This page lists compositions with scores. You can reach out to Tessa directly through the contact form. All compositions are BMI. Please send programs of any performances!

Categories (descending order):
Orchestral Music
Chamber Music: 2-10 players
Chamber Music: 1 player

Orchestral Music

The score for Spider Boots will be available for purchase in late 2026 – video/audio coming soon!

Spider Boots (2026)
Tessa Brinckman (BMI) + Sarah Bassingthwaighte (ASCAP)
Symphony orchestra + audience participation – 6 min 30
Instrumentation: 3333 | 4331 | timp + 3 perc | harp | strings

Years ago, Tessa was living in an old building on the corner of Bellevue Ave and Olive Way. She was reading at her kitchen table at midnight when she heard a “ticka-tacka-ticka-tacka” sound. She couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. When she turned around to look towards the refrigerator, she saw a spider on the floor, walking towards her. It was so quiet, the floors so resonant – that spider had boots. We’ve made this piece as a double tribute – and we’re grateful to Unbound Symphony in premiering our piece (July 10, 2026).

Spider Boots is a tribute to Deep Listening composer matriarch, Pauline Oliveros, who nurtured listeners to hear the world, and themselves, anew. And it’s a tribute to the back-ity-back days in Seattle, when life was more affordable. It was possible to make a living as a musician from jazz clubs – and where talents like Quincy Jones had come up, surrounded by all the old jazz and improvisation greats. Ancestors, everybody! To conjure up the soundscape of Seattle, we lovingly transcribed the calls of Pacific Northwest birds, the horns of the ferries that travel through Puget Sound, and the whistle of the Amtrak that leaves from King Street Station. Spider Boots invites everyone to remember all the things that have made sense to you and yours, to kick them back up, and put the sauce back into your lives. Like a spider and its web, our community is our sensory instrument, feeling resonance, tension, motion, frequency, and relationship. The audience participation is an invitation, and optional. Trust yourself, listen intently, play your part, allow space for others, and leave the sound world better than you found it.

Chamber Music: 2-10 players

The Heart Has Four Chambers (2025)
Tessa Brinckman (BMI)
2 bass flutes + fixed audio – 11 min

This piece was commissioned by Lisa Cella as part of her pioneering Low Flutes Project. I wanted her to have a piece that was both through-composed and left room for imaginative interplay. This work evokes the cycles, memories and mysteries of our literal and metaphoric hearts. The players become molecules moving through the heart, carried relentlessly through four chambers, submitting to the “weather” of each chamber, and then returning to the body, where they will eventually have to cycle back. The audio track is built from field recordings I have collected over seven years all over the world. Many thanks to Jane Rigler for our recording of my waterphone with her geophone, for Scott L. Miller’s help in the finer points of mixing. And to Lisa Cella for commissioning this work in the first place. Each journey through this piece is unique. Who are you and what will you encounter? Fatty molecules? Heart flow reflux? Too many dreams? Not enough? Just know in any case that owls can hear your heart beat from far away.

Wade Through Water (2023)
Andile Khumalo + Tessa Brinckman (SAMRO/BMI)
Alto flute + piano – 3 min 07

Wade Through Water questions the binary expectations of African heritage.
Andile Khumalo references sounds from around the African continent, Asia and the West, inviting the listener to go beyond individual and cultural differences. The pieces was inspired by the Hermann Hesse poem “Happiness”. At Andile’s suggestion, Tessa adapted the original version (clarinet and piano) for alto flute and piano, making use of the alto flute’s colorful extended techniques.

You Never Come Out the Same (2023)
Cara Stacey + Tessa Brinckman (PRS/BMI)
Piccolo + prepared piano – 8 min 14

The title comes from Cara’s time spent in Bahia, where there is a saying that “you never come out the same”. The music meditates on the value of water and cycles in healing, built from all kinds of cyclical movement, rhythms based on the title, connective nodes, hocketing techniques (from central African xylophone music), modal material (from Sundanese chamber music) and improvisation (from Tessa’s experiences on the Maori marae). Extended techniques on the piccolo and the prepared piano enhance the wilderness of emotions.

Taniwha (2023)
Tessa Brinckman (BMI)
multiple flute + percussion players (8-10)
piccolo/flute/alto flute/bass flute/contrabass flute
+ non-mallet percussion – 9 min 12

Tessa Brinckman grew up with Maori stories of the taniwha (spiritual protectors and antagonists), and a sense of the dark underground places they lived, beyond Pakeha explanation. She was struck similarly by a sense of strong ancestral forces that exist around northern Manhattan. This piece is a tribute to the dead, the living, ancient pathways and machines (specifically subways) that vibrate the foundations of Manhattan.

This piece (realized with taonga puoro, multiple flutes and multiple percussion) can be heard on the album The score will be available eventually from the composer, depending on performance interest, and there is flexibility in how the instrumentation can be organized. Contact the composer for more information.

Giant Sleep (2023)
Tessa Brinckman (BMI)
graphic score for any number of players + fixed audio OR fixed video+audio

Giant Sleep has two versions as a graphic score:
1. Physical or digital cards with both an external continuous audio and its instruction sheet (6 min 03)
2. A mp-4 video with both a soundtrack and its instruction sheet (9 min 07)

The origins of Giant Sleep was a commission from UK-based Cities & Memories Project to create a piece, using a rural town field recording, “Leeton Hums”, by Bassling. I composed musical cells that directly connect to its sound-structures, adding multi-track piano and e-bowings, in static and traveling spatialisations. This work suggests we are like slumbering giants, deeply asleep, which offers both a brief respite from, and engagement with, the terrors of being alive within our time.

Giant Sleep can be performed with any number of musicians (with sensitivity to delicate sound, skilled listening and improvisation). The performance needs a good sound system for the quiet soundtrack, and good projection/sound for the video.

Your Coat, Turning (2023) – for a sounding community
Tessa Brinckman + Jane Rigler (BMI/ASCAP) 
Any instrumentation + fixed media (video with audio)  – 13 min 16

Your Coat, Turning is a video score, with sound, text and images, that guides participants to imagine, play and transmit sounds. The piece draws from electronic music, sound art, and  contemplative practices. Text and video prompt the audience to explore sound and interact with (provided) mystery objects that create a communal music experience. It’s a musical experience that invites participants to create multiple futures through sound, video, text and play – a game of recreations of self and community. Our climate crisis means that the coat of the earth is changing — and we must be able to deal with injury through creativity, beyond survival to renewal. Joy and imagination are necessary birthrights, and communal, political acts. We are interested in how to transform our individual and collective metaphorical coats (i.e. identities) through the experience of sounding and imagining together.

Galanthea (2022)
Tessa Brinckman (BMI)
alto flute + theorbo OR alto flute + guitar – 8 min

Dedicated to guitarist Caroline Delume, Galanthea was commissioned by Festival Embarque (Paris France) and premiered by Tessa Brinckman, alto flute and Caroline Delume, theorbo, on August 26, 2022. Galanthea is an homage to the snowdrop flower, galanthus nivalus, which uses thermogenesis to literally burn through the ice and snow. The snowdrop is known as the first sign of spring, and also a messenger of hope. The composition is both improvisatory and strictly scored, microtonal and modal, beginning with a spacious atonal section, ending in a microtonal mode.

That Which Colors The Soul (2015) 
Tessa Brinckman + Terry Longshore (BMI)
flute, tabla, tuned bottles, waterphone + fixed audio – 12 min

A tribute to Northern Indian music traditions, in a tensile relationship with modern and Western aesthetics. Both parts in the score are improvisatory within both Western and Indian traditions. The flute part is notated for key melodic phrases and raga indications, requires glissandi between certain notes (meend), and the sound is best (though not necessary) with a wooden headjoint. The tabla part requires an experienced tabla player.

Umi Sajin (2013)
Tessa Brinckman + Mitsuki Dazai (BMI/ASCAP)
Flute/alto flute/piccolo + koto/bass koto – 8 min

Inspired by accounts of the Dust Bowl and the Great Garbage Patches in the Pacific Ocean, Umi Sajin expresses the ambivalence of our own survival in a destructive world. The score is mostly notated, with improvisatory parts, drawing from the Sawai koto school and jazz.

Glass Sky (2003)
Tessa Brinckman (BMI)
Flute, violin, viola + cello – 9 min 38

An homage to South African Outsider artist Helen Martins and her Owlhouse, borrowing from the Indian raga Multani and vocal traditions of the Kirana gharana. The score is fully notated. The flute part uses a wooden headjoint for its characteristic sound (though not essential), and glissandi technique (meend) is essential to the score.

Chamber Music: 1 player

A Radiator Wonders About Fish (2024)
Tessa Brinckman (BMI)
Solo flute (any) – 1 to 2 min

Commissioned by Lisa Bost-Sandberg for the Fifteen Minutes of Fame: Flutist-Composer Edition this piece was inspired by the sounds of the composer’s 100 year old steam radiator in northern Manhattan, and the idea of water carrying its own memories of other times, places and beings. All microtones can be achieved through any method (ie. embouchure hole angle, fingerings, flutes with microtonal key systems). The degree of flat/sharpness is not exact. The desired effect is disorientation from 12 tone system. Timbral differences are welcome. Measures can be repeated or omitted to enable performance under 1 minute. Adjust tempo to suit. Add, as wanted, dynamics, articulations and rubato to realize your dramatic interpretation of a radiator wondering about fish.

A Shared Solitary (2022/2020)
Niloufar Nourbakhsh arr. by Tessa Brinckman (ASCAP)
Alto flute + electronic media – 3 min 30

The original version for violin of A Shared Solitary was commissioned by the Library of Congress during the pandemic. Violinist Jannina Norpoth of PUBLIQuartet premiered the piece as part of the Library of Congress’ Boccaccio Project. Electronics (MAX patch) accompany the violin, a combination of live and fixed processing. The composer writes that “…over the course of the piece, a delay line becomes less and less distant as the texture becomes fuller, culminating into a collective sound. A Shared Solitary attempts to resurface the fact that we are all going through this together all over the world even though we might not be able to physically see it.” The alto flute and MAX version was suggested and arranged by flutist Tessa Brinckman. Composer Niloufar Nourbakhsh heard, and was entranced by, this new version, which still keeps the original fixed violin processing. It was premiered at the International Low Flutes Festival 2022, and the score is available via the contact form at www.niloufarnourbakhsh.com

Sonus Redux: And the Wave Rolled Back (2020)
Todd Barton + Tessa Brinckman (ASCAP/BMI)
baroque flute + fixed audio – 8 min 47

Sonus Redux: And the Wave Rolled Back is a wild collaboration of sources and composers, quoting Jean-Marie Leclair’s Sonata II in C major from the Premier Livre de Sonatas, Oeuvre I (1723) and Hunter S. Thompson, unfurling dense layers of Tessa Brinckman’s collection of baroque flutes, prepared piano, underpinned by Todd Barton’s Buchla harmonizations.

A Cracticus Fancie (2017)
Tessa Brinckman – (BMI)
Amplified piccolo + fixed audio – 6 min

A Cracticus Fancie melds together an archival recording of Denis Glover (1912-1980) reading his famous New Zealand poem, The Magpies, with field recordings, and contemporary live/processed piccolo sound-worlds. It was inspired an Australian First Nations story of cracticus tibicena saving the people from perpetual darkness, Denis Glover visiting Tessa Brinckman’s grandparents as a mischievous raconteur, a re-imagining of Denis’ poem from the viewpoint of a magpie, the Irish folk song The Magpie, and the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Hüzün Nar: The Gorgon Cycles (2017)
Tessa Brinckman (BMI)
Alto flute + fixed audio – 7 min 30

The words “hüzün” and “nar” in the title – which mean “melancholy” and “fire” in Turkish and Arabic respectively – are a nod to Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk and his memoir of his beloved city, Istanbul, which I travelled to in 2011. The music was inspired by city-wide calls to prayer, Turkish TV shows, electronic dance music booming all night in the Old City, and later protests in Taksim Square. The score has room for improvisatory elements and moves rhythmically in cycles of 22. The fixed audio uses processed alto flute, prepared piano and electronic patches.Hüzün Nar is also the soundtrack for the animation film, The Gorgon Cycles (2023), and a score to is available to perform live with the animation.

The Gorgon Cycles was co-directed with animators Miles Inada and Devyn McConachie. It is a fever dream – an intricately layered animation invoking the return of long-banished visionary, Medusa. With a supporting cast of fish, snakes, dinosaurs, cat, monkey, magician, the film is statement of violent optimism – a contemplation of life amidst global catastrophe.

Blazing World (2018)
Tessa Brinckman (BMI)
Baroque flute + fixed audio – 5 min

The score accompanied a research project realized during a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Using data sonification of the star system Orion and piano in the fixed media, Blazing World is a tribute to 17th Century philosopher and science writer, Margaret Cavendish, who was arguaby the first science fiction writer.