ALBUM OF SOLO VIOLIN WORKS COMING IN 2026!
Recorded with cmntx records
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To me, this album traces the inner world of a person striving to remain sensitive, unjaded, and fully connected to themselves and others within an increasingly chaotic and oversaturated world, with the violin as the medium for this journey. It represents a vibrant collection of pieces for solo, mostly written by composers whose artistry I greatly admire, and whom I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know: Elizabeth Gartman, Darian Donovan Thomas, William Bolles-Beaven, Christian Frederic-Bloquert, Luis McDougal, Kylan Hillman, Anuj Bhutani. The album also includes a work by myself, and two older works that I believe demand a renewed interpretation for our time.
Some selections on the album - ‘Volaste junto al ave a vacio’ (You Flew With a Bird to the Nowhere) by Luis McDougal, ‘Flow’ by Elizabeth Gartman, and my original piece ‘Outrage Fatigue’, aim to carve out an oasis for the listener to reflect on topics for which public discourse is often stigmatized or met with damaging external baggage. While dialogue on ‘difficult’ issues is so important (I put ‘difficult’ in quotes because they shouldn’t be so), our ability to engage meaningfully with ongoing events in 2025 is handicapped by the speed at which we are collectively expected to absorb information, often reducing discourse to a series of knee-jerk reactions to a constant stream of updates and news clips. We may get caught up in watching a series of parallel daily-unfolding ‘train wrecks’ to a degree that we don’t leave ourselves energy to develop nuanced understanding and connection to important issues on a level which would spur meaningful action. When we are constantly emotionally reeling from a new disaster (or from the consumption of content which is inflammatory by design), adopting values and emotions prescribed to us externally can feel easier than devoting additional energy to our own private reflection and research. In this state we just add more ‘noise’ to the thick mantle of outraged speech on the surface of these matters, while at our core, we feel numbness, resignation and exhaustion.
In my performance of these heartfelt works engaging with ‘difficult’ topics, my hope is to create an avenue wherein listeners can more deeply connect to these issues and the humans experiencing them, whose voices are often silenced under all the noise. These pieces do so through a wordless medium, giving us a break from the ongoing stream of rhetoric and information which can feel so constant that it loses meaning. If we approach tough conversations through first accessing the unspoken feelings that bind us as human beings, we can be spurred into desiring understand each other more deeply - a conversation originating from desire is more likely to outlast whatever results from the spikes of cortisol and adrenaline we may get from watching the news each week.