Drawings for Iberê was inspired by a series of paintings called Spools, by Brazilian painter Iberê Camargo (1914-1994). These works depict numerous images of spools, which occupy an important part of the painter’s childhood memories. The paintings range fromfigurativism to abstractionism, exploring a wide range of visual and psychological configurations. In Drawings for Iberê, the kinetic elements present in most of the abstract paintings of the series are especially considered. Various notions of movement – from amorphous outbursts of sounds to repetitive and crystalline rhythms - are at the core of the piece. The work is divided in six sections, exploring the multiple configurations of Iberê’s Spools series. The piece was premiered by the Nieuw Ensemble at the Musiekgebouw in Amsterdam, 2009.

Driving Force (2004) for trombone, tenor saxophone and accordion (commissioned by Gaida Festival, Lithuania) 

A driving force is the inner device that stimulates any activity. An impulse and a driving force are required for any action. The latter is the most important. How do we find it? Where does it lie?

Sometimes people write music because the world seems off-kilter, because the world seems to be missing something and there's only one way to fix it. And sometimes people write music because the world seems so overwhelmingly beautiful that you want to preserve it anyway you can.

Stop is the new Go was written for the Avion Saxophone Quartet in the summer of 2007. I was interested in trying to translate some ideas from film and cinema into music. I was thinking of a narrative in which, for some reason, the story kept getting turned off suddenly, and the viewer or listener then had to piece together what was happening from the fragments they did hear or see.  The title refers to the idea that even in the absence of typical or traditional development, a kind of momentum can still be felt throughout the work.

"One of the more salient features of this quartet is the use of what I can best describe as “sonic fields.” A sonic field is a network of musical gestures perceived most immediately as a generalized musical texture. However, over time the listener is able to bounce back and forth from the recognition of the unique parts and the undifferentiated whole.

Each piece of music that I write comes from the depth of my heart, from the inner ocean of emotions and possibilities that are carried by waves of memories. Just as a sculptor frees the elusive figures from the block of marble by cutting away all that is unnecessary, I find myself carving out the musical notes with the inspiration that visits me and calls on me to compose, guiding the process of creation. Perhaps for the composer, the writing of music is a divine act, as much a meditative experience opens the gates to paradise lost and brings out the nostalgia for the infinite. This is what I felt when I was writing the violin concerto Konzerto for A.

Writing a work that attempted to capture the mood of this epic poem seemed impossible. Because of the inherent abstract nature of text-less music, writing a work that was a musical blow-by-blow of the poem seemed equally impossible. For me, the solution was to take three fragments of the poem and focus on conveying their particular moods. In the score, I have included the following lines at the beginning of each section: “the Body electric”, “A divine nimbus exhales”, and “the Body at auction.”

I have never been more stuck than I was in the winter of 2008. My writing came to a grinding halt in January and for a long time this piece languished on my desk, a mess of musical fragments that refused to cohere. It was not until the following May, when I saw a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and remembered one of its iconic sentences, that I had a breakthrough realization. The sentence was this: "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time," and the realization was that the lack of coherence in my ideas was to be embraced and explored, not overcome.

Oceanic Verses, originally commissioned by Carnegie Hall and recently performed by the New York City Opera on VOX, is an operatic tableau of rituals that pays homage to Italian folk music of different times and regions—from Genoa to Salento and Sardinia. With a nod to the great contemporary Italian singers Fabrizio D’Andre and Roberto Licci, the work aims to create a world music of the Mediterranean people, a tribute through Prestini’s musical lens.

The two pieces here—ELEVEN and Sextet —embody many of my current musical interests. Both use minimalist and vernacular materials as starting points, but develop them into complex, dramatic narratives. While I grew up steeped in the classical tradition, I have since become fascinated with minimalism and various vernacular styles, especially heavy metal, funk, klezmer, and Balkan music. I thus aim to use basic materials that are catchy, direct, and rhythmically driving and to build them into complex, dramatic, emotionally compelling narratives in the manner of classical masters like Brahms or Beethoven.

I chose these excerpts from my Octet (completed in 2008) and my sextet Lumens (completed in 2006) in an attempt at broad contrast: fast vs. slow, soft vs. loud, lyrical vs. punctuated.  But when I listened to what I had selected, I was more struck by the similarities in the pieces than by the differences. Both are final sections of longer pieces for medium-sized chamber forces, both are for standard, time-tested ensembles, and both are, in the end, full of contrast in and of themselves. Each has plenty of soft, fast, and lyrical, and each has plenty more.

Scored for bass clarinet, piano, cello, percussion and electronics, the initial concept for +ou- (pronounced "plus ou moins") was to compose music that would be heard through a veil of noise. The idea came from waking up in the middle of the night with the television set turned to a nonworking channel. The screen was mostly filled with black and white static, except for a faded image of what looked like an old couple dancing. The image would come in strongly and then recede into the static

Meant to evoke the process by which changes in an organism’s genetic information are induced experimentally or by environmental stresses, mutagenesis is a dance based on an ever-changing cell structure. The work is, at its core, really just a fun way of changing one woodblock into three woodblocks. Also, it’s kind of kicky.

I remember reading a poem about a person who, while dreaming, unlocked certain life truths, only to forget them upon waking.  This moment, in which one is suspended in wonderment in the face of mysterious yet daunting absence, when one is armed only with the power of questioning and the knowledge of no longer knowing—this is the moment that opens the piece.  It is from this sense of loss that all else springs: the restless uncertainty of the first movement; the meditative stillness of the second; and the muted madness of the third.

For the last few years, I have been working on compositions that focus on the different degrees of nearness between gamelan and non-gamelan instruments. In my interest to explore the intersection of tuning and idioms, I search for ways to generate common spaces for differently tuned instruments and for sound qualities not traditionally found in the same context.

I have often been fascinated and disturbed by my inability to turn away from grotesque images. Media coverage and the Internet expose us, first hand, to intensely graphic images of human suffering, and many times I question why I am so captivated by brutality, while at the same time finding it disgusting.

Oyster was commissioned by the School of Music and School of Dance at Ohio University with funds from Arts for Ohio. It received its premiere in June, 2008; John Climer conducted the OU New Music Ensemble, and Ruben Graciani choreographed the dancers. When discussing dramatic scenarios with John and Ruben, their suggestions were optimistic in nature. One idea came from an NPR segment in which someone suggested that happiness is perhaps most fully appreciated in the context of remembered bitterness. This notion led me to consider the creation of pearls—how a speck of dirt, followed by layers upon layers of mucus, eventually results in something of great beauty and value. In the piece, a series of variants (not precisely variations) have at their thematic center a piano solo—the kernel/speck/bitter pill that the other variants surround in successively optimistic layers. The title is a salute to the crusty crustacean that accomplishes the task.

get a lot of my inspiration from the forms, structures, and energies in the natural world, and I also like math, which can describe these forms, designs, and energies so elegantly and concisely. This piece has three climaxes, each one bigger and more intense than the previous one.  The function f(x) = xsin²x + x simply describes the curve (an ascending sine wave) of the energy of this piece as it progresses through time.

Angles of Repose draws its title from the Wallace Stegner novel of that name about an itinerant mining engineer and his family as they struggle to prosper in the American West. In Stegner’s work, the title refers simultaneously to the angle at which granular materials achieve stability on a slope (picture the angle at which rocks no longer slide off a mountain), and the forces of fortune and consequence that ultimately shape the lives of its protagonists.

The two pieces included here, Put Your Weight Into It and And Then It Rained, were written with a similar set of guiding principals. As with the majority of my output for the last few years, the instrumentation and orchestration remain relatively undefined.