I wrote These Valleys Never Heard in 2004 while working on my master’s degree at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with the remarkable David Stock. Having arrived at Duquesne with an already substantial catalog of mainly tonal-ish works, David encouraged me to work on expanding my compositional vocabulary by experimenting with different languages and compositional systems. Being the bull-headed student, I rebelled for a quite some time, but eventually gave in—writing the second movement of this piece in a few hours. My goal was to write a 12-tone work that didn’t exactly follow the rules of 12-tone. There is a row, yes, but I adapted the rules so that I can at any time go back to pitch zero without having to complete the entire row. I enjoyed the piece—which is now the second movement—so much, I decided to expand it by writing three more movements. The title These Valleys Never Heard comes from the fact that up until this point in my writing, the valleys in western Pennsylvania had never heard
