3: Chromo
This piece was actually started for two specific reasons: 1) There was a performance opportunity given to me in Paris that required a string quartet, and 2) Arizona State University was having a composition competition offered by the St. Lawrence String Quartet that required a newly written string quartet with an approximate length of 8 to 10 minutes.
The approach to this piece was that I wanted ...