Home Score Repository	Fractured Compound   2009
PDF Score Listen	Fractured Compound was written for the United States Coast Guard Saxophone Quartet. This three-movement work is similar to many of my other works in its exploration of juxtoposition as a primary organizitional and aesthetic element. The inspiration in this case is primarily geologic. I have always been fascinated by the drive through Wyoming, where the landscape is often broken up by large, imposing structures that take a myriad of forms. These structures appear immobile and everlasting on the one hand, but at times fragile, unbalanced, artificial, and ready to collapse on the other. Always they seem to be silent monuments to a violent past. In much of the present work, sound compounds (the rock formations of the work) consist of various arrangements of melody, ostinati, and/or textural filler. I then employed several methods of fracturing these sound chunks, particularly in the jagged, abrupt changes that occur from one chunk to the next, and also in the “broken record” technique of repeating a fragment over and over and over. Otherwise the work is quite old-fashioned, with its fortspinnung melodies and toccata, adagio, and fugue (and then more toccata) layout.