notated works
I am at risk (2026) for baritone and ensemble
I am at risk takes its text from two sources: excerpts from Walt Whitman’s Calamus poems, and transcripts of interviews with gay men in San Francisco discussing the early availability of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP).
These two sources trace a historical line through gay American life. Whitman’s texts are interpreted as expressions of budding gay American political consciousness. Whitman writes of sending “immortal reverberations” through the future of the United States through his work. In contrast, the contemporary interviews show a more frank public attitude, with many individuals no longer forced into secrecy but instead left to navigate the cultural legacy of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
The contemporary speech recordings are also mined for pitch content and timbral tendencies, engaging with documented features of “gay male speech” as studied by linguists: expanded pitch range, frequent contour shift, and liberal use of vocal fry. I am interested in speech as a site of marking, exposure, and often shame. For gay men and other minority groups, the voice is one area where subjects are marked as other, often uncontrollably.
Shame (I can see birds) (2025) for cello and clarinet
Shame explores the influences of culture and surroundings on how we speak and present. The same motive gets passed around between aesthetic regimes, morphing to fit different molds. Pointillism and microtonality give way to dense consonant harmonies and lyrical melody that decay into low-register, timbral mush. Like much of my work, it started with a vocal improvisation. Premiered July 2025, VIPA festival, Valencia, ES.
“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. In Quarrel, a relatively austere pitch-and-rhythm palette gets expanded on with vocalizations, unstable meter, and a repetitive, conversational melodic flow. Premiered June 2025 by Mark Broschinsky, Festival Mise-En, New York.
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. 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 sky gathered round (2024) 2-channel work for fixed media
the sky gathered round (2024) is built around fragments of stilted, 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. Text by Ken Nordine.
tarik inman 