Seasonal

ABOUT THE ALBUM
4 years in the making, this album is the culmination of Nick's musical education beginning at the end of high school. The pieces range from whimsical byproducts of late night hobbying to final assignments for class. Some were written to be performed, some were written and recorded with no such intention at all. Now, remastered and compiled into one concise narrative, this body of works runs through many instrumentations, purposes and styles and somehow blends together to paint a sonic landscape previously only found in his brain.


DEDICATIONS
Thank you, Alex Anand for creating the beautiful album cover for the purpose of the album. Thank you to everyone who owns, shares, and listens to this collection for your support.

This album is dedicated to all of my teachers and influences, to everything and everyone that inspired me to write and innovate and explore. Dedicated to my dad, who passed away far too early, but who always supported my goals with an open heart. Dedicated to my mom, who instilled in me the values of doing what you love as a means to happiness, no matter how impractical or unprofitable it may be. And lastly, dedicated to Marilyn Sauter, who encouraged me to compile, revisit, release, and re-fall in love with this music which may have otherwise just lied around, unheard.


ABOUT THE MUSIC
Introduction-
Originally intended to be the introduction to a barbershop quintet called "My Killer Queen" professing his love for a girl he was romantically involved with at the time. It never worked out and the piece was never completed or delivered, but the harmonic interest in the introduction seemed to carry enough weight on its own to deserve its autonomy and separation from the unfinished work, and now serves to introduce the listener to the music.

Intense Encounters of the Second Kind-
A re-instrumentation of track 13, "Intense Encounters," it marks a pivotal point in Nick's musical development. The piece in both of its forms reveals the transition from one musical stage to the next; the earlier being the final piece of a more naïve and immature, but raw stage, and the latter being the first piece heralding in the new, more mature, orchestral, and compositionally aware stage. Its place in the album seeks to introduce this stage as the narrative.

Symphony for the Lost-
His first symphonic work intended for performance (but never performed), he wrote this about a year after the death of his father as an ode to those who feel lost, and also as an ode to those lost in death, in a double entendre. Each movement sought to highlight a universal truth meant to assist those in need of encouragement or direction. Originally intended to have 4 movements: Motion, Beauty, Chaos and Impermanence, the work was never complete and may someday be completed, but for now also remains lost in its own direction…

First Movement- Motion
Philosophically tied to the concept as the final (planned but never written) movement, "Impermanence," this movement seeks to display the ever-churning entity of time as it pounds forth in constant 8th note rhythm. It begins like the tuning up of an orchestra, like a sunrise of plucked and snapped open strings, sounds like the rain before a spring until a rhythm bursts forth as a train does through the opening of a tunnel. Other melodies start appearing. The various repeating melodic motifs vary in length and thus repeat at different intervals, creating a vast network of constantly moving melodies all superimposed over a cool 7/4 time signature. They then trip up and come to a screeching halt, and pluck about aimlessly, lost and seeking direction, before finding their rhythm again and heralding back to cycling through the original melodic ideas.

Second Movement- Beauty
Now adding a wordless choir, this movement seeks to highlight the simplicity of beauty, and also its fleetingness. Keys are explored, instrumentations are rearranged, new melodies invented, and each is short, sweet, and then vacated for a new one.

Fibonacci's Jungle-
This work for two marimbas was written as a final for a composition course, and performed at his school's New Composer's Concert that spring. It was written in four days. Based around the ideas of minimalist composer, Steve Reich and the numbers [0,1,]1,2,3,5,8,13,21 and 34 (better known as the Fibonacci Sequence in which each number is the sum of the previous two), all of the rhythms, motives and time signatures after the opening 10-against-7 are founded in the numbers of the sequence. In creating this work, he essentially designed a map using a formula he composed, and the piece composed itself as he willingly followed along with pencil and paper.

Epic-
This piece was composed separately in two parts, months apart, until the opening melody was superimposed over the new part in a "eureka!" moment and the overall work was achieved. An earlier work, it was intended to replicate some of the harmonic ideas present in Science Fiction and Adventure film scoring.

Winter-
A cool view of a snowed-in wooden fence skirting along through a car window, containing a snowy landscape beyond, this piece was extremely visual in its conception. In practice, the opening string quintet progression was meant to combine the coloristic embellishments of jazz harmony with the progress and direction of classical theory. The main melody was so enticing to Nick while he was working on it that he had to exercise some amount of self control to contain it to three iterations. Otherwise, he would have kept on going, repeating the same melody until he ran out of instruments.

It's Not Christmas I-V-
Originally one entire work, this was obsessively composed over the course of a week with 14 hour days and asocial irritability to boot. While Nick is not, and has never been, a Christian of any kind, he has a deep respect for some of the traditional music- of course once separated from iconic versions and lyrics. He sought to give the music a voice outside of its normal paradigm, rooted so heavily in tradition and only allowed to see the light of day a few months out of the year. He wanted to bring a fresh style to each work and allow their natural melodic and harmonic beauty to shine through.

First movement-Carol of the Bells-
Containing the introduction to the entire work as a series of chiming bells, vibraphones, marimbas, glockenspiels, and celestas arrhythmically painting the stars in the night sky as an emotionally tense string section fades in with delicate suspensions, the piece gets under way in big orchestral fashion

Second Movement- Greensleeves-
A transitionary section serves to bridge the gap between instrumentations, tempo, key and meter in loving quartile harmonies before settling on 7/8 and a Fender Rhodes keyboard to play a fresh, jazz-inspired rendition of the classic folk tune (although not a Christmas piece, it has a strong tie to Christmas so its inclusion is semi-ironic).

Third Movement- O Holy Night-
Probably his favorite Christmas melody, Nick spent the most time on this piece, calling upon the entire orchestra and symphonic choir to bring the resounding chorus a justifiably dramatic entrance with 3 simultaneous melodies fighting for presence but all working together.

Fourth Movement- Have Yourself A Merry Liitle Christmas-
Having sung this in a choir many years before, he borrowed the opening harmonic division starting from unison and branching into lush chords, and returned with the Fender Rhodes and also introducing the original soundscape of the bells from the beginning in reverse for a very tender, delicate atmosphere. While composing this one, he had a broken arm and could only use two fingers from his left hand, but still insisted on using all 7 fingers to play in the part and keep its clumsy rhythms as part of the delicate music box-like charm.

Fifth Movement- Quodlibet-
A quodlibet is defined as a medley of well-known tunes, and this would be classified as a simultaneous quodlibet. Each melody returns from throughout the piece to work together on top of one another, each containing a piece of their original orchestral ideas, against the backdrop of the bells and tense string passage from the beginning in an extremely powerful close to a very interesting musical adventure.

Intense Encounters-
Composed in 2008 near the end of high school, this pieces was an inaugural exploration of odd time signatures (7/4 in this case) and ethnic instrumentation that may or may not be feasible as an actual performance piece. It was the final piece of a musical paradigm for Nick that was raw and unexperienced, and completely ignoring of musical practicality, as he had yet to imagine his doings as anything more than late-night hobbling.

Seasonal-
Written as a final assignment in a music theory class, it was supposed to fulfill the requirements that it A.) drew from the style of the Impressionist period via the likes of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and B.) it be at least 8-16 measures long (usually about 30 seconds) so naturally he wrote a 6 minute piano piece. Based entirely around a 4-note melody, each section is a derivation and expansion on that opening idea in the first 4 chords played by the left hand. Never recorded and never even heard by any of his friends, he carefully put together this recording for the purpose of the album.