You mentioned in your proposal that you have a tendency to separate your projects as academic music versus digital music. I was curious if you could elaborate on what you mean by academic music versus digital music, because to me it seems like those two terms apply to different categories that aren’t necessarily opposites in the way that, say, digital and analog are opposites, or electronic and acoustic. In other words, I think that there are academic works that involves digital technology and others that don’t, and that the same can be said for nonacademic works. So I’m interested to know how you’re defining those terms.

I think I could’ve used more accurate terms in that description, but what I was trying to explain is just the fact that I have music that basically only exists in that concert space, and then I have my body of work that I put together on my own in the studio. It’s the difference between being a composer and a producer, which sometimes overlap.

So what you meant by academic was concert work.

Yes.

And mainly acoustic work? I’ve listened to some of your pieces, and you have this really broad spectrum of work, but there was a lot of work that I thought one might classify as academic, and some of those works were for acoustic instruments and sounded like they were conventionally notated music to be played by flutes and percussion instruments. And then I heard this other music, which I wasn’t clear about the source of the sound, but it also sounded very composed and also kind of abstract. But, if I understood it correctly, it sounded to me like the sounds were generated electronically – that it was electronic music. And then I heard this whole other section of your work from this EP that you recorded, that was in a much more kind of popular music idiom that also made use of your voice – I assume that was your voice?

No, actually, the recordings on that EP I did with my band, Meinu…

And somebody else was the singer?

Yeah. It’s a collaboration between myself and two other artists: Madelin, and Angelina Torreano of Citris. These are friends from college, and we wanted to make something that utilizes and brings together our artistic voices that inhabit different corners of the music world. We recorded that EP last summer and will probably put it out very soon, sometime this summer.

The way that I sort of took it in when I was listening to it is that there was a much greater distinction, stylistically anyway, between that music and the other works that you had created, some of which were electronic and some of which seemed like they were completely acoustic. But all of those other works felt to me like they were in one kind of aesthetic world, whereas this other music seemed to be in a different kind of sonic space, a different aesthetic space. And I felt like the distinction was more about stylistic difference than it was about which tools you were using.

That project is collaboration, so already with two other artists involved, my sound is definitely going to be transformed. And it’s true, aesthetically it falls more towards the pop side of the spectrum. But I feel like I draw from the concert music world in more subtle ways: for example, a certain type of rhythmic complexity.

I agree. I could definitely hear elements of the other kinds of sounds that you’ve gotten. And maybe the thing that really put it in a different world was your friend’s voice, because her vocal style is definitely in sort of a more pop music style. And so if you stripped away her tracks – not that you’d do that, but if you stripped away her tracks, or just focused on other elements in the tracks, I could hear that there was definitely some continuum between your different ways of working, which I think is really interesting.

I found your score for the drum machine to be really intriguing, and I like this idea that you had of separating the score into staves for triggering sequences and for playing notated rhythms precisely as written and so forth. I’m curious how you came up with that approach for that piece.

I was just experimenting out of necessity, because there’s no way that you can notate a machine like that strictly through conventional notation. So what I was trying to do was be as efficient and clear as possible and give the performer just enough information so that my ideas could clearly come across, and also not give too much information, so that there’s this saturation and it’s sort of counterproductive. I tried to use a combination of a bunch of different notational styles to make it as easy as possible for the performer to be able to interpret a piece for this very specific, very different type of instrument. I used text descriptions and traditional notation, and some graphic stuff, as well.

Well, it’s a really interesting area for me… we’re talking about making these boundaries between different parts of your work, and how you’re striving to connect them all, but then you find yourself once again separating them. And I have the same thing in my work, when I think about the difference between work that I compose for myself to perform as a solo artist versus music that I’ve written for an ensemble or for a soloist who isn’t me. And one of the big differences there is the notation, because once you’re writing for somebody else, then that makes the notation suddenly very necessary: you have to come up with some means of communicating to whoever the player is what it is that you want them to play. So I’m always looking for interesting ways to make things that don’t lend themselves to conventional notation – how do you incorporate those into the notation? I thought it was really interesting how you were doing it. I also really thought that the score was kind of beautiful to look at because of the elasticity between things that were a clear notation, and other things that you had to figure out to how to graphically represent some of these ideas.