Master of Music (MM), Ohio University, 2021, Music Composition (Fine Arts)

Presence is a work for Pierrot Ensemble scored for flute, bass clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion consisting of drum set and marimba. The title represents an unknown entity that is slowly consuming the fictional country of Amicea. The piece fits into a set of pieces using the Pierrot Ensemble and its subsets to tell parts of a multimedia story; other mediums include literature and visual art. This work opens and closes with a reprise of sorts like in musical theater. The main section is a slow build of a harmonic progression that becomes serial. As this is happening, each instrument tries to voice their own unique melodies, while being interrupting by others. These melodies are pentachords transposed depending on the given chord in the harmonic progression. The violin tries to bring them all together, but everything dissolves into chaos by the end.

Committee: Robert McClure (Advisor); Mark Phillips (Committee Member); Jennifer Smith (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Fine Arts; Music

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2022, English

Withering is a collection of seven stories rooted in an exploration of humanity's relationship with the natural world and with itself. Spanning geographies and time periods, these stories are connected in their primary impulse to reconsider passivity in the face of environmental degradation. Other prominent themes in the collection are dynamic social identities and the performative quality of those identities. The stories that comprise Withering are situated primarily in the eco-fabulist tradition, with other inspirations found in the New Weird movement and horror, as well as traditional realism. By blending genre, Withering seeks to decenter readers' understanding of reality. The uneasy and shifting reality through related but distinct genres serves to underscore themes of calamity and worlds that have been broken and reassembled in new ways. Withering challenges popular notions of crisis, environmental and otherwise, as being a purely distinct event, having a clear “before” and “after;” rather, my thesis considers crisis a degenerative process, much in the way a plant slowly withers away over time, leaf after leaf shriveling up and falling.

Committee: Joseph Bates (Committee Chair); Daisy Hernandez (Committee Member); Margaret Luongo (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts