Orchestration
flute and electronics

Commissioned by/Premiere
Adeline DeBella, flute, at New Jersey City University in Jersey City, NJ (November 8, 2025)

Program Notes
This piece, “dress set sledgehammer,” has its conceptual roots in my high school marching band experience. My band director was hard-nosed and prone to vitriolic rants about the perceived lack of quality music emanating from the students. This was consistent across all of the bands under his supervision. However, my entire experience in the marching band genre is confined to bands that he ran. As a result, I came to associate the aesthetic of marching bands with his borderline-abusive tendencies. More broadly, this piece explores the connection between music and experience, along with how these personal associations emerge over time.

The musical elements convey the chaos of my band director’s supervision. The relationship between the flute and electronic material convey how something as simple as playing an instrument can come to be a terrifying and tumultuous experience under specific associations. The spoken material in the electronic part comes from a mix of sources. Some of them are phrases that were spoken by my band director. Others come from secret recordings of the band leader Buddy Rich, who had a reputation for verbally abusing the members of his bands in ways that recall my band director’s rants.

The title of the work is derived from “dress set dress,” a marching band command.