SMALL ENSEMBLE WORKS
If you are curious about or are interested in performing any of these works, please let me know! I can be reached at alanwmack@gmail.com.
STRINGS
-
for string quartet (ca. 5’)
Click here for score
Click here for MIDI rendition (be the first to premiere this work!)
Hear That Train a-Comin' (the stand-alone version of the eighth movement of Sun Rises on the Yucca Motel for string quartet), explores the soundscapes of the railyard in the small town of Vaughn, New Mexico; the pieces juxtaposes contrasting harsh textures and rhythms inspired by the railyard's machinery with the constant stream of ephemeral gestures emerging from the nearby interstate, all the while grappling with a troubled bluegrass tune as it attempts to emerge from the junction of industry and the desert landscape.
-
for double bass trio (ca. 15’)
Click here for score
Be the first to premiere this work!
Remains of a Permian Parking Lot is a sonic portrait of an abandoned parking lot in West Texas written for double bass trio. Across its five movements, Remains of a Permian Parking Lot explores the sonic textures of the lot and the surrounding desert landscape while meditating on man's touch on nature in one of the least hospitable (yet hauntingly beautiful) environments on the North American continent; musical material is buried beneath layers of gradually fracturing sonic asphalt and structural ideas break apart within their strict confines, ultimately yielding to the wide-open expanse of the Permian Basin landscape.
-
Click here for score (ca. 29’)
Be the first to premiere this work!
Sun Rises on the Yucca Motel is a work for amplified string quartet and fixed media inspired by an abandoned motel wedged between the Southern Transcon rail line and US Highway 285 in the central New Mexican town of Vaughn. Sun Rises imagines its nine movements as individual rooms in the dilapidated motel, each containing its own distinctive yet heavily patinaed narrative, characters, and atmosphere.
Ultimately, Sun Rises encounters the nature of place along the New Mexican interstate system and its almost mystic capacity for preserving memory, the vacuum left in rural communities across central New Mexico by vanishing industries, and the unrelenting yet sacred beauty of the high desert landscape that creeps in through the motel's cracked windows and gaping doorframes.
-
for amplified string trio and fixed media (ca. 45’)
Click here for score
Click here for recording
BMI Composer Awards (2025) - Winner
Rail Dynamics is a large-scale work for string trio and fixed media inspired by a defunct rail line in northern New Mexico's high desert. Structured as ten landscape-style movements, Rail Dynamics explores the soundscapes of the northern New Mexican landscape while navigating the cultural and environmental impact of the rail in the Galisteo Basin, ultimately meditating on the slow deterioration of the rail line and the surrounding landscape's gradual reclamation of its previously inhabited spaces.
Intertwined among these explorations are images surrounding a tragic car accident I was in as a child that involved a collision with a train. Being by the rail in the deep quiet that characterizes so much of northern New Mexico's landscapes, however, helped me to re-contextualize my experience and facilitated my recovery; the slow dissolution of the rail into the high desert soil seemed to mirror the gradual vanishing of the scars on my face, and in a strange way I found a deep kinship with the basin, what remained of the rail, and their deeply nuanced relationship.
This piece is dedicated to my father, who, for weeks following the accident, would fall asleep at the foot of my hospital bed without mattress or pillow so I would not be there by myself.
(Rail Dynamics takes its name from a ground-breaking set of mid-century field recordings of locomotives in New York, championed today by the Smithsonian Folkways. The original Rail Dynamics can be found here: folkways.si.edu/rail-dynamics/sou…album/smithsonian as well as on Spotify and YouTube).
This work was premiered at The TANK Center for the Sonic Arts on September 22, 2024 by Jordan Grantonic (violin), Emma Reynolds (viola), and Peyton Magalhaes (cello). The TANK is well known for its uniquely intense acoustic resonance, in which sounds can last up to 50 seconds before fading away. More information about the TANK can be found here: tanksounds.org/
-
for string quartet (ca. 14’)
Click here for score
Click here for recording
Between the Northern New Mexican townships of Maxwell and Raton is a rest stop on I-25. From the rest stop, you can take in the landscape you would otherwise see only in brief flashes while traveling down the interstate; tall grasses extend across a vast, open plain, forming a restless blanket of bowing brush, junipers, and cholla. The corresponding soundscape is similarly nuanced, yet deeply subtle; the tall grasses very quietly bristle and shake in tandem with the wind-like gestures resonating from the interstate itself, as if a constant reminder of mankind’s transgressions on this otherwise deeply still and commanding space.
Over the years, the view from the I-25 south rest stop has become strangely iconic in my mind. Not only is it one of the only places on I-25 that feels deeply remote and removed from the cacophony of civilization, but it instantly conjures for me this profound sense of meditation and stillness. However, on the backend of the recent wildfires in the Northern New Mexico region as well as the Texas Panhandle, both of which were magnified by the influx of tall grasses, it has become challenging not to see the I-25 S rest stop’s landscape as potential for similar devastation. brush and bristle serves to reconcile these competing visions by fluttering between sonic simulations of the grassy soundscape and its imagined apocalyptic counterpart.
Premiered on April 16th 2024 by Greg Abrell, Jordan Grantonic, Allyson Stibbards, and Peyton Magalhaes at the University of Colorado Boulder.
-
for string trio (ca. 25’)
Click here for score
Click here for recording
BMI Student Composer Awards (2022) - Winner
American Prize (2023, instrumental chamber music) - WinnerRemains of a Permian Gas Station, winner of a 2022 BMI Composer Award, is a string trio inspired by an abandoned gas station in West Texas. Across its eight movements, Remains of a Permian Gas Station explores themes of degradation through its structure while sonically simulating the gas station’s deteriorating interior; promises of musical symmetry are inevitably corroded, recurring musical ideas are twisted before being left for dead, leaving space for strange, organic ideas to spring from the cracks.
The piece, like the gas station it takes its inspiration from, urges forward from the exploitative systems that once defined it and finds roots in decay.Performed by Annie Kim, Emmanuel Feldman, and Anna Griffis at Tufts University on December 3 2021.
-
-
for two violinists and viola (ca. 15’)
Score incoming - stay tuned!
Click here for recording
A series of short meditations on the joys of camping.
Premiered on April 8 2021 at Tufts University by Annie Kim, Katianna Nardone, and Anna Griffis
-
for two violins (ca. 6’)
Score incoming - stay tuned
Click here for recording
Rustic Grace explores the timbres and textures of the violin in context of the American fiddle tradition; exploring the intersection between the oral tradition of fiddle pedagogy and classical performance techniques.
-
MIXED CHAMBER ENSEMBLE
-
for chamber wind ensemble (ca. 8’ 15”)
Click here for score
Click here for recording
Inspired by a 90-minute video essay on ghost trains in the Thomas the Tank Engine cinematic universe, Phantom Engines imagines the abandoned boxcars and historic steam engines scattered across New Mexico's Chama River Valley as haunted and possessed; using the textures and techniques from the chamber wind ensemble to sonically simulate the sounds of these pieces of train anatomy lifting up from their decrepitude and careening down the rail towards god knows what.
Premiered by the Newfound Chamber Wind Ensemble at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA on June 16, 2026 as a part of the Tidewater Composition Program.
-
for saxophone, electric guitar, piano, percussion (ca. 14’)
Click here for score
Click here for recording
In 2025, legislation was proposed to the House of Congress that would require dual-citizens residing in the United States to choose one of their two citizenships and relinquish the other, putting into question my own dual citizenship between the United States and New Zealand. I have long struggled with my identity in regards to nationality (too Kiwi to be fully American, too American to be fully Kiwi), and while unlikely to pass, the proposed legislation has only amplified the sense of placeless-ness that has long defined how I see myself in the world.
blue hour descends on clines corners, written for saxophone, percussion, electric guitar, and piano, confronts this disturbed sense of citizenship; weaving together widely spaced harmonic material, microtonal dissonances, and sonifications of a truck stop near my childhood home in the desert outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
blue hour descends on clines corners was written for the Spring 2026 Hypercube Composition Lab, and was premiered by the Hypercube ensemble on March 29, 2026.
-
for percussion sextet (ca. 11’ 30”)
Click here for score
Click here for recording
Hovel, a work for six percussionists, emerged from an opportunity I received to write for Mantra Percussion during their residency at the University of Colorado Boulder. As I listened to as much percussion ensemble repertoire as I could in preparation for this piece, I found myself particularly attracted to the many countless sounds of found percussion; soon enough I found myself discreetly hitting PVC pipes and wooden boards at the local hardware store near my childhood home in Santa Fe, New Mexico and scouring the desert landscape for new sounds I could use.
During my sonic explorations, I could not help comparing my obsessive collection of junk to the family of pack rats that plagued my mother's house for decades; stealing nuts and bolts from the back porch, destroying the grill in search for trinkets, and hauling it all off to their bizarre treasure hole in the backyard. In some ways, Hovel is a strange sonification of the pack rats' eclectic home.
Hovel was premiered by Mantra Percussion on March 25, 2026 at the University of Colorado Boulder.
-
for flute, oboe, bassoon, french horn, violin, viola, cello, and double bass (ca. 10’)
Click here for score
Click here for recording
Inspired by abandoned mining facilities in northern New Mexico's Cerillos Hills and recent interest in a uranium deposit outside of Grants, NM, Hollowed Ground explores New Mexico's troubled history with mining and resource exploitation, seeking to illuminate the industry's destructive nature through the sonication of the spaces it previously inhabited. Musical material (which finds its roots in field recordings taken around Golden, NM as well as Peter Maxwell Davies' work Farewell to Stromness) violently deteriorates over the course of the piece, leaving gaping holes in its structure that are rapidly replaced by the disturbed representations of the Cerillos environs' cathedral-like ambience.
At its core, Hollowed Ground seeks to reiterate what many New Mexican environmental agencies have expressed for decades; that New Mexico is not a wasteland defined only by its exploitable natural resources, and that there is a profound beauty in the high desert landscape that is worth protecting and preserving.
This work was written for Ensemble Modern at the International Young Composers' Academy in Ticino, Switzerland.
-
for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and fixed media (ca. 8’ 45”)
Click here for score
Click here for recording
A series of meditations on the burn scar that stretches across the Raton Pass in northern New Mexico at a time of deep anxiety surrounding the growing intensity of wildfire danger.
Premiered by Hub New Music at Connecticut Summerfest in June 2023 at the Hartt School of Music.
-
for alto flute, sop. saxophone, bass clarinet, violin, cello, and percussion (ca. 7’ 30”)
Click here for score
Click here for recording
During our time in the Alaskan tundra, we would regularly experience the effects of the distant disintegration of the hanging glaciers perched about the valley we explored; crashes and explosions echoed to our camps several moments after their sources had settled into a cloud of disturbed snow. colossus falls with invisible radiance seeks to recreate that experience; imagining those tons of ice unnoticeably falling gracefully and silently, yielding uncanny moments later to a raucous of mythic proportions.
Premiered by the Corvus Ensemble at Federal Hall in New York City on March 18 2023 as a part of the Composing in the Wilderness program.
-
for clarinet, violin, and piano (ca. 9’)
Click here for score
Click here for recording
Clearing is collection of three short songs that attempt to emulate the sublime nature of a mountain meadow at night.
Premiered by Phillip Wright, Katianna Nardone, and John McDonald at Tufts University in April, 2022.
-
for chamber ensemble (ca. 7’ 30”)
Click here for score
Click here for recording
Four Short Songs is a study on the serenity of stillness, conjoining ideas together on a canvas reflective of a moment of brevity in a quiet mountain meadow.
Premiered by the Boston Conservatory Contemporary Music Ensemble on April 19th, 2018.
ELECTRO-ACOUSTIC
-
for fixed media, dance, and heartrate sensors (ca. 22’)
No score available!
Click here for recording
The Heartbeat Symphony came about as a collaboration with Boulder-based dance company Dance Continua, featuring the music-ification of dancers as they navigate through complex textural systems.
Premiered at Spark in Boulder, CO on June 12, 2026.
-
for fujara and electronics (ca. 9’)
Score incoming - stay tuned
Recording incoming - stay tuned
-
for solo fujara and electronics (ca. 15’ 45”)
Click here for score
Click here for recording
Inspired by images of northern New Mexican communities devastated by the Hermit's Peak fire of summer 2022, ponderosa effigy explores the sound-worlds of the impacted landscape; namely, the damming and eventual flash-flooding of the acequia systems that irrigate much of the mountainous farmlands of northern New Mexico.
ponderosa effigy becomes a study on stillness and patient tension, a recognition of the reverberating impacts of an ever-increasing climate crisis in a largely underrepresented part of the United States.
-
for fixed media (ca. 10‘)
Click here for recording
An homage to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Premiered on Oct. 18 2023 at Grusin Hall at the University of Colorado Boulder.
-
for fixed media, interactive Max/MSP patch (ca. 2 hr.)
Get in touch for the Max/MSP patches and surrounding materials: alanwmack@gmail.com
Click here for recording
Premiered by Alan Mackwell at Tufts University in April, 2022.
-
for two scordatura cellos and electronics (ca. 15’)
Click here for score
Click here for recording
Purple Sky -a work for two scordatura cellos, fixed media, and live electronics- is a study on openness, resonance, and resilience; it celebrates the magnificent hues of the New Mexican sky at dusk and yields to a somber remembrance of ash falling from the sky during a childhood trip to the Jemez Mountains.
Recorded by Alan Mackwell in November, 2022 in Boston MA.
SOLOS
-
for solo cello (ca. 7’)
Click here for score
Recording incoming - stay tuned!
ash falls like snow on jemez springs sonifies memories and spaces in the wake of wildfires - recent or long gone from my childhood landscape in northern New Mexico.
-
for solo fretless banjo (ca. 8’)
Click here for recording
Two Tunes on Tallis Themes reimagines fragments of the renowned Elizabethan composers’ iconic melodies shattered and reassembled in the language of old-time bluegrass banjo performance.
Premiered by Alan Mackwell at the University of Colorado Boulder on Feb. 11 2026.
-
for solo banjo (ca. 15’)
Click here for recording
Three Basinscapes, a work for amplified solo banjo, meditates on the Galisteo Basin landscape and its deceptively nuanced relationship with stillness.
Recorded at the TANK Center for the Sonic Arts on Sept. 20, 2025.
-
for amplified solo double bass (ca. 10’)
Click here for score
Click here for recording
Inspired by a trip to Abiquiú, home to Georgia O'Keefe's famed studio and the high desert landscape that inspired many of her New Mexican works, Pedernal meditates on the vast stillness that radiates across the basin; etching with its long, sweeping tones the skyline of O'Keefe's legendary painting of the same name.
Premiered by Asher Dobrin (solo double bass) at the TANK Center for the Sonic Arts in Rangely, CO on May 17, 2025.
-
-
-
-