The Dreaming Girl Suite

The Dreaming Girl Suite is what I would consider my first 'true work', the point in my journey where composition turned from hobby to discipline. Inspired by the album Sylva by American Jazz Fusion ensemble Snarky Puppy, The Dreaming Girl Suite features a lofty 'half Big Band, half Wind Ensemble' instrumentation in twenty six parts–– so large that each movement was stored as its own MSCX file to prevent corruption. The Dreaming Girl Suite to this day holds the longest in-development cycle of anything I've ever written; it took just north of two years, beginning my sophomore year in high school and ending a month before I graduated.

The suite itself tells a vague story of the 'dreaming girl' who receives aid from two angels to fight her personal demons; the original vision of the suite included poetry, spoken during intermissions between movements and specific vamps, though this idea was never realized.

Due to the comically ambitious nature of this work (written at a time very early in my life no less), the piece never saw a full premiere, or even a full run. Modified versions of movements III and IV were performed in my senior recital, alongside my electronic piece "Pixelated Wildflowers" and an arrangement of Carlos Eiene's "Flow". Nonetheless, the Dreaming Girl Suite was essentially the piece that taught me how to compose, and ideas from this suite continue to find themselves in my more modern works, even today.

A more cohesive re-imagining of this suite is planned in the future as part of the Diem Project, entitled Concerto per Voce Electronica.