Theater
- Burn: a folk musical (Instagram)
- My thesis project at BerkleeNYC, Burn (co-written with Patrick Deane Greeley) is about what happens when two musicians from the east coast get stranded in a bar in Northern California. They get to know the locals (mostly weed farmers) and are eventually threatened by a wildfire, forcing everyone to decide what home means to them and what is worth fighting for.
- Mr. Burns: a post-electric play (Preview)
- When Bryn Mawr College put up Anne Washburn’s exploration of post-apocalyptic cultural memory in the spring of 2018, I composed original music for the third act, largely with a cappella accompaniment, but also utilizing a melodica, ukelele, and a prepared piano.
Art Song & Choral
- Three Psalms (Preview)
- My senior thesis project from Haverford College, which considered the liturgical and poetic function of psalms 12, 66, and 120. The piece is written in four movements for SATB choir and SSATB quintet and debuted under my direction in April 2017.
- Songs of War (Preview)
- Inspired by a poem that Eleanor Roosevelt kept with her during World War II, this two-movement work for SATB choir features poems written by women during two different major American wars. They speak to a similar feeling of survivor’s guilt mixed with gratitude that pervaded the country after both World War II and the Civil War.
- Ich, Der Überlebende and Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep (Preview)
- Another pair of wartime songs, both of which from the era of World War II and the Holocaust, this time meditating on two contrasting views of survivorship. The first, a Brecht poem, represents an intense feeling of self-hatred, whereas the second is a secular sort of way of dealing with the death of a loved one.
Mason Emmert 