The text for Doubt was derived from public domain versions of the Bible as well as from these websites with permission: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org; http://www.antideathpenalty.org. It is not meant as a diatribe but is simply an expression of my deeply personal thoughts on the troubling issue of capital punishment.

The poem by P. B. Shelley beautifully describes the nature of poetry itself. My piece attempts to create a similar atmosphere as he does by using some of the prominent consonant sounds and breathing sounds heard when reading the poem.

Jesus hears the rabble's cries for peace and shows the people the way of nonviolence. The rabble questions him and He patiently responds. His statements seem incomprehensible; the people try to understand, following Him in their own manner. Some of them imitate Him, and some are completely out of step with Him, eventually leading to chaos. Trying to gather the straying sheep once more, the Shepherd reminds the rabble of its Father and His peaceful ways, in a brief moment of angelic quiet. Alas, the rabble does not listen and merely overpowers Jesus, as He desperately screams for peace! The misguided rabble falls back to its violent ways, while vacantly shouting for peace. It fails to realize that Jesus has shown the answer: Violence cannot cure violence. Hate cannot cure hate. It fails to listen and continues its futile pleading for peace on Earth.

Loosely following a biographical account of the playwright's grandmother and her family, this operetta puts a personal and modern spin on the famous Nutcracker story. The main character Ann Marie encounters her brother, the recently martyred WWII soldier in a dream world where time has been suspended. Together they are shown scenes from their future, our present-day world and are forced to consider the repercussions of war and the need for action. The music references Tchaikovsly's ballet heavily while transforming it into a more contemporary sound within an art song/musical theatre style.

Dviraag is a fabricated word taken from the Sanskrit prefix "dvi" meaning "two" and the word "raag" loosely meaning "melodic mode." The pitch material for this piece is entirely based on a combination of two complementary pentatonic modes. The primary rhythmic material, introduced towards the beginning by the cello, was derived from a Carnatic vocal exercise I fondly remember learning as a child, in India. Of all the beginner’s exercises I learned, this one always stood out as being surprisingly challenging and unusual in its subdivisions. This exercise has become the basis for an exploration of intricate rhythmic subdivisions grouped into salient short phrases that recur throughout the piece in various contexts.

Thaandavamis the divine dance performed by Lord Shiva. The subtitle Rudram signifies the version of the dance when the god of destruction is in his fiery, violent temper. This masculine dance is typically characterized by explosive rhythmic energy and brisk, powerful movements.

As soon as I encountered this elegantly simple and poignant poem, I knew I wanted to set it to music. I was not concerned that the poem's language was not particularly well suited for a musical setting because I was deeply drawn to the simplicity with which it stated its strong message. While I understand the need for criminal punishment in any society, I have always been deeply troubled by the inevitable possibility (indeed, the reality) that innocent people might be punished. I am very sympathetic to victims of criminal acts, but I also regard the wrongly convicted as victims of criminal acts that are sanctioned by the state, the community, and indirectly, myself. In this piece, I tried to use the power of song to express the tragedy underlying the mundane situation depicted in Parole Hearing by Poet Laureate Martin Espada.

Bapu, an homage to Mahatma Gandhi, is based on one of his favorite devotional songs. This song is so iconic of Gandhi that hearing it immediately conjures up his image in any Indian's mind. As with most Indian music, the basic song is a guideline, allowing for continuing melodic variations. The text of the original song praises Lord Raam, but Gandhi's version inserts Allaah into a Hindu song and thus proclaims universality of religion. In the finale of this piece, Gandhi's song is juxtaposed with another iconic Indian song, Vande Maataram, which evokes strong patriotic emotions in Indians, and certainly in myself. Both songs affect me deeply, as an Indian-American and as a person. While I have conflicted feelings on being a non-resident Indian, I consider America my home. These songs express the universality of culture and humanity and engender in me a "patriotism" for the entire world.

The word Janani is traditionally used to address the Goddess and means life-giver, or mother. This piece is based on two Indian ragas, or modes, the first called Lalitha and the second called Ahiri. The piano opens with a drone-like gesture on E and the viola begins an exploration of the first mode. As the piece progresses, new pitches enter and there is a gradual shift to the second mode, with a new tonic on F#. The rhythmic energy grows as the viola introduces a new theme with varying pulses. While the bottom voices elaborate this theme, the violin soars above in a longer tempo with gestures similar to the viola's opening phrase. The intensity increases until all instruments come together at the end for a dramatic finale.

This piece is lovingly dedicated to my mother.

The Carnatic raga Shubhapantuvarali is the mode from which all of the notes in this piece are derived. I find this raga particularly moving because it has always evoked a sense of deep and intense sorrow in me. A sorrow associated with Weltschmerz, or world-pain. This emotion reminds me of a particular moment in one of my favorite books. It is the moment when Siddhartha, in Herman Hesse's great little novel, stands by the river and ponders the endless and pointless cycle of Samsara (the cycle of birth, suffering, death, and rebirth). The irony is that he is by the same river that he had crossed after his fortuitous meeting with the great Buddha in the town of Savathi. This time by the river, however, he feels nothing but intense misery and nausea about life.

By the River near Savathi is an exploration of the aforementioned rag and the various emotional inflections of sorrow inhere in its sometimes slow and melancholic, sometimes furious, sometimes heart-breakingly longing, and sometimes resigned. Also fundamental to the piece is the simple gesture of a crescendo and decrescendo, rising and falling, slowly breathing in and out, like the endless cyclic motions of life.

Having written some pieces for solo instrument and electronics, I decided I would like to write a piece for duet and electronics. I wrote this piece specifically for oboist Jamie Schneider and violinist Eileen Doty, who have been playing together for awhile. Unlike the tyranny of pre-processed electronics, the computer plays a somewhat subservient and accompanimental role here in that all of its material comes from the live performance and the computer performer reacts to the instrumentalists. This allows the instrumentalists to play as they please while the computer augments, modifies, and mimics their sound. Nevertheless, even with its subservient role, the computer is a key producer of the overall sonic result, as it sometimes drastically and sometimes subtly adjusting the duet's output.

Kalpitha [kul'-pi-thaa] is set in three attached movements and is structured around opposing ideas. Mvt. I juxtaposes two drastically different gestures, first abruptly, then more smoothly. In contrast, Mvt. II's stasis is itself in opposition to Mvt. I's fluidity. Mvt. III suddenly interrupts the stasis of Mvt. II and ultimately resynthesizes the chordal, scalar, and textural manifestations of the first two into a cohesive whole.

The names of the movements have been derived from Carnatic Music. Shruthi [shrew'-thi] is the smallest interval or building block for a scale, or raagam [raa'-gum]. It is heard as microtones to Western ears. Swaram [swa'-rum] relates to the notes of a raagam. Korvai [kor'-vayee] is a kind of dramatic cadential gesture where all instruments play three repetitions of coordinated rhythmic patterns followed by a return to the main idea.

One-on-One is essentially written for saxophone and itself. The technology's role here is to simply create a chamber ensemble of clone saxophones. Delay times, entrances, and timbre are varied and controlled by Max/MSP, while the performer controls the musical content. The toughest challenge for the performer is to make his performance as flawless as possible since every mistake is echoed back to him! At the same time, for 8 minutes, he can be completely self-centered, reveling in a sound world of himself.

In Reactions, each movement deals with three different musical relationships: teacher/student, solo/accompanist, and equal performers in an ensemble. The first movement is largely improvised and thus governed by the pianist. The computer randomly generates data and it is up to the pianist to help the “student” computer make this data sound musical through her improvisations. In the second movement, the computer reacts and adds to the solo pianist, whose music is now fixed. The third movement allows both “performers” to react to each other, as they sometimes play fixed music or fixed algorithms, and sometimes improvised music and random-generation algorithms, playing as two equal performers in an ensemble.

With a lazy dance, she awakens to the day. Arrhythmically dancing alone, as in a dream, until she comes to full consciousness. Dancing to a strange meter, with an imaginary partner. At first steady but soon frenzied as she becomes consumed by her wild fantasy dance. Whirling like the frantic wind, seemingly out of control, until she collapses triumphantly to the floor.

Time is but an infinite sequence of ephemeral moments that inevitably fade. I dedicate this piece to my husband from whom I have to live apart most of the year. Our new surreal life of distance has sharply focused my thoughts on the fleeting nature of time, which I wish to suspend when I am with my partner and which I wish to push forward when I am not. Though, all I can do is (im)patiently wait for the next brief ephemera of time together and agitatedly anticipate its obligatory passing. In the same way, this piece is caught between periods of uneasy calm and controlled urgency. The passive periods invoke the ringing nature of the instrument to suspend time, while the more active sections seem to wander endlessly. Neither is accomplished, of course, and the piece begins, proceeds, and ends as all pieces and all moments do.

Serious Music is based solely on manipulations of four 1- to 2-second samples of nonsense vocal sounds, using various procedures in Puredata. Particularly inspiring was the random playback, looping, and transposing of a “gurgle” sample, which produced sounds that closely resemble particular bodily functions. The final product is a carefully constructed sequence of multiple layers of these silly sounds. But, this is serious music, so no laughing please.

This piece is an homage to the SuperCollider program and creator James McCartney. While I never really had enough experience with the program to be proficient at it, I enjoyed sampling his "example" files to creat this piece.

Food for thought: The average life span of a gastrotrich is three days. Analogy's analogy is probably pretty clear and doesn't need much more explanation.

Falling:Samsaaram is an exploration of the abstract Hindu concepts of attachment (samsaaram) and detachment (nirvaanam) to life’s pain and pleasures through the juxtaposition of volatile colorful textures with calm ambient ones. The word “samsaaram” often has a negative connotation, as a hindrance to “nirvaanam” (enlightenment, inner peace). In my view, we travel through cyclical periods of lesser and greater attachment, however we may define that for ourselves. The piece constantly moves between these two sonic and conceptual ideas, and after the finale crescendos to a frenzied finish, there is a brief return to the opening as the cycle of falling in and out of “samsaaram” begins again.

Autumn Mist Belk's original concept relates to the dichotomy of sole vs. many, still vs. chaotic, drab vs. colorful, and what she called Man vs. Monster. The piece gradually moves from a preponderance of idea A (sole) to a prepondeerance of idea B (many).

This song is set in a typical Bollywood-style ballad resembling the oldie Hindi film style. It also incorporates Indian classical techniques, specifically with the vocal lines and with the tabla, while using more Western harmonies as the underlying foundation.