The Cubist Breakup was conceived first as a purely instrumental chamber work where I would spatially arrange the musicians around the room to simulate a surround sound experience. With sound engineering developments in both movie theatre and home audio I feel that our audiences grow increasingly interested in perceiving a recording from "within" the orchestra. For this reason I decided to surround the audience with the ensemble, placing them in the center.

While reading the cubist poetry of E.E Cummings I found a similar phenomenon in his technique of breaking up words and spatially orienting them in a systemized way on the page. Inspired by this poetry I decided to incorporate this text with four solo voices in the ensemble. While I would not call this music “Cubist music” to describe an innovation in melodic writing or development, I would say that Cubism has certainly inspired the way I change the audience's perception of the music. The first movement, tortured perspective , maintains a painfully longing tone that I mirrored in the music. Cummings illustrated the harshness of city life, not for the individual, but in terms of the city's soundscape – full of harsh noises. The second, smiles friend smith , I found very exciting with letters literally "bouncing" off the page. The poem illustrates a man reading a letter from a young woman while colorfully illustrating his immediate response. Unfortunately the woman is expressing that her mother has forbidden their relationship but she still ends the letter with a P.S. “kiss.” I decided that this quick read poem would also be the shortest movement and equally as energetic.

Finally, the sky was candy, based on the third poem, I found more passive. In this movement I paid tribute to Duchamp's Nude , a painting in Cubist style depicting a nude woman descending a stair case. The image is distorted as though we are seeing every frame of a motion picture. I allude to this with the chromatic step-wise motion heard in the base on which the latter two-thirds of the movement is structured. First, I quote Renaissance composer Luca Marenzio's solo e pensoso which harmonizes a chromatic line and follow it with material from the first movement developed chromatically.