Five Miniatures

Written in early 2025, Woodwind Quintet is a collection of five compact movements, each built around a distinct musical or extra-musical idea. Rather than tracing a single narrative, the work treats the quintet as a kind of laboratory—five short studies in sound, gesture, physicality, and style.

I. Written “C” begins with a simple compositional joke: what happens when five transposing instruments are asked to play the same written note? From that premise grows a sharply rhythmic movement in which pitch, key noise, breath, and articulation become part of the musical material.

II. Lacrimosa turns inward. Inspired by the traditional Latin Mass text and by historical musical gestures associated with weeping and lamentation, the movement explores a more fragile and resonant sound world, including multiphonics and closely shaded instrumental colors.

III. Spitting Distance is concerned with proximity—sometimes intimate, sometimes uncomfortably close. Aggressive articulations, compressed gestures, and volatile exchanges give the music an almost physical presence, while the bass clarinet introduces a spectral, didgeridoo-like harmonic sound.

IV. Waves Low & Slow considers vibration itself. Sustained sonorities are allowed to resonate and accumulate overtones before lines begin to rise, fall, swell, and recede in wave-like motion.

V. Funk closes the work by turning toward groove. Sixteenth-note rhythms, syncopation, and tightly interlocking parts draw on the rhythmic vocabulary of funk, particularly the clipped, propulsive patterns associated with the clavinet and rhythm section.

Across its roughly twelve-minute span, Woodwind Quintet moves freely between seriousness and play, treating the familiar combination of flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon as five individual personalities capable of producing far more than their conventional blended sound.