Composed as my final thesis project to satisfy degree requirements for my Master’s in Theory and Composition from the University of New Mexico, Use Your Words is the first of a series of works that fixates on a type of harmonic structure based on the augmented octave. This work, along with compositions Of Observation and experience I and II, and Holds Ghosts, attempts to build more complicated harmonic areas while still maintaining a stable and strongly centric sense of mode by exploding chromatic clusters across multiple octaves so that verticalities contain no close half-steps. Set in two continuous movements of roughly equal length (slow then fast), the work is an early example of a synthesis of influences such that are seen in many of my later works. Pierre Boulez and John Adams make for strange bedfellows in this work that combines aspects of post-minimalism, modernism, and spectralism.