I found that the systems I've used to understand music most often broke down when analyzing the contrapunctal music of Bach and Vivaldi, and I've spent a good deal of time trying to understand why. The time I've spent anylizing that kind of music has changed the way I approach writing music and how I understand harmony. I imitate that period here in the first and third movements. The middle movement feels more to me like a Faure idea, but I think it works well with the whole. Here is a recording from a concert of original works I gave in April of 2025. Bella Pepke - Cello, Johanna Pepke - Piano.
A music theater piece. It traces a story of an accidental death, a funeral, and the decomposition of a corpse. I was thinking about how everything passes itself on-- In matter when things eat and are eaten, and in ideas when we listen, think, and communicate. I tought it would be funny if the worms digesting a decomposing body took on the memories and spirit of the person.
To tell this story, the piece is devided into 10 scenes. Each scene starts as a title card describing the scene is changed (a la brecht). I did my best to paint out what I wanted to happen and what I wanted the characters to feel through the written score, and also encouraged the musicians to improvise dramatically within the scene. Lisa Yoshida - Violin, Rebecca Larkin - Flute, Brian Shank - Vibraphone, Bella Pepke - Cello, Spencer Pepke - Guitar.
With the aim of adapting Brecht to fit a postapocolyptic hellscape, I provided a score for Chapman University's 2023 production of Mother Courage. I wanted to stick as close to the mood of early productions, and of Dessau's original score, while moving to a totally different sound world. Piano and snare are replaced with guitar and circuit scrap, and the blues takes over as the primary folk music language.
Here I present two songs of the twelve I wrote, both sung by myself. The first is the confession of Yvette, a prostitute who follows the army and is followed by her many traumas. The second is the song of Mother Courage's eldest son, Eilif, who brags to the military commander after becoming a war hero.
Silence Cyborg is a mixed-media interactive art project that I made to demonstrate Social Control Theory and negative feedback processes. It can be exhibited in any group setting (classroom, gallery, theater, etc.) and makes use of user's cellphones as system interfaces. As the exhibition starts, each user's phone generates a random set of pitches, and plays pitches from this set for them to vote on. When a note is upvoted more than any other, it is played more frequently. Vice versa, the notes that are downvoted most frequently are removed from the pool of choices. Through group listening, the system gradually moves from chaos into harmony.
I was able to run a proof of concept with about 30 participants. The backend functioned well and users enjoyed the sound experience. The audio here is a simulation created by using Python to make rational choices in the place of humans. The system comes to ballance at around one minute in. Here is a demonstration I've made of the javascript that lets this kind of thing work.
If the server is currently up, you can use this here.
The Disclavier is the modern equivalent of a player piano. Rather than playing music from a paper roll, it takes in live MIDI data. Here are a couple of examples of how I have expiremented with composing computer algorithms instead of scores.
The pieces can be played indefinitely- procedurally generating new music based on the rules without end. Different rule sets can make the program lean towards different moods, and bounds can be as strict or as free as any mood dictates.
I started this project to evaluate notions of uniquely 'devine' geometric elements of music. I wanted to approach sound creation from a purely mathematical perspective using my experience with computer programming.
Through expirementation, I created a 6 channel (presented here in mono) algorithmic piece of rationally connected pure sine waves.