One of the most enduring of my student pieces, at the crossroads where Ives meets minimalism. A haunting. 

35 etudes for solo guitar in idiosyncratic notation that can be played as written, or used as jumping off points for improvisation. 

Extracted from the game piece Sebastopol, this brief piano miniature makes for a wonderful encore showpiece. 

An early exploration of genre busting in a cartoon format. 

Eluding classification to this day, this genre jumper is a favorite of quartets the world over. Filled with plenty of drama, humor and musical games, this piece is lot of fun both to play and to listen to, Tex Avery meets the Marquis de Sade. 

Cinema for the ears, this chamber favorite is a kaleidoscopic tribute to many of my musical heroes: Mozart, Varese, Carter, Berg, Stravinsky, Stalling, Scott, Schoenberg, Scelsi, Ives, Boulez, Ligeti, Xenakis, Reich etc. 

Screams, scrapes, scratches and howls in the night. These thirteen short movements, inspired by the book of the same name by French philosopher Georges Bataille, contain perhaps the most overt S/M subtexts in all of my work. 

Ives, Tatum, Chopin, Messiaen, Monk, Beethoven, Scriabin, Floyd Kramer, Boulez, Nancarrow, cocktail piano...... Jumping moods and styles from bar to bar, this is a favorite of many young modern music virtuosos. Next to Cobra, my most oft-performed composition. 

An intensely personal, emotional and complexly hermetic work that relates more to Harry Smith's film Heaven and Earth Magic than to any previous musical models. A trip through another dimension, featuring coded messages and fleeting references to Berg's Lyric Suite. 

A kabbalistic piece for winds dedicated to Jewish cultural theorist Walter Benjamin. In five movements: Peshat, Tzomet, Aliya, Herut, Pardes. 

A sprawling ten movement work, part piano concerto/ part requiem exploring the mysterious passages from life to death and back again. 

A sonic ritual for four bass drums. Sombre and hypnotic. 

Meditation and prayer transcribed for four clarinets. 

Perhaps the most fitting arrangement of this very personal and spiritual work, drawing inspiration from the Jewish call to prayer on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur. 

An arrangement for string quartet of a piece originally written for the Masada songbook. My most traditional work for concert repertoire. Lyrical and Haunting. 

Toys, ice skating, candy, spanking, jacks, carousels, slides, snakes and ladders, treehouses, dolls, magic tricks, swings....a vision of children unlike any other. 

Breaking the full orchestra into small chamber groups, this enigmatic miniature creates an intimacy rarely heard in modern orchestral music. Written for the 200th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic, and dedicated to Leonard Bernstein. 

This fragile, elusive work was inspired by the writings of Jewish poet Paul Celan. Perhaps my most beautiful and enigmatic composition, certainly my quietest. 

Wind machines, wooden gears, gravedigging, bull roarers, bird squeakers, stochastics, and complex vocalise from a lyric soprano. Dramatically staged, this could make a mysterious one act opera. 

A work of sensuality combining eroticism with mystical transcendence in a world of Surrealistic French decadence. 

In the tradition of the great violin concertos, this is a powerful and dramatic showpiece for soloist and orchestra in the form of a romantic fantasy. 

Inspired by the visionary 20th Century shaman Antonin Artaud, this intense, hallucinatory work charts the ritualistic road to madness and beyond. 

Nostalgia, romance and a touch of surrealism filter through a set of very private obsessions. Dedicated to artist Joseph Cornell. 

A very challenging and very difficult polyrhythmic piece for 13 tuned drums. Virtuoso voodoo. 

A colorful ten minute opera that can be dramatically staged or presented on the concert stage. 

Loosely inspired by the remarkable world of Henry Darger, which throws childlike innocence against a background of perversion and violence, Chimeras is a work of fantasy and imagination for a Pierrot Lunaire ensemble plus percussion. Each of the twelve movements pit the vocalist against a changing kaleidoscope of sonic dramas, climaxing with all-out war in a breathtaking tutti for all eight musicians.  

The connection of the violin to Satanism has been well documented, and Paganini's supposed pact with the devil inspires in part this set of eight variations/ incantations for contacting demonic spirits. 

Witchcraft and sorcery....a spell, featuring perhaps the most difficult music yet written for the bass clarinet. One of the most energetic and outrageously spectacular pieces in my catalog. 

A Sacred Ritual from a Secret Temple. Religious music, mysterious and beautiful, that touches upon the work of Aleister Crowley, and the misfits that brought mysticism to the west. A Black Mass. 

A five movement tour de force of Black Magic and Alchemy, with perhaps the most intense ensemble writing I've yet achieved. 

Breathtakingly beautiful music for five female voices that speaks to the feminine. A minimalist motet—a hymn to sensuality.  

A modern reading of the Orpheus legend inspired by French Romanticism and Debussy's Sonata for flute, viola and harp. 

The Night of Evil. A Witches' Sabbath in three movements. 

Explores the Rabelais/ Crowley axiom of "do what thou wilt" through an eclectic language of tone clusters and colors both inside the piano and at the keyboard.  

Written for violinist Jennifer Koh after getting permission from Maestro Ligeti himself, this is a very intense cadenza to one of the 20th century's great concertos. 

Written for violinist Jennifer Koh after getting permission from Maestro Ligeti himself, this is a very intense cadenza to one of the 20th century's great concertos. 

A magical initiation for soloist, chorus and four players drawing upon the mystery of Enochean Ritual. 

Derek Bailey In Memoriam. A quirky and personal tribute to one of my biggest mentors. 

Nothing is true—everything is permitted. A deliriously virtuosic piece of Crowleyana inspired by the angelic tables of Edward Kelley and John Dee. 

A lyrical and sensual setting of the world's first erotic verse, for male and female narrator and 5 female voices. As an evening length performance, selections from the Sefer Shirim Shel Shir-ha Shirim may be performed as an instrumental prelude. 

An intense and dramatically lyrical mini-concerto for flute accompanied by live foley sound effects/amplified percussion and electronics.  

A wild satanic composition for solo organ using hypnotic ostinatos, sand bags and wooden boards to invoke the left hand path of the infamous Huysmans novel.