Interrupted Access: A Photo-Ethnography

In my sophomore year, I was conducting an Admissions tour and while introducing myself to a group of prospective students and their families, I noticed that one young man was in an electronic scooter. Immediately, I began running through the tour route in my head and it seemed that at every turn there was another obstacle or inaccessible path to overcome. For the first time at Trinity, I realized how truly inaccessible the campus was. The young man’s mother approached me before the group left the Admissions building and graciously told me not to worry if her son wasn’t able to see everything and that he understood that the campus wasn’t fully accessible. This conversation made me feel so disappointed with Trinity, for I knew that on multiple times during the tour I would have to explain that there was no handicap-accessible entrance or, worse, that I didn’t know where it was. I didn’t have to wait long for Trinity’s inaccessibility to become apparent. Within the first ten minutes of the tour, while explaining the collegiate gothic architecture of the Long Walk, I realized that the classroom reserve

And we drown

Composition for wind ensemble

Pretty Pretty Princess vs. The Underworld: A Song Cycle in Seven Movements for Alto and Chamber Orchestra

This song cycle, which is scored for alto and chamber orchestra, is a setting of excerpts from Emily Corwin’s beautiful poetry. It explores the archetypal themes of love, loss, identity, and obsession. In regard to the text, the pretty pretty princess of Corwin’s pretty pretty princess vs. the underworld (2016) does something Orpheus himself was never able to achieve: she rescues her lover from the Underworld. For his part, the tall handsome emerges relatively unscathed, his beauty left intact. The same cannot be said for the princess. She sacrifices her identifying princess characteristics—her “pretty princess hair, glitter tongue, and white swan”—in order to save her lover. When this does not work, she gives up an eye, a tooth, and ultimately an ovary. Unlike Orpheus, the pretty pretty princess successfully rescues her tall handsome with this final gift, but she loses her own princess, feminine identity in the process. In the finale of the work, the princess has saved her lover and grows delirious with love. It is only with her final, gasping breath that she rediscovers her own identity

Commissioning, Composing, and Conducting Contemporary Pedagogical Orchestra Music

Over the past two years, the University of Oregon Campus Orchestra has commissioned and premiered four new works involving aleatoricism, graphic notation, atonality, and extended techniques. For many of the musicians in this ensemble, which is pedagogically based and open to students from all academic disciplines, these pieces were their first exposure to contemporary compositional techniques. It is essential to provide pedagogical ensembles with new works that both challenge and excite students about contemporary music. Numerous pedagogical advantages result from studying new work, including the focus on color and timbre, the experience of collaborating with a composer, and the expansion of the musicians’ definition of music. In this presentation, we draw from our personal experiences conducting and composing for the UO Campus Orchestra to demonstrate the importance of creating a body of musically engaging contemporary works for pedagogical ensembles, and of introducing such works to these ensembles. We will focus on the collaborative process between conductor, composer, and ensemble, and the challenges faced when approaching this type of ensemble. To do so, we explore two of the pieces commissioned and performed by the UO Campus Orchestra: Cara Haxo’s Out of stone (2016), and Martín Quiroga’s A Quaint Snowfall (2016). We provide suggestions for both conductors and composers who are interested in incorporating contemporary techniques in hopes of encouraging more pedagogical ensembles to commission contemporary compositions. While this presentation is geared towards composing for orchestra, the concepts can easily be applied to the band, choir, chamber, and solo medium as well

Multi-Site N-glycan mapping study 1: Capillary electrophoresis – laser induced fluorescence

An international team that included 20 independent laboratories from biopharmaceutical companies, universities, analytical contract laboratories and national authorities in the United States, Europe and Asia was formed to evaluate the reproducibility of sample preparation and analysis of N-glycans using capillary electrophoresis of 8-aminopyrene-1,3,6-trisulfonic acid (APTS)-labeled glycans with laser induced fluorescence (CE-LIF) detection (16 sites) and ultra highperformance liquid chromatography (UHPLC, 12 sites; results to be reported in a subsequent publication). All participants used the same lot of chemicals, samples, reagents, and columns/capillaries to run their assays. Migration time, peak area and peak area percent values were determined for all peaks with >0.1% peak area. Our results demonstrated low variability and high reproducibility, both, within any given site as well across all sites, which indicates that a standard N-glycan analysis platform appropriate for general use (clone selection, process development, lot release, etc.) within the industry can be established

L\u27Imagination De Lenore: A Song Cycle in Six Movements For Soprano, Baritone, and Chamber Ensemble

L\u27Imagination de Lenore is a song cycle in six movements based on the play LenORE, written by my good friend Carolyn Fado as part of her Senior Independent Study at The College of Wooster in Ohio. Her play, in turn, is based on the works of Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe. LenORE is a play of dualities - ”English and French, film and theatre, past and present, reality and imagination ”that are mixed together and confused as the play progresses. The title character, Lenore, gradually becomes the slave of her own imagination, which is personified by the male character Jean Transsen. LenORE also criticizes misogyny in literature, suggesting that Baudelaire and Poe kill their young female characters in order to create the highest form of beauty. Fado\u27s play ends ambiguously, leaving the spectator to decide whether or not Lenore survives the oppression of her own imagination. I have tried to capture the essential elements of Fado\u27s play in my song cycle. The six movements are based on crucial moments of the play and outline Lenore\u27s dangerous passage into her imagination. I have included translations for the French texts where cognates may not be readily available. The italicized quotations that follow the title of each movement are taken directly from Fado\u27s script and are meant to help develop the story of the play. They should be read aloud by the indicated vocalist -the soprano is Lenore, and the baritone is Jean Transsen - before the performance of each movement