Maya Beckons; I Shall Embrace Her is a reflective and deeply personal piece. The title is a quotation from an imaginative translation of the Hindi movie Utsav. To some, the world we see around us is nothing but Maya, meaning illusion in Sanskrit. Wise men tell us that in order to achieve enlightenment we must detach ourselves from this material world, which gives us many pleasures but can also cause us great misery. While I can see the truth in this, I feel that it is a de-emphasis upon life. Having recently gotten married, I cannot imagine giving up the many joys of companionship in order to avoid suffering, regardless of the depth of the misery. I recognize that suffering is a part of existence and willfully accept it. This piece is about deliberately choosing to embrace Maya and rejoicing in the beautiful illusion of life, come what may.

Anaximander of Miletos was a sixth century B.C. Greek philosopher. The Anaximander fragment is the oldest surviving Western Philosophy text. It can roughly be translated as, That which is, Being, is indeterminate. From the indeterminate, things, or beings, emerge and regress according to the necessity of time. Mr. Cole was introduced to this fragment and Martin Heideggers elegant analysis of the fragment in Basic Concepts on the island of Poros in Greece. While studying the fragment, he took many walks through the countryside and along the coastline. A walk with Anaximader is a musical reaction to both the beauty of the Greek islands and the philosophical ideas he examined on those walks.

Attack was my musical reaction to the Iraq war.

A Slow Unravelingwas commissioned by the Kansas City Electronic Music and Arts Alliance for Quadrivium, a Kansas City based ensemble. The piece is for flute. Bb clarinet, cello, piano, electronics, and video. It focuses on the spinning out of a small portion of music. Like a spindle or spinning top the piece starts fast and increasingly slows down until finally coming to a rest.

Courage Wolf is Wise Notes coming

Five is a very free, somewhat aletoric piece for Oboe, Also Saxophone, Viola, and Cello. It was premiered by Jamie Schnieder, Matt Taylor, Cameron Raecke, and Nathan Bontrager at the 2008 Artscape Festival. The piece was heavily influenced by the writings of John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Steve Reich from the 60's and 70's, yet I feel that it still contains my thoughts and ideas. The piece is more interested in nuance, tuning, and subtle variation than tradtional pitch structure and harmony. As such I chose to only use 5 notes, played in a variety of octaves using a variety of playing techniques. This piece is very minimal but unlike our typical concepts of minimalism it avoids a steady pulse and instead focuses on tuning and texture.

2 Scenes from Maine was written for Saxophone quartet and was primired on the After Now concert series. It a reflective piece based on the experience of visiting Downeast Maine, where I grew up after almost 10 years of living in Baltimore. Every time I vist home, I find that I have change quite dramatically and home has changed very little. This may be unique to Downeast Maine, but I doubt it. The piece is divided into two calm and reflective movements. The first movement is about visiting the small fishing village of Jonesport Maine, where I spent my childhood. The simplicity of the land, people, and culture, interlaced with the undertone of poverty and hardship present where ever man scrapes a living from land and sea, can be hear wrenchingly sad and beautiful at the same time. The second is a reaction to watching the ocean break against the coast from the top of a mountain in Acadia National Park. I've always found the peaceful beauty of Maine's coast quite moving, and my experience during this trip was not exception. I will always love and miss the Maine of my childhood. To me it is truly home.

Satipatthana is the shortened buddhist word for establishing mindfulness through meditation. I chose this name because the work is a self-reflection on the rituals that I put myself through every day in part to become more mindful. Mindfulness is something that I struggle with because I am too attached to my momentary circumstances and desires. Musically, I've always felt that the tone of the work evokes an ancient ceremony that uses repetition to clear the mind much like a mantra is used in religious services. The work has a folk-like quality that focuses on a returning thematic idea and accompaniment patterns that never quite repeat themselves the same way twice when put together. These patterns and the work's construction are influenced by Carnatic (South Indian Classical) melodic and rhythmic ideas. In its essence, this work is a juxtaposition of a repeating, introspective 21-note melody that is often played heterophonically with 16-note and 5-note accompaniment ostinato figures that are somewhat flexible rhythmically. These ostinato figures ultimately serve as a drone both harmonically and rhythmically. Instead of a constant tone, this drone is continuously shifting while ultimately staying the same. Through its various repetitions, the work seeks to create both a sense of motion and stasis at the same time.

In many ways this was an important work for me. I think of it as the first piece where I really embraced my background and cultural influences. Specifically, I see this work as influenced by rock music, and electronic music as well as minimalism, modernism, and the chaos of a short circuited toy.

This work was written for Grace Lai and will be premiered by her next year.

From the perspective of my composition output, I think of this work as my guitar piece. The chords and music reflect what I play when I relax and improvise on guitar. I initially wrote the work in 2007 for an AfterNow Collective concert in Baltimore, MD. However, I was never completely satisfied with the result, and when the opportunity presented itself, I revised the work and instrumentation in 2012. The title is a play on words. When I started writing the work I called it “near a pierrot ensemble,” which I shortened to “Nee-are-o.” Interestingly, the word means narrow or close in Anglo-Saxon. I find this somewhat entertaining because in a sense the title can be seen as a metaphor that describes my aesthetic particularly in regard to melodic and harmonic motion. While the chord changes often have a semblance of tonality, the motion is generally chromatic and parallel. One element of Nearo that I've only realized much later, is the work's debt to Brahms. I've always loved his chamber works, particularly his mixed compositions and have studied them in some detail. I have always been struck by his thick textures and smooth melodic lines and these clearly had a deep impact on this work. When you combine these elements with my strong background and love of Carnatic music, it is not hard to see where this work comes from.

Agni Sakshi, translating as "fire witness," is one of the central ritual acts in Hindu weddings. Agni, the god of fire, acts as a divine witness to the marriage and as such he receives sacrifice and, in turn, purifies and blesses the union. He is also the god of light, smoke, the fire of the sun, and even the flame of the human spirit. This life-giver and destroyer is the discerner of truth, the mundane and unique, and the cycles of life that occur every day, every generation, every eon. This piece is a dedication to Agni, this witness of life. While I'm not particularly religious, I've always found the idea of a witness watching our life and our personal evolution to be fascinating and somehow touching. Seeing the good and the bad, the beauty of life that we all share, Agni is an impartial witness, an unmoved mover.

Aphorisms on Futurism is for Soprano and electronics. It is a setting of about half of Mina Loy's 1914 text by the same name. The work is divided into 4 songs. I chose this text for a because I've always been fascinated by Futurism. It was the first artistic movement to explore noise, machines, speed, and a host of other issues that reflect modern life, and thus reflects many of the ideas of electronic music. I'm also struck by the tone of futurism and this text. While none of the philosophical ideas were particularly new, there is an aggressiveness and lack of respect for the past that resonates with me, provided I do not take it too seriously. I think futurism created wonderful art and horrible politics. Musically, I tried to reflect this.

Rushing Toward the Singularity was commissioned by Mauricio Salguero.The work is inspired by cyberpunk and the idea of life after the technical singularity, a point at which technological acceleration creates a paradigm shift in our existence, resulting in artificial intelligence, human augmentation, a virtual human existence, etc. The sound and images of this piece are gritty, distorted, and mechanical, much like the cyberpunk aesthetic. Movement I, The Luminous Flesh of Giants, explores the grandiose monuments of a technologically advanced society, creating on a scale never before imagined. In contrast, Movement II, Idoru, Love and the Turing Machine,focuses on the interplay of the humans and machines where the clarinet and electronics flow to and from one another. In Movement III, Rushing Toward the Singularity, the mechanical and fast-paced future becomes the dominant theme and the clarinet and electronics mirror and augment each other while preserving their separate roles. Finally, Movement IV, The Spiritual Machinesonce again explores the interchange of man and machine; this time the clarinet and electronics are much more unified. The titles are taken from the writings of Charles Stross, William Gibson, and Ray Kurzweil.

Program Note: Sound, Timbre, and Density III was written for Kyungmi Lee during the winter of 05-06.

The piece is primarily concerned with non-tonal pitch hierarchies and how we perceive, or even do not perceive the register and hierarchal changes. The register changes and diverse instrumental sounds paired with the changing electronic accompaniment through out the piece defines its content and shape. In its essence, the piece is an exploration of the sounds, timbres, and density created by the Flute, the electronic accompaniment, and the dialogue that results from the interaction between the two.

Sound, Timbre, and Density II seeks to explore the various timbral possibilities of the Alto Saxophone. While melody is of little concern to the piece, the register changes and diverse instrumental sounds made available by extended techniques paired with the dense electronic accompaniment present through out the piece defines its content and shape. In its essence, the piece is an exploration of the sounds, timbres, and density created by the Alto Sax, the live electronic manipulation of the saxophone, and the dialogue that results from the interaction between the two.

Sound, Timbre, and Density seeks to explore the various timbral possibilities of the Double Bass. While melody is of little concern to the piece, the register changes and diverse instrumental sounds made available by extended techniques paired with the dense electronic accompaniment present through out the piece defines its content and shape. In its essence the piece is an exploration of the sounds, timbres, and density created by both the double bass and the electronic manipulation double bass samples. The piece was written using Csound, Metasynth, Digital Performer, Audacity, and Max/MSP.

Staring at the Sun was written during the winter of 2008. The piece makes use of Andrew's field recordings of the Laurel Park as well as a local noodle house and samples of flutes, saxophones, pianos, pingpong balls, and wineglasses.

The piece is Andrew's first multichannel fixed media piece. He approached the piece with a distinct realization of the techniques typically used in fixed media pieces and chose to embrace the implications involved. The piece is interested in layers of implication and the blurr of conceptual mediation which naturally flows from interweaving of those layers

isort is a miniature written for fun.

Bubolz Walk is a sonic exploration of the everyday sounds of small town America, specifically, a summer day in Appleton WI. The general narrative of the work is a walk from my apartment to a nature preserve I enjoy visiting. As a composer of primarily electronic music I've always been aware of my sonic environment and imagined it twisting and turning to and from typical sounds and large non-organic textures. As such, when I focus on the environmental sounds, I intend them as hyper-real examples that slowly bend to and from the surreal.

No program notes available.

Korunga Maadu was written during the fall of 2004, Andrew Cole's first semester at Peabody Conservatory. The inspiration for this piece arose when Mr. Cole was fulfilling his Graduate Assistant duties and changing a light bulb in one of the Computer Music studios. The very first sound in the piece is that of a hammer hitting the blown-out light bulb. The second is the bulb breaking, and the third is the broken glass giggling in a bucket. These three sounds exclusively make up the sound materials for the piece. Mr. Cole would like to thank his accompanist, Sam Burt, for holding the light bulb during the recording.