The compositions below are all of the pieces I am proud to call my own, as I spend the majority of my time working on them.
I composed this aria for a group assignment in my high school's Psychology 12 course, to depict a case study on Social Anxiety Disorder for which classmate Jules Dawkins wrote the lyrics. For this publication, the lyrics have been slightly modified to better depict a more universal experience of anxiety—in any shape or form.
I was commissioned to score my English class’ hurriedly put-together production of Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) by Ann-Marie MacDonald, a satirical comedy which follows Constance Ledbelly on a subconscious voyage in the worlds of Othello and Romeo and Juliet, where she tries to prove that both these plays were originally intended to be comedies.
This is my most substantial and ambitious work yet. It is undoubtedly my most emotional as well, a piece of wide scope which captures the entirety of the COVID-19 global pandemic from start to finish.After all, a significant historical event of this scale should have an orchestral work of similar magnitude to accompany it, and I decided to undertake such an endeavour.
This concertino was composed to be a part of the "Creative Innovations" concert, where the Victoria Conservatory of Music Chamber Orchestra and Jonathan Crow (concertmaster of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra) as the soloist will perform Vivaldi's Four Seasons with different students' compositions preceding each season.
My first attempt at counterpoint! Hopefully I have not offended Bach, but to me (for the most part), it sounds relatively believable as a counterpunctal work, as it also seems to be free of parallel fifths, utilizing contrary motion more or less.
I gradually composed my first clarinet sonata over a period of three years, from 2019-2022. I have titled it my "youth" sonata, since my work on it spanned from my age of 14-16, and it illustrates the many facets of youth: from a buoyant dance of playfulness and innocence to a dark lament of lovelorn and anguish, fueled by firing hormones and the discovery of new emotions.
Upon hearing my composition “Walking Woodwinds Trio” (Op. 5) in the Canada Music Week masterclass at the Victoria Conservatory of Music, Judith Pazder, who directs the Academy Flute Choir and that performed shortly after me, said that she would be open to the flute choir performing a composition of mine, perhaps for the concert next year.
After my grade 8 homeroom teacher (Luke Forand) showed the class a rap he made on B.E.D.M.A.S (British Columbian mathematical order of operations: brackets, exponents, division, multiplication, addition, subtraction) I asked him if I could put it to music in an orchestral aria.
This is a piece I composed for the Victoria Symphony New Explorations Workshop, a program where one is asked to compose a piece for a specific selection of instruments, and a few professional musicians from the Victoria Symphony volunteer to play the music and mentor the composers.
On Februrary 24 2019, my grandmother suffered a fatal cardiac arrest while traveling to Nanaimo, BC. When I woke up to the news, as I had slept through the entre incident, the emotions that struck me I felt could only be properly expressed through music. This elegy, containing the essence of my anguish and shock, is both inspired by and dedicated to my grandmother and her passing.
After my school’s music teacher (who is a clarinetist) saw one of my compositions, she asked me to compose a trio for her to perform with me and another student at the end of this school year.
The majority of the students of the grade 7/8 split classroom (that I was in, previously mentioned in Op. 2), put little to no effort in physical education (myself included), and that generated a silly melody in my head.
My household was often full of tension and loud arguments scattering about, so I composed a dramatic marching band theme to depict the chaos.
I was excited to return to school for grade 7, as I had a wonderful last year, until I learned that I was going to be placed in a Grade 7/8 split classroom intended to punish misbehaving and uneducated grade 8 students. I composed this piece to lament my suffering.
This piece is the foundation of my composing. I was just fooling around with the music notation software, but I happened to create a somewhat genuine jazz composition. Since I had created it with such ease, I realized the "gift" I had, so from that point, I decided to venture on further into the world of composition.
This very short melody which is now my first composition had been stuck in my head for a while. I thought of it whenever I rolled hula hoops on the floor for some reason.