tarik inman

notated works

Shame (I can see birds) (2025) for cello and clarinet

Shame begins from a simple premise: that direct emotional expression is often treated as aesthetically suspect, naïve, or in need of justification. The piece sets fragile, openly consonant gestures against a more guarded, fractured musical language that repeatedly interrupts, reframes, or suppresses them. What might conventionally function as “development” instead becomes interference. The title names not only an internal feeling, but a lived condition; one shaped by social enforcement, institutions, and by the habits of self-monitoring they produce. For queer subjects in particular, restraint and fragmentation are not merely stylistic choices but reflective of lived reality.

“Idiom III: Quarrel (2025) for solo trombone

Idioms is an ongoing series of solo works that investigates how instrumental music can carry social and rhetorical meaning through gesture and timing. Each piece takes its title from a linguistic or literary concept that informs its formal behavior. Idiom III (Quarrel), premiered in June 2025 by Mark Broschinsky at the Mise-En Festival in New York, draws on the dynamics of dyadic conflict: interruption, escalation, insistence, and abrupt withdrawal. These features are translated into muscular, speech-like trombone gestures rather than organized as narrative. By treating changes in breath pressure, articulation, and register as rhetoric, the piece approaches the trombone as a surrogate voice.

Lament for Sumer and Urim (2024) for Pierrot and baritone voice

Lament for Sumer and Urim takes its text from an ancient Sumerian “city lament”, a style of poem that commemorated a conquered or destroyed city. The piece comments on the timelessness and universality of occupation and displacement. Incorporating dense harmonies, extended techniques, and moments of indeterminate intonation, the piece meditates on the human cost and anguish of occupation, ecological destruction, and land loss. Premiered Dec 2024 by Temple University New Music Ensemble.

live and fixed media works

Easy and Fun (2025) 2-channel work for media and live electronics

Easy and Fun uses audio from far-right anti-LGBT media podcasts as raw material, subjecting speech to continuous re-pitching, looping, and temporal distortion. Rhetoric is stretched, fragmented, and looped, stripping the speech of its narrative and semantic value and playing in the inanity and absurdity of queer panic. Recorded in a single take on digital DJ equipment, the piece relies on affect and instinct to inform structure and performer behavior.

the sky gathered round (2024) 2-channel work for fixed media

the sky gathered round (2024) is built around fragments of heightened, poetic speech, looped and recontextualized within a shifting field of percussive and noise-based electronic textures. The voice of a spoken-word poet is disrupted, delayed, and re-sequenced, mining already abstract lyricism for new syntaxes and patterns, raising questions of authorship, digital ethics, and artistic identity.