Sound and intellect in dialogue

If there is a single thread through everything I make, it is counterpoint, not as a relic, but as a way of thinking: independent voices that keep their own integrity while listening, constantly, to one another.

That idea reaches well beyond notes on a staff. It is how I compose, how I perform, how I teach; and, no less, how I write a poem, how I listen to the people around me, how I take in the world and long to shape it: how a room should look, how it should feel, how it should function. Whether a choral setting, a fixed-media work, a screendance, or an improvisation at the organ, each begins with the same question: how do distinct lines hold their difference and still make meaning together, through contrast, return, transformation, and resonance?

I am drawn to the places where sound and intellect meet. Structure, for me, is not a cage but a kind of attention, a discipline that frees feeling rather than constraining it. The rigor is constant; the feeling it carries is not. One piece might move through many emotions, or hold several at once, and what sounds simple on the surface is built with the same exactness as what does not.

Much of my work is made with others. In a years-long partnership with the choreographer Rebecca Salzer, we turned toward questions of justice and the experience of those who have been pushed to the margins, including the human toll of displacement we witnessed firsthand.

And much of it is made for the everyday gatherings of a community, the weekly, living practice of liturgy, where music is not performance so much as presence in people's actual lives. Concert hall or sanctuary, festival screen or studio, the thread holds: distinct voices, deeply listening, in dialogue.