From Darkness We Awaken (for violin, violoncello, alto saxophone, prepared piano, vibraphone, and percussion)

Commissioned by Virago

For violin, violoncello, alto saxophone, prepared piano, vibraphone, and percussion

Score and Recordings will be available late 2021/early 2022.

I composed From Darkness We Awaken in the middle of what has proved to be the most chaotic period of time that I've ever lived through. As I write these words we are in the midst of a global pandemic that has killed millions, a fascist is attempting to consolidate power in the United States, mass protests are erupting across the country to affirm that Black Lives Matter, and a mounting climate crisis is threatening to destroy us all.

Against the backdrop of these intersecting crises, another personal upheaval occurred for me: in March 2020, my wife and I found out we were expecting our first child. Now, in October, we're less than two months away from our baby's arrival.

Of course, we couldn't be more excited. But while 2020 continues down its intensely toxic path, in our house it's been eerily quiet. We've essentially been in quarantine since March, rarely venturing out, terrified of what a Covid-19 infection could do for our growing baby. We've thrown our pent up energy into preparing our home, our hearts, and our lives for the arrival of a new human. It's a strange juxtaposition, to be simultaneously balancing so much joy with so much fear.

The one thing that has kept me relatively grounded in this unique moment has been writing this piece. I've worked quicker than usual, immersed myself in it, and put my whole self into it. As I progressed deeper into the piece, I observed it taking on more and more of a central role in my well being. I started to notice myself using this piece as a forum for processing these transformative changes. From Darkness We Awaken became a proxy for my emotional preparations for the next phase of my life — a diary documenting my personal metamorphosis. It became an avatar for an awakening of sorts: for myself, for our future baby, and hopefully for our society.

From Darkness We Awaken works to bring together several concerns that have been central to my creative practice for years — namely, the tension between composed and improvised music, and a desire to blur the lines between these two dispositions. This piece started as a series of vignettes for solo prepared piano that were structured improvisations. When I decided to transition it into a chamber piece, one of the chief concerns was to retain the open, improvisational quality of the original while utilizing the wider coloristic palate made available by the introduction of new instruments.

I'm grateful to BethAnne Kunert, Sofia Carbonara, Wesley Hornpetrie, and Meghan Rohrer of Virago for commissioning this work. Their collaborative and open attitude has given me permission to completely be myself, without a second thought.

We've Got To Find A Way (for tenor, electric piano, and fixed media)

Published as part of the Dualisms collection (below.) We’ve Got To Find a Way starts on page 21.
Recording available here.

for tenor, electric piano, and fixed media.
after "What's Going On" by Al Cleveland, Renaldo “Obie” Benson, and Marvin Gaye

Video features Denzel Donald (vocals) and Michael Malis (Fender Rhodes electric piano.)
Premiered at Sidewalk Festival, Detroit MI, August 2019.

A recomposition of Marvin Gaye’s seminal piece What’s Going On, We’ve Got To Find A Way expands on What’s Going On by featuring newly composed material for electric piano and voice. This newly composed material is interwoven with an electronic backing track that samples the original track extensively, bringing the recomposition into conversation with the poignancy of the original recording. The track consists of nearly 200 individual samples, and is comprised almost entirely of samples from What’s Going On.

What’s Going On is a song that asks deep questions about peace, power, and utopia. Set in the civil unrest of the late 1960’s, Gaye gets straight to the heart of many of the issues that faced society at that time. In many ways, it’s staged as a lament for the ails of society (“brother brother / there’s far too many of you dying.”) But it also strikes a hopeful tone (“you know we’ve got to find a way / to bring some loving here today.”) This classic song transcends the times that it was written for and is extremely relevant to our current era of social and political unrest. Furthermore, What’s Going On has an extra layer of importance in Detroit, the city that birthed this masterpiece.

Almost 50 years later, it’s appropriate to ask: what, if anything, has changed? We’ve Got To Find a Way highlights that question, and gives audiences the opportunity to investigate this question themselves. Some of the recomposed elements of the piece are a radical departure from the original, allowing the audiences to meditate on what has changed. But by using samples from the original track, this piece stays tethered to the original, allowing the audience to meditate on what has stayed the same, for better or for worse.

Quiet Times (for violin and viola)

Purchase the score here.

Since shelter-in-place orders went our across the United States in March 2020, our lives have been altered dramatically. Many of us have mourned. Others are navigating a lack of access to basic resources. Many more are facing significant financial hardship, and all of us have had our day to day schedules thrown into upheaval.

Since this paradigm shift began, I've been taking solace in quiet. Quiet has been a comfort to me -- its uncertainty and potentiality seems so much more honest than many of the noises that tend to express themselves the loudest.

As its name implies, Quiet Times is a quiet piece. It's private music, written for an era in which we've all been asked to retreat into our homes. My goal was to tailor this piece to the scale of a small room. Some of the notes might only be audible to the performers. I hope it inspires others to slow down and find peace in the quiet that we're experiencing as part of our new normal. Perhaps, if and when life returns to what we used to consider normal, we can remember our current quiet and bring some of it with us.

Three Pieces for Piano (for solo piano)

Three Pieces for Piano by Michael Malis, released 17 March 2020 1. 31114 2. 72114 3. What Story Down There Awaits Its End? I wrote these pieces in 2014, which in retrospect feels like a different lifetime.

Purchase the score here.

Purchase the recordings here or on Bandcamp.

“This is thrilling music, with shifting harmonic and rhythmic qualities that require prodigious precise technique and the kind of generic versatility that few pianists achieve. … This is a wonderful milestone in the artistic progress of an artist of boundless versatility and intellectual curiosity secured in an expressiveness anchored in solid artistic discipline.”

- Southeast Michigan Jazz Association

I wrote these pieces in 2014, which in retrospect feels like a different lifetime. I've almost released this collection several times, but inevitably some other, more pressing project has gotten in the way, and as a result this music has languished for six years.

I'm choosing to release this music now because I feel that making art is more important now than ever. We live in strange times, where mandated social distancing is our only hope at defeating a pandemic which could cause irreparable harm. In this moment that we can't be together physically, life can feel creatively stifling. We have to do what we can to continue to cultivate our sense of community.

Any music for solo piano has an undertone of isolation. Both pianists and composers are, by nature, accustomed to social distancing. There is a sense of distance embodied in this music -- distance in time since it was recorded, distance in space between myself and the microphones that were far at the back of the cathedral we recorded in, and distance between you and I as I release this music out into the ether. That distance does create isolation, certainly. But there is a beauty in that distance, too.

A Little To The Side (for alto saxophone, piano, and drum set)

Purchase the score here, and the score and parts here.

Commissioned by ThreeForm. Premiered on January 21, 2020 at North Carolina School of the Arts.

"There’s a real advantage in deeply investigating and becoming skilled at something and then realizing your real interests are a little to the side of that."

- Kate Soper

Over the last few years, I -- like so many others I know -- have made some significant shifts in my creative practice. As I grow older, I've occasionally entertained the self effacing thought that perhaps these shifts betray some sort of character flaw; a flakiness or inability to stay grounded in one creative process. So when I read the above quote from composer Kate Soper in Sound American Magazine, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I felt like she was speaking to what I've sometimes perceived as my isolation; to my unease about not being squarely situated in one creative practice or another. And much to my surprise, when I shared this quote on Instagram, I found myself flooded with responses from friends, all of whom also felt a deep resonance with this sentiment.

As much as I try to be in complete control of my life, I find that there's always something imprecise about the end result. I need to remind myself that this imprecision is actually something worth celebrating, not deriding. Plans and designs can go out the window as life takes on its own form.

That was the case with A Little To The Side: I started this piece with a very limited set of musical materials, with the intention of carrying those materials throughout the piece. By and large, that happened -- but there are plenty of moments where the music veers off into unscripted territory, taking on a life of its own. In my music, I'm always wrestling with the tension between what should be pre-meditated and what should be left up to inspiration. (This, incidentally, is not too far from the tension between what must be composed and what must be improvised.) A Little To The Side has a little bit of it all.

Ultimately, the experiment of A Little To The Side was, can I write something that sounds like jazz but requires the approach of chamber music? It's a question that obsesses me, and represents something fundamental to who I am as a musician. I'm grateful for the opportunity to explore this creative terrain, and I'm grateful to ThreeForm for asking me to explore with them.

And I'm holding Kate Soper's quote as an affirmation to myself; that it's not only permissible, but actually adventageous to chase my creativity down whatever foxhole it wants to lead me. The path will be longer, but the journey will be mine alone.