for ensemble (percussion, cello, guitar and clarinet)

Four Songs by the Firelight

2024

The timpani in this quartet acts as a second body for the other instruments. Four spiraled metal springs connect it to the cello; the guitar is routed into it through a transducer; the clarinet plays directly onto the surface. Only the timpani is amplified, and it resonates with everything that touches it—sometimes more than with the instruments themselves. What you're hearing isn't a bad recording’s distance, but a kind of displacement.

The setup is simple: timpani in the middle, others around it. A circle. The work imagines instruments as living beings gathered around a source of warmth that reveals their hidden, distant features—magnified, bent, and slightly alien. The timpani does not merely amplify them; it illuminates.