At the Brink of the Chill was commissioned jointly by the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble of San Francisco. Scored for violin, viola, cello, double bass, and piano, it was programmed to be premiered alongside Franz Schubert’s Trout Quintet of the same instrumentation.

Since my earliest years as a percussionist, it had always been a dream of mine to compose and premiere a work for percussion solo and orchestra. I realized this dream when Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra was premiered in February 2008 by the University of Southern California Thornton Symphony under the direction of Donald Crockett. It has since been selected as a winner of the 2008 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards and has upcoming performances in Oviedo, Spain (August 2010) and Seattle, Washington (May 2011).

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.