I am a composer, bass guitarist, and double bassist. I’m best known for my work in my band, Stolen Gin. I studied music at New York University as an undergraduate, and I am now a Master’s student in music composition at CUNY Queens College. My works have been performed by various NYC-based ensembles including Contemporaneous, JACK Quartet, Bergamot Quartet, and HYPERCUBE. As a bassist, I’ve performed at festivals including Govball, Ocean’s Calling, and Zootown, and at venues including Brooklyn Paramount, Salt Shed, Capitol Theatre, and The Fillmore.
Click here to take a look at my compositional work.
Click here to take a look at my work as a bassist.
The Sunset Scrolls is an opera for TikTok.
This opera is a series of 22 short-form vertical videos, ranging in length from about three seconds to two minutes each.
Each of these videos possesses an ‘aria’, ‘recitative’, or ‘entr'acte’ quality. This work exists natively on short-form video apps (TikTok; Instagram Reels; YouTube Shorts), and cannot be reproduced live.
The Sunset Scrolls is dedicated to Robert Ashley, whose experiments in ‘Opera For Television’ provided the inspiration for this work. Thank you for listening.
Dale - A Monodrama For Flute, Bb Clarinet, Violin, Cello, Narrator, and Piano
It can be difficult to acknowledge when you aren’t quite as close with someone as you used to be. “Is it my fault? I hardly reached out… But, then again, neither did they…”
It’s been years since I’ve spoken to various old friends — ones that I used to see nearly every day. I wrote Dale in an attempt to examine the kind of passivity that leads to the end of relationships like those. Set in the bleak, everyday England of my childhood, Dale tells the story of a husband and wife who don’t quite know each other like they used to.
Performed by Lydia Saylor & Alegria Ensemble.
This Piano Trio is an exercise in irrelevance. Do the subtle changes to rhythm and note-duration really mean much when they’re propagating through a resonant space that clouds them with reverb and echo? I enforce some rather unwieldy piano extended-technique in order to access pitches that are slightly out of tune — but does that narrow detuning matter much when it’s subject to the natural pitch-decay that all soundwaves experience as they travel? I thoroughly enjoy writing music that does not matter, and I hope you enjoy spending your time in the most meaningful way possible: by wasting it.
Performed by Contemporaneous and Amara Trio.
Advice - For Alto Saxophone, Electric Guitar, Vibraphone, Snare Drum, Piano, Accordion, and Electronics.
Performed by HYPERCUBE.
This Saxophone Quartet is partially inspired by Elliot Carter’s 3rd String Quartet. After a brief opening microtonal chorale, this work emulates Carter’s superimposition of unrelated rhythmic strata to create a sort of polyrhythm. The four saxophones play rhythms derived from the quintuplet, septuplet, and regular duple 16th and 32nd-note pulse levels simultaneously, before ultimately converging into a uniform rhythm and homophonic texture at the very end.
Performed by Joshua Haugen.
Stolen Gin’s discography…
Iannis Xenakis - Roscobeck (1996) for Cello and Double Bass
Two songs from Stolen Gin’s most recent NYC headliner at Irving Plaza
Double bass transcription - Sonny Rollins on St. Thomas
David Lang - i feel pretty for Double Bass
Stolen Gin on Morning TV
Philip Glass - Songs and Poems for solo cello VI (adapted for double bass)
Bass guitar transcription - Brad Mehldau on Beatrice