This 5-minute character piece for string quartet was my project and submission for CUI's Spring 2021 Composition Juries. It is my first real project for strings and from it, I have learned a lot!

The name of the piece (and any visuals that go along with it) may bring about images of sealife - schools of fish, the open ocean, and frenzies of sharks. That's good! It is supposed to. One of the big ideas, as I was working on Feeding Time, was to think like a film composer. I asked myself how I could make it as "oceany" as possible - what techniques can I employ that would achieve the fluidity that is associated with the ocean? After working on it very closely with Steve Young, my composition instructor, I like to think I accomplished that goal well.

The Google Drive link below contains older versions of my score and sketches for Feeding Time should you wish to look at those. The sketches in particular are a newer tool to me, so their transformation is quite notable. The sketches contain a "scene" row with scenes I was imagining in my mind as I wrote this. Ideas like panic, a fish jumping out of the water and falling, and scattering were what I had in mind and portrayed in the piece.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1aLMuc2I9G30FNuI_8dN50f5pyyjK2dsk?usp=sharing