Zemblanity and Other Serendipities is a piece I recently wrote for Mantra Percussion, to be premiered in New York City at the Bang on a Can Long Play Festival on May 3rd. I am including here a mockup produced with sampled instruments, which reflects the musical ideas and compositional approach of my recent work. Here are the program notes:

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"The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
— Henry David Thoreau

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Zemblanity and Other Serendipities explores the musical and rhythmic dimensions embedded in ordinary events that often pass unnoticed. Cars crossing a bridge, birds cutting across a blue sky, footsteps in an airport, the sustained passage of a train, the blinking of an eye. They are ordinary moments whose internal pulse becomes audible through attention.
 

Composed for Mantra Percussion, the work unfolds in eleven movements. Each functions as a video étude in which visual accidents, whether incidental or subtly framed, become sources of rhythmic and harmonic material. The result oscillates between inevitability and surprise, between pattern and coincidence, between serendipity and zemblanity.
 

The ensemble of keyboard instruments, drums, voices, toy piano, desk bells, and electronics interacts with projected video. In some movements the musicians trace the rhythms suggested by visual motion; in others they inhabit a looser, proportional space in which synchronization gives way to texture and drift. The work does not attempt to illustrate the image, but to reveal structures already latent within it.
 

Zemblanity and Other Serendipities is structured in eleven movements:

I. Anya and the Coincidence
II. Birds Blue Sky
III. Punctual Surfaces
IV. Cars on Bridge
V. Serendipity
VI. Rain Lookout
VII. Cat & Train
VIII. Soccer
IX. Airport Feet
X. Zemblanity
XI. Infinite Train