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Poetic Afterthought is an original music composition for orchestra (2-2-2-2 / 4-2-2-1 / timp-perc / piano-harp / strings). The work comprises a cycle of seven orchestral pieces inspired by seven Chinese Classical poems. The seven orchestral pieces attempt to capture the moods and impressions of the poems while carrying hints of the original structures of the poetry as if the music speaks poetry itself.

Cachalote is a work for 17 musicians inspired by the study of social behavioral patterns in sperm whales. The distinctive series of clicks produced by these mammals, known as "codas," are their primary means of communication. These patterns manifest in Cachalote as a series of "sound objects", whose specific arrangement symbolizes communication, and underlines the musical discourse. The sound of field recordings provided further inspiration for the music's texture and orchestration. The composer's creation of an extra-musical narrative related to the lifecycle of sperm whales determines the appearance and ordering of the work's main gestures, and articulates the overall structure.

With Hecate Nocturne, I set out to create a unified piece of substantial length. The piece features certain sounds of British Columbia---birds, animals, wind, water, machinery, and folksong; their musical depictions represent a growing interest of mine, one which was expanded significantly in this piece. / The primary goal of the thesis is a close interconnection of all musical material, at all levels; that a limited pool of material could produce, through motivic development, all the components of the piece, from small to large. The secondary goal is to give the music a "sense of place" through depictions of natural sounds occurring---in this case---in British Columbia. The tertiary goal is to write musical returns, or recapitulations, that are always significantly altered from their original presentations, to give the piece a feeling of consequence or alteration. This last goal arises from the aesthetic application of some of the composer's philosophical beliefs.

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This essay presents an analysis of Crystallisation, a composition for a large orchestra. The work consists of a single movement, with a duration of approximately 15 minutes. / The analysis focuses mainly on formal structure, pitch organization, texture and rhythm. Some of the main topics are: large-scale form and subdivisions of each section, thematic interrelations of the sections, central pitches, pitch collections, chord structure and interrelations between texture and rhythm. / Throughout the course of the work, the music closely follows an overall process of searching for a valid structure and "core". In realizing this process the music takes on a variety of devices, among them: various kinds of symmetry within texture and form; thematic relations between separate sections through variants and material transformation; a coherent pitch organization which contains structural pitches, symmetrical collections and three main groups of chords; a complex and carefully structured rhythmic organization. / The concluding section of this essay compares between some of the properties of a crystal and the structure of various parts in Crystallisation.

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In this paper the compositional issues and techniques employed in my D.Mus. Thesis Composition Noite dos Tambores Silenciosos (for symphony orchestra) are discussed. The piece, constituted of three linked parts, exhibits a counterpoint of three distinct kinds of music as the main vehicle of the musical discourse. / Two of these musics are connected with Maracatu de Baque Virado and Maracatu Rural, popular musical manifestations found in Pernambuco, a state in northeast Brazil. In a "defragmentation" process, reference materials from the Maracatus are abstractly fragmented and reconstructed according to a technique I call Zin-Zout, implementing in the music a continuous state of transformation, back and forth between micro and macro dimensions. The third kind of music, free of folk references, follows a transformational process built up according to a "palimpsest" technique. In this transformation the hierarchy of the musical parameters changes along with the units of the musical content. / These procedures involve not only pitch and rhythm, but also other parameters like timbre, density and register in a structural way, as building elements of the content and form of the work. / The defragmentation process establishes some predetermined compositional paths, but permits micro- and macro-level decisions based on intuitive considerations, especially in the manipulation of orchestration and micro rhythms. More systematic, the organization of pitch involves a limited serialism and a variety of modal treatment.