Featured Piece

Reed Between the Lines (2023)

for electric clarinet and wind band. 10 min.

Premiered by clarinetist Christopher Mothersole and the University of West Georgia Wind Ensemble, under the direction of Dr. Joshua Byrd, on April 3rd, 2025.

Originally for amplified bassoon and wind band, this piece has been arranged and reworked for electric clarinet. One of my dreams is to be an electric clarinetist in a heavy metal band. This piece allows me to live that dream, and allows other clarinetists to feel like rock stars. I started really getting into guitar pedals around January 2022, and I wanted to write something that featured distortion and ambient reverb. Through many hours of improvising, researching pedals, and experimentation, I found a pedalboard setup that really worked with how my musical brain thinks. Reed Between the Lines does a few things for me: it sits between the traditional music of the concert stage and the shredding lead lines of heavy metal, it fulfills my dream of being a heavy metal clarinetist, it’s a lame pun, and I get to tell people who don’t like this to “read between the lines.”