With the world premiere of my miniature Beryllium for tenor saxophone, in my Elements series, on June 4th at 7:00PM EST (shoutout Drew Hosler, who will be performing my work!). I am making this entry into my series of blog posts about musical miniatures.
To say the work of Edgard Varese has had an enormous influence on my music is an understatement. I often make subtle references to his music in my compositions. Take the below example from his work Density 21.5 for solo flute. The opening motive, F-E-F# (alternatively, [0,e,1] or any of its permutations) is, in my opinion, a wonderful use of symmetry – reflecting across the pitch-axis of the first note, a half step below and then above that pitch.
Density 21.5 for solo flute, measure 1.
I often use this motive directly in my music. I sometimes use an expanded form, following this pattern through a twelve-tone row.
Reflected across the axis of the first pitch, the tone row expands outward in pairs of semitones.
Other times, I use the idea by taking a musical motive, and repeating it down a semitone, and then up a semitone from the original. Take the following example from Beryllium:
Beryllium, measure 4. The 5-let motive starts on A, then is repeated on G# and Bb.
This technique permeates the whole piece. I also really love the low honks which saxophones are capable of. These are heard throughout the work.
Beryllium, measure 15. This example shows both the Density 21.5 technique, and low honks.
It’s always fun writing for a virtuoso (and new-music specialist!) like Hosler. They always seem to find a way to make difficult passages sound effortless. Hosler will be giving the world premiere performance of the anthropocene extinctionfor solo baritone saxophone later this year. He also premiered Lithium and Saxharp!
Beryllium, measures 16-19. Techniques used include a multiphonic, low honks, and harmonics from the low register up through the altissimo register.
In this series of posts, I plan to discuss the musical ideas that go into my musical miniatures—brief, concentrated works that distill compositional thought into compact forms. These pieces often last only a minute or so, but within that short time, I aim to explore specific ideas in harmony, structure, and texture.
My harmonic language, which leans toward the dissonant and chromatic, is well-suited to this format. Extended stretches of sharp dissonance can be overwhelming in longer pieces, but when confined to miniature form, they can be intense without exhausting the listener. Like Anton Webern, I prefer economy in many of my chamber works. The miniature allows me to say more with less, and to present musical ideas which are both concise and pointed.
One of my favorites to write in this genre has been a series of miniatures based on the periodic table of elements. For several years now, I’ve been composing one piece for each element, using a form of musical cryptography I’ve developed. This technique transforms the element’s name, its atomic number, and select properties into pitch material. From there, I craft the composition—not as a programmatic interpretation of the element, but by allowing the encoded material to generate the piece’s musical identity.
The outcomes can be surprising. Because my system excludes the numbers 10 and 11, the pitches A and A♯ do not appear in number-based material. Likewise, the English alphabet’s uneven letter distribution means some element names yield more tonal clarity, while others result in sharp dissonance. The cryptographic method is a structural constraint that shapes the work in often unexpected directions.
“Helium,” for solo toy piano, opens with the notes of the F major pentatonic scale.
As the music progresses, additional notes are introduced methodically—B♭, E♭, A♭, D♭, and so on—expanding outward (and backwards!) through the circle of fifths. With each new pitch, the harmony becomes increasingly tense. Simultaneously, the tempo increases and a third contrapuntal voice emerges, enriching the texture and pushing the limits of the toy piano’s expressive capabilities.
The music accelerates throughout, and more pitches are added as the piece develops. As such, the music starts out with very consonant counterpoint, and over time becomes increasingly dissonant.
Distilling a musical idea into such a short form (and keeping the product musically coherent and interesting) is a challenge which draws me to the miniature. Because the musical ideas stem directly from external constraints (i.e., the properties of the particular element being expressed through my cryptographic method) the process remains fresh, surprising, and creatively challenging.
In future posts, I’ll delve into other works in the periodic table series, exploring how different elements have inspired unique musical solutions, and how I have explored different musical ideas I’ve been interested in over time.
Here are some things which have been occupying me musically and personally over the last week.
The Busy Season
Musically, it is the busy season! Publishers are putting out their new catalogs, and starting to accept new works. In that vein, I have one band (I’ll expand on that one below) and one strings work in progress. It is also marching band season, and I have two marching shows I am arranging – one with a theme of celebrating Chicano music and culture; and the other with a weather theme. I am learning a ton about writing for battery and front ensemble; integrating work with other folks, who choreograph the shows, and my contractor for writing percussion parts; and even some styles for arranging jazz, a la Basie.
I recently read John Green’s new book “Everything is Tuberculosis.” In this book, he describes the tragically short life of the Japanese poet, Masaoka Shiki. Shiki, who revived the poetic forms of haiku and tanka in the late nineteenth century, died an agonizing death from tuberculosis in his mid 30s. His poems are both beautiful and haunting, with vivid imagery and rich symbolism.
Inspired by both Shiki and Green, I’ve begun work on a piece for oboe and vibraphone based on Shiki’s work. The seven selected poems feature his despair and suffering, including imagery of snow and luffa plants. Each is being written into a movement of music, with the tentative title “The Tuberculosis Verses.” I intend the whole work to be about 10 minutes in length. The oboe-vibraphone duo is a beautiful, but unfortunately under-explored, medium in chamber music, and this will be my (first) contribution to the genre. If you’re interested in joining the project, or know of someone who would be, please reach out!
Sonemoia– a neologism
The band work in progress, with the tentative title “Petroglyphs,” will be about a grade 1 to 1.5 work which is somber in nature. Inspired by petroglyphs found in Arizona, and those I viewed recently in Joshua Tree National Park, I found myself lacking the words to describe precisely the emotions I felt viewing these artifacts from 2000 years ago. “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,” penned by neologist John Koenig, offers two words which are close – sonder and anemoia.
Sonder is the feeling that everyone around you lives a life as rich and complex as your own, that you can never truly know. Everyone, including the stranger you pass on the street and the person that lives on the other side of the planet, lives a life full of love, hope, grief, regret, and the rest of the full spectrum of what it means to be human – they work hard, love their friends and family, and do the best they can. It’s a profound feeling, and it reminds us we have more in common with everyone than we think. Indeed, the world might be a nicer place if we all remembered to imagine each other complexly.
Anemoia is nostalgia for a time one can never know. I certainly felt this when seeing the Joshua Tree petroglyphs, but the feeling was more complex. As I stood before the petroglyphs, I was struck not just by the artistic marks themselves, but by the people behind them. Their joys, fears, dreams, and disappointments are lost to time, but their marks remain—silent yet deeply human. As we are separated by time, I wonder what stories, jokes, and music their culture might have had, and in some sense feel a sense of loss that these are all lost to time. And I wonder what from our time will be lost to future generations.
So with the help of ChatGPT, I coined a new word: sonemoia. A portmanteau of sonder and anemoia, sonemoia represents the wistful, aching awareness that others—whether distant in geography or history—have lived lives as real as ours, full of laughter, sorrow, and longing. It is the grief of never knowing their stories, and the hope that our own will one day be seen with the same reverence. In a world that too often flattens others into enemies or footnotes, sonemoia is a call to imagine more deeply, feel more widely, and remember more kindly.
“Pangrams” (2024) is a brief suite for string orchestra that I recently composed. The idea struck me that a series of miniatures based on the linguistic concept of the pangram – a sentence or verse containing all letters of a language’s alphabet – might yield some interesting results using musical cryptography. Each movement is a short musical cryptogram where the letters of the pangram are converted to musical notes. Containing all letters of the alphabet, the musical equivalent uses all twelve tones; this yielded some surprisingly tonal-sounding musical material to develop. Thus I wrote four movements, totalling about six minutes of music:
I. Sphinx of Black Quartz, Judge My Vow II. Pack My Box with Five Dozen Liquor Jugs III. The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog IV. The Five Boxing Wizards Jump Quickly
The work divides the violin section into four parts, and features the principal players of the violin and cello sections in two of the four movements. It was named a finalist in the “Musica Per Archi” international composition competition, and was premiered by the KLK String Orchestra in Lviv, Ukraine on June 17, 2024.
Here are some things which have been occupying me musically and personally over the last week.
This week’s post will continue the discussion of techniques in my work Leviathan. Personally, life goes on much as it has. I’m grateful to have lots of time to write and be home with my dogs. The first notes of the #2024saxophoneproject are on the page. There is still time to join! I’m working on this with my composition teacher.
Technique #4 – Extended Techniques I would hardly be a good modern composer if I didn’t take advantage of the range of sounds which can be performed on the instruments I write for! Just a few from Leviathan include the absence of meter, the use of a metal scraping implement in the piano, indeterminate notation in the piccolo and cello, the use of boxed cells which are freely repeated, forearm and palm clusters in the piano, and alternative bowing techniques for the cello. In the examples below, time is indicated by the number of seconds each bar should last (approximately).
Leviathan, mm. 43-47.Box notation and free meter, along with piano extended techniques. Leviathan, mm. 48-50.
Technique #5 – Structured Improvisation Structured improvisation gives a loose framework around which the creativity of the performer takes precedence. In my case, a mix of pre-written and improvised materials make up a significant portion of the work, with solo cadenzas for each instrument, punctuated with violent stabs from the piano.
Technique #6 – Collage/Quotation Why do I call my music metamodern? In a sense it is because I use techniques of both modern and postmodern composers with a mix of sincerity and irony. This is a technique used by postmodern composers – mixing in pre-existing music in new and exciting ways. Leviathan ends with quotes of two hymns, one by Bach, the other the familiar Old 100th. The battle march which begins the section is a not-so-subtle not to Holst as well. See if you can find other references hidden in the music (full performance video with score).
Leviathan, mm. 97-105, contains references to Holst and Bach.Leviathan, mm. 120-122, rhythmically transforms the Old 100th, one of my favorite hymns.
Here are some things which have been occupying me musically and personally over the last week.
Personally, there’s not much to report. Life continues much in the way it has for weeks – I’m keeping busy with my day job, and continuing composition lessons. This week instead I will give you a brief overview of some techniques used in Leviathan. I’ll finish the analysis next week. Feel free to follow along with the techniques in the context of the full work:
Technique #1: Rhythmic Dissonance In the opening of Leviathan, I use complex rhythms the way that composers might use dissonance. It’s far from a perfect analogy, but it’s the term I use. Check out the examples below:
Leviathan, mm. 1-6.Leviathan, mm. 51-53.
Technique #2: Shared Monody Sharedy monody is a term coined by Joseph Schwantner to describe a melody being split among several instruments. Not all notes of the melody appear in all of the instruments. It’s a way to highlight some notes in a melody, and it kind of blurs the melody out horizontally. In the second example below, the performers are instructed either to speed up (flute), slow down (cello), or maintain the tempo (piano), creating a similar effect.
Leviathan, mm. 7-12.Leviathan, mm. 60-67.
Technique #3: Dissonant Counterpoint Of course I didn’t invent the concept or term, but I have my style of it – it essentially reverse the rules of species counterpoint, where dissonant intervals are prefered vertically, and rhythmic dissonance is also used, not unlike a 5th species of counterpoint.
Leviathan, mm. 17-22.
Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments!
Written 2/10/24
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Here are some things which have been occupying me musically and personally over the last week.
This week, I want to talk about a technique which frequently populates my music. When daunted by a blank page, it is one of the first places I go to – musical cryptography. I did not invent the technique, or the term for it, “crypto-serialism,” but I have found some success with it. The essence of the technique is developing a musical chiper to convert strings of characters into musical pitches; a title, concept, name, or line of text or poetry becomes a series of notes.
Below is the cipher I typically use:
There are several good examples of this in the early music of Dr. Neal Endicott, a composer/theorist I met while I was completing my undergraduate work at Western Michigan University. His Boketto for solo flute, riverrun for solo saxophone, and Come Slowly, Eden are a few which come to mind. You can see the conversion of numbers using a similar method in my works in the Elements series of musical miniatures (for example, the properties of Hydrogen and Helium).
The most extensive use in my music can be heard in the recently-released Leviathan. Inspired by the mythological creature as portrayed in the Bible and the cult television series Supernatural, several musical motives and chords are derived from the supposed qualities of the creature. In the example below, the word “hunger” is converted into pitches. The vertical sonority is based on the letters in order, from the lowest note to the highest.
The Hunger Chord, mm. 57-59, Leviathan.
However, the order of the pitches in the vertical sonority aren’t always important, as in the below rendering of the word “Leviathan” (left). The piano spells out in pitches the word “Purgatory,” the mythical home of the creature.
The Leviathan Chord, mm. 68; and Purgatory, spelled out by the piano, mm. 69-74, Leviathan.
There are several creative avenues to explore with this method. These include rhythm, repetition, register, and converting parts of these musical words into musical motives. The possibilities are endless, but it is a definite method of finding where to start! I will use it in the baritone saxophone commission I am working on this year, and will discuss other techniques I use in future blog posts.
Personally, the week was eventful! I worked the state music educators convention; it’s always nice connecting with music educators whom I don’t always get to see, and I was recognized a few times for my music (which is always surreal!). Dark Matter was featured on a reading session, and a set of my music was won in a raffle (I autographed the score for the director!). I’m always grateful for the love and support.
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!
Written 2/4/24
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Here are some things which have been occupying me musically and personally over the last week.
I seem to be staying busy! I had a great session with my therapist; I’m taking a composition lesson tomorrow; and, I am working this weekend at my state’s music educator conference. Hence, I am writing this post on Tuesday to be posted Saturday.
Musically, I’ve been thinking a lot about chamber music – I rather enjoy this kind of writing, but it doesn’t have much of an audience, compared to my band and orchestra music. This year, I will likely write 3-4 band and orchestra works, and about the same for chamber music. However, chamber music is my focus, hence the #2024saxophoneproject (content continues below).
I’ve also taken some of my writing time to make some much-needed changes to my website – cleaning up some broken links, removing some old works from my catalog (they just aren’t any good, honestly), and streamlining where my outbound links go – specifically, to publishers and SheetMusicPlus, where much of my chamber music and arrangements are distributed. I’m a big fan of their digital sales/licensing model. I’ll be continuing this work where I can. And I’ve changed the theme to be brighter, and hopefully easier to read and interact with.
I’ve experimented with advertising this week – spending some money to (hopefully) increase my web traffic here. I hope my weekly blog will help with that too.
Feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments!
Written 1/30/2024
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Here are some things which have been occupying me musically and personally over the last week.
Professionally, I’ve been quite busy. My day job sapped a lot of my energy. But work leads to success, and I’ve set a goal to be better at my day job. I made the Top 10 for sales for the first time this week!
Musically, I’ve been having a lot of fun listening lately. I normally listen to podcasts or audiobooks, just because music is my job, and it’s nice to escape that at times. But I am researching for some big projects, so I’m listening to a ton – music for saxophone, specifically, and chamber music that comes up in my social media/YouTube feeds. I’m enjoying a recent recording of a composition of mine, which was featured on a score video channel (content continues below video):
As far as writing goes…I’m revising a band march I wrote last year, and readying some other scores for sending out to publishers. I’m working on a Christmas-themed piece for band based on my Latvian heritage. And I’m starting my #2024saxophoneproject (details here). And I’m starting to think more like an entrepreneur…especially regarding social media engagement.
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!
Posted 1/27/24
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Here are some things which have been occupying me musically and personally over the last week.
Jason Taurins 