UC San Diego

This dissertation documents three compositions: Bless This Mess for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion, Wonderful Things for soprano, guitar and vibraphone, and Music is My Life for electric guitar and drum machine. Bless This Mess contrasts disjunct gestures to create ecstatic static textures that develop in musically eccentric manners. Wonderful Things consists of four movements that contain interrupting themes from the remaining three movements. Music is My Life uses heavy metal vocabularies, repetition and physically exhausting performance demands to create a work of ecstatic stasis.