• Bach Stradivarius model 37 Bb Trumpet, reverse leadpipe
• Getzen Eterna 4-valve flugelhorn
• Bach 1.5C Trumpet Mouthpiece
• Curry 1.5FLD Flugel Mouthpiece

JD: Hello! Thanks for reaching out for the interview, I’m happy to be here.

JD: Well, I guess my earliest musical experiences must have come before I can even remember, since my parents were both in the Navy Band with you when I was a kid. I got to hear them practice quite a lot, and also listened to their concerts from time to time growing up. Way back in first grade, and again in third, Dad tried to start teaching me the cornet (on the same instrument he’d learned on 40 years earlier, which is pretty cool), but both times I was too small to actually hold up the instrument for longer than a few minutes, so I wasn’t able to really get going until about the middle of fourth grade. Until then, I had some fun in recorder class in elementary school.

JD: It was pretty cool! Getting to hear them in concert was great – I especially loved it when the band played Stars and Stripes Forever, since I got to watch Mom stand up and play that famous piccolo section. The yearly tour that one or the other would go on was a bit odd, since they’d be out of the area for a couple of weeks, but they always brought back some fun stories.

Other than musically, my parents have certainly had a huge influence on me. Throughout my schooling, they’ve been very active in my education, not only teaching me the extra math and reading skills that have helped me so much, but encouraging me to be curious and creative. They’ve been super supportive of my interests, and it’s wonderful knowing that whatever I decide to do, they will be happy seeing me excited about it.

JD: It was fantastic. I’d had a good introduction to solo playing, but the band program where I moved from was pretty weak. Once I got to Texas, I fell in love with playing in a big group every day, and the strength of the band program really helped my playing. Learning an instrument is great, but it’s even better if that learning happens alongside a bunch of other people your age in a fun (and at times, a bit competitive) setting.

JD: I did! I was fortunate enough to have the honor of performing in a TMEA All-State ensemble all four years of high school – the last year somewhat narrowly missing COVID’s arrival in Texas. It was an incredible experience. The music was amazing, the conductors were awesome, and more than anything else, playing alongside that many talented musicians for a few days was life-changing.

The other competitive thing I did, musically, was marching band, which, for those who don’t live here, is huge in Texas thanks largely to football’s popularity. It honestly wasn’t my cup of tea at first, but I managed to get into it after not too long and had a lot of fun.

JD: My other big thing was Robotics. I was lucky enough to join my high school’s “FIRST” (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology”) Robotics Team in its rookie year. Each year, a new game is released – sometimes like basketball with rock climbing, ultimate frisbee along with robotic vision systems, crazy stuff like that – and teams have six weeks to build the best robot they can to play it, and then we go to competition. The experiences I had with The Spring Konstant (our team’s name) – both educational and community-oriented – were really what pushed me to keep pursuing science into college and as a career.

JD:I chose Stanford for a number of reasons, but I think the most significant one is that they said “You can learn here and we will give you money.” Well, I think they put it a little more formally, but you get the idea. The longer classes go on, and the more people I meet there, the more it feels like I belong, which is great. Since so far everything has been online, I can’t wait to get started with a somewhat normal campus life, hopefully this fall.

Academically, I’ve loved my classes and learned a surprising amount – I knew things would speed up and get more in-depth, but it’s really surpassed my expectations. Socially, I’ve managed to at least meet and get to know a few people despite the difficulty of communication, which is nice.

JD: Indeed I have! I guess I’ll start by talking about my Arban duet series, since the videos for that are probably my most creative. My goal for them, since some of the tunes on their own are quite simple, is to make them all unique and entertaining, but within the format of “convincingly depict two copies of me in the same scene.” Playing within boxes is fun, and it can be a cool part of a video (I did some of both sectioned-off and one-scene video in Yesterday), but I think it’s cooler and more natural-looking to have that seamless transition between one clone and the next.

For my other videos, what I make usually depends more on the goal of the project. For Launch, that meant creating a video that artistically complemented the music and crystallized the story it told, but without being too distracting or trying to redefine the music’s message. But for my upcoming version of Launch, which includes recordings sent in by a few of my friends, the video will be much more player-centered and lighthearted: I plan on putting everyone into a Zoom meeting.

For “Down in the River to Pray,” which I arranged and played in about two days in response to the murder of George Floyd, I wanted the song to reflect of the power of peaceful protest, and so I composed the video of images that conveyed that message.

And lastly, there are some video projects that I want to purely be about the music, and for them, I make a simple score-video for people to follow along in the music with.

JD: Haha, maybe! YouTube is a great platform to share my work on and get a wider audience, so even though I’m composing and playing just because I really enjoy it, I’m happy to put what I do up on my channel and see what people think. My favorite youtuber is probably Steve Mould, who makes really interesting science videos explaining little things that most people don’t think to even wonder about. Musically, my favorites are Seb Skelly and Antonio Cabrera. They both have moderately-sized channels where they post trumpet or brass ensemble multitrack tunes, and they were the inspiration for me to start recording and posting some of the music that I made.

JD: I’m glad you enjoyed it! Last summer, I was wanting to get into composing a new piece, and I started in my head, just toying with a few of the musical ideas and moods from pieces I’d been listening to at the time, most significantly Eric Whitacre’s “Deep Field,” and the Santa Clara Vanguard’s 2018 show “Babylon.”

Once I decided I wanted it to be about space, I started imagining visual scenes in my head of what the music depicted, since I’ve noticed I write much more effectively if I have a specific goal of what I want to convey with my music.

So, Part 1 of the 4-part piece begins with my best musical impression of the stars coming out at night. At first, they appear one by one as little points in the sky, and then they all reveal themselves as the staggeringly big and distant collection that makes up our galaxy. Emotionally, depicting that meant attempting to walk the line between the wonder I feel looking up at night and the intimidation that comes from the sheer size, emptiness, and unknowability of the universe. Following that, the big hit in part 1 was my way of moving the piece from an introduction about wonder and fear to a story about exploration.

Part 2 was probably the hardest to write, since it took the longest to develop the imagery I wanted to convey with it. In fact, while writing it, my imagination was focused on the process of engineering and building a rocket – which is by all measures astounding and worth a piece of music on its own – but once I finished it, I actually decided what I had written fit better within the arc of the piece if it was about the ascent of the rocket itself.

Part 2 was also the hardest to learn, and that’s partly the consequence of the way I went about writing it. I wrote the entire piece in Sibelius before ever playing a note of it on an instrument, and so once I had something that worked on a computer, I would often find it needed some serious rescoring to give the lines direction or even just make the melodies playable. It seems a bit silly to do it that way in retrospect – now, when I compose or arrange something, I usually just skip straight to recording first, lay down some experimental tracks, and then notate what I like – but back then going directly to the score in Sibelius was what I was used to, and it worked out ok in the end.

I really loved writing part 3, and honestly it felt like it just wrote itself – like it already existed and I just caught it, bottled it, and put it onto a page. I knew from the very beginning that I wanted it to sound like the way International Space Station footage looked – a gradual reveal of the earth rolling underneath you, close enough to show the beauty of the planet’s natural features, but far enough below to remind you of how small and special our whole world really is – and I did my best to convey that visual beauty in musical language. I didn’t (and don’t plan to) do much harmonic analysis of that movement; I just wrote what felt and sounded right. In fact, that’s my go-to approach to composing. Theory is a wonderful tool for understanding and appreciating music, and it can be a great help in navigating through a difficult part of a piece I’m writing, but I find that if I use it as anything more than a tool (for example, by pre-structuring a movement chord by chord before writing), it can close the creative pathways or dampen from-the-heart emotions that really make music special, and really make my music my own.

The last part was a lot of fun. Narratively, I toyed with the processes of reentry, descent, landing, and recovery quite a bit, but thematically it was always simply a celebration of gaining a new perspective. I got to bring back melodies, rhythmic ideas, and chord progressions from the three other movements (which musically are nearly independent of each other) in a style and context totally different from when I introduced them, and that made it a blast to write and play.

JD:  Thank you so much! It’s been a pleasure.

JD: Ooh, I’m glad you asked. Currently I have a few projects (probably a few too many, as I find it hard to put one thing on the shelf while I finish another) going on. One of them is a brass band re-orchestration of Launch for the San Antonio brass, who reached out asking to play a version of it scored for their ensemble. It’ll be a bit tricky, since there are roughly twice as many parts and a lot more variety in the sounds, but I’m looking forward to it. Reworking an earlier piece of mine, The End, from small brass choir to concert band was a lot of fun and had a lot of opportunities to be creative with transforming the music, so I’m expecting this to be kind of similar. Once I finish that, I’ll get back to a couple of ongoing projects, one of which is a brass ensemble arrangement of “You and I.” It’s originally a Stevie Wonder tune, and one of my favorite musicians, Jacob Collier, did a stunning choir arrangement of it a few years back. I think it’ll translate really well into an instrumental format. The other things I’m working on are my duet series and the additional Launch video that I mentioned earlier, and maybe a few easy arrangements of tunes like Holst’s Jupiter Hymn.