Bound X

Ten years ago today, I took the stage at First Presbyterian Church in Ypsilanti, MI to introduce an audience of family, friends, and colleagues to my dissertation recital, presented in partial completion of my Doctorate of Music Arts degree in Music Composition.

I was so emotional that I didn’t get through my prepared remarks, cut the tension by joking that I was screwed if I ever won an Oscar because I’m so apt to cry, and then took a seat to hear the assembled achievement of my time as a graduate student at the University of Michigan. The final and most important work on the program was Bound, a twenty-minute-long a song cycle for mezzo-soprano, violin, clarinet, saxophone, cello, and percussion that served as my dissertation piece. You can listen to the complete world premiere performance below:

Bound sets and takes its title from poetry I commissioned from a friend, Lauren Clark, who remains an incredibly gifted poet, whatever they are up to now (we have not been in touch in a long time). And, that performance marked my first of many collaborations with vocalist Megan Ihnen, for whom I have composed three subsequent works.

The instrumental parts were performed by a subset of the chamber group Latitude49. I wrote my first piece for them, A Five-Note Chord Seen from the Porch of a Curious Mind, in 2013, and that work both appeared on and inspired the title of the group’s debut recording. Latitude49 continues to perform actively, and its members, pianist Jani Parsons and percussionist Christopher Sies, founded the exciting Sound Atlas festival in Calgary, Alberta. After working together on Bound, Chris and I collaborated again with the amplified percussion piece Djentdemic (2016).

This same group performed Bound for a second time a few months after this world premiere, at the 2015 ‘Strange, Beautiful Music’ marathon, an annual event organized by New Music Detroit. Megan encouraged me to send the recording of Bound’s final movement to icareifyoulisten’s Spring 2015 mixtape, and she got the same recording included on a playlist presented at the SXSW Festival in 2016 by a group representing the cultural offerings of Des Moines, IA.

Megan has also performed Bound in its entirety, as well as individual movements thereof, more recently, including a complete rendition in 2018 organized by composer Mara Gibson and featuring Louisiana State University’s Constantinides new music ensemble. Lately, Megan performs most regularly with saxophonist Alan Theisen in the duo Neonautica, for whom I composed the work Dark Star (2019). But, last year, Megan returned to Bound while on tour with bassoonist Darrel Hale (with whom she is in the duo ‘Takin’ Souls’) where they debuted a new bassoon and voice arrangement of the movement Bound III.

I have thought about Bound’s tenth anniversary for a long time. And, as 2025 approached, I knew I needed to find a way to celebrate and re-engage with one of the most important pieces of music I’ve ever created. Both the music of Bound and the collaboration that brought it the stage in Ypsilanti on March 14, 2015 taught me an enormous amount about myself and the work of making music. As I have reminded Megan more than once in the intervening years, she pushed me to grasp a deep understanding of what I had written, because, otherwise, I could not communicate what she needed to do in her performance. The skills I gained from my partnership with her have benefited me endlessly in all the musical activity I have pursued in the last decade.

Chris Sies also contributed an enormous amount to making Bound succeed. The work’s percussion part plays a crucial but delicate role in its success. Not only did he help me hone the instrumentation so it would sound good in an unamplified, live setting, his improvisations in Bound’s final minute are critical to making its closing climax overwhelm the audience and everything we’ve heard before; just like the crashing waves depicted in Lauren’s text at this point in the composition.

As the music theorist Kevin Korsyn noted in my dissertation defense, Bound is, for the most part, an incredibly economical work. Thematic ideas appear, return, and grow. For the most part, the music spins variations on a handful of motives and intervallic relationships. The emotional arc of the work traverses austerity and heartbreak to arrive at its explosive end, which represents the final, consuming arrival of a style derived from my favorite genre of music: heavy metal.

The musical perspective from which Bound emerges continues to be relevant to my work today, though I have grown in important and unexpected ways as a composer over the last ten years. The biggest changes in my composing involve a surprising embrace of aleatoric techniques as well as my more recent attraction to composing with electronic tools and for digital media. The first of these trends began with Noa (2017), for marimba duo, and then continued with my percussion chamber concerto This Could Be Madness (2022). This recent work is almost like a sequel to Bound in the way it balances a wide range of aesthetics against the gravitational pull of riffs and rhythms inspired by metal.

The second new trend, composing for electronics, has gradually become the centerpiece of my artistic work. Excited by the potential to create and share original compositions and improvisations online almost immediately, and encouraged by my access to excellent synthesizers thanks to the Ann Arbor District Library’s music tools collection, electronics have become my primary musical medium since 2022. This includes short pieces for social media and other digital releases, as well as my ambient composition O Beata Maria (2024), which I created for the fixed media/live carillon improvisation performance I organized with Sara Tea and Julie Zhu in November 2024 as part of our Resonant Soundscapes project.

Now that 2025 is here and the tenth anniversary of Bound has arrived, it feels only appropriate to revisit this impactful work through my newfound mode of expression: electronic music. Bound X, the new remix project I’m announcing right here, in this blog post, will do exactly that. The first preview of what I had in mind is linked below. This interlude from Bound was originally scored for percussion and voice, and it is the first part of the piece that I wrote in the fall of 2014. My electronic transformation of this decade-old music embraces a chip tune-inspired sound:

You can listen to Megan Ihnen and Chris Sies perform the original scoring of ‘Interlude III’ from Bound below to compare this new version with its source material:

My goal is to share the rest of Bound X on June 1, 2025 because the opening line of Bound is, “it is June”. Every June 1 since Bound premiered, I have texted Megan, “it is June” - this year, I plan to release Bound X as an album (and, Megan, I think I can stop texting you now).

The rest of the music will include somewhat straightforward synthesizer arrangements of the original composition, like the preview piece above, as well as more abstract interpretations of Bound that use more aggressive processing techniques and samples from the performance recording I made with Megan and Latitude49 in Ypsilanti a decade ago.

Follow me on Bluesky for updates on Bound X and come back here when it is June!