I composed Tripp in 2016, commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University for the Meitar Ensemble. It was premiered by Meitar in Tel Aviv on October 29, 2016.
As in many of my works, the piece is built on a fractal number series that determines its form and proportions. Fractals fascinate me because they embody self-similarity: the same relationships exist whether one looks at the whole or zooms into the smallest detail. In Tripp, this principle creates a structure where micro and macro levels resonate with one another.
The title came about almost by chance. While searching for a name, I typed the number series into Google and discovered it was the ZIP code of a small town in South Dakota called Tripp. I liked the coincidence and adopted it as the piece’s title—a playful link between abstract mathematics and a real place.
Since its premiere, Tripp has traveled widely. Meitar Ensemble has performed it in Israel, Europe, and North America, with highlights including concerts at the Venice Biennale, Florida State University, Guanajuato, Salzburg, Vienna, Graz, Tel Aviv, and New York City. It has also been performed by Ensemble Oktopus with Konstantia Gourzi in Munich, and by the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble in Moscow and Kazan.
The piece was recorded on my album Tripp by the Meitar Ensemble under the direction of Konstantia Gourzi. In her reflections on working with the score, she compared the music to the diary of a traveler whose journey is filled with vivid and exciting experiences. For her, studying the piece was itself a journey through shifting rhythms, themes, and phrases along a clearly determined path. Though complex, she felt this path was always guided by an authentic musical language — one that she described as fine, sensitive, fragile, and pictorial. Her words capture what I also hope to convey in the work: a sense of exploration, curiosity, and discovery within a precisely shaped musical landscape.