Music and Words

I am working on three projects right now that translate words into music (and vice versa). I have worked with words and music in different ways ever since high school—when I wrote a proto-chamber opera on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death and music to a song for a proto-musical with lyrics by my friend Ryan Walsh. I was (and am) fascinated by the marriage of music and words, and especially how the listener can simultaneously experience meaning from both. I remembered the first time I encountered music and drama together—it was a revelation to watch my high school’s production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes: “Wow. We can do that? We can have a band play music, and have songs, and tell a story?”

My studies with the composer Charles Fussell introduced me to opera. We began with Samuel Barber’s A Hand of Bridge and Leonard Bernstein’s White House Cantata and Trouble in Tahiti. I really enjoyed working with the opera medium because of the stylistic freedom that it afforded—you can call anything an opera and, with the right ensemble, you can write anything for an opera. I loved the idea that we can play with the baggage of opera and surprise audiences with the frame.

Now, in 2026, I am grateful to take stock of my relationship with words. In a solo clarinet piece, I translate acronyms from the AIDS crisis into Morse code; in the first movement of a violin concerto, I translate imaginary speech rhythms to create the sense of self-talk seen through homorhythmic clusters from the homogenous sound of a string orchestra. And in an oral-history-and-music project for Hong Kong, I take another stab at combining recorded speech with music as I grapple with my relationship to this form among so many such pieces that have come before, from Different Trains to Bang On A Can’s Field Recordings to my friend Ruby Fulton’s Wilderness Suite and so much more.

And, after all this time, I still find something new in words and the sound of words, and they continue to inspire.