I was born on March 29, 1956 in New Haven, Connecticut (at 5:04PM for you astrology fans). Although neither of my parents was particularly musical, my father loved to sing while he worked around the house...mostly popular songs of the 30's and 40's, but also light opera arias. He also kept the phonograph going with the warhorses of the classical repertoire...so much so that works like Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the Moonlight Sonata and the William Tell Overture seem to be in my memory back to the earliest moments of my childhood. I had an uncle who was a drummer and another who played the violin and I remember being fascinated with both instruments (especially the drums) from the age of 3 or 4 and, whenever we'd go to visit either of them, I would beg to be able to play the instruments. At the age of 10, I began my formal musical training. First on drums, but also picking up bits of guitar, piano and flute through a combination of lessons, tips from friends who played those instruments and lots of self-instruction. My earliest compositions date from this time although they were mostly very poor imitations of the top-40 hits of the day. Occasionally, I'd get into more esoteric fare, such as the short piece from 1968 for sitar, miscellaneous percussion and sound effects which I vaguely recall as having been influenced by something I saw on one of the Bernstein Young People's concerts on TV.

Around 1970, I came across a series with Daniel Barenboim discussing the late Beethoven piano sonatas on public TV. At about the same time, I bought a copy of the Switched-On Bach recording, my first introduction both to Bach and to electronic music. The incredible tapestries that these Bach and Beethoven compositions built out of such simple motives was fascinating to me. I immediately began writing music which, although still pop-oriented, was more contrapuntal, more through-composed and more metrically irregular. I formed a rock band (at first called Jestle Manor and later, with slightly different line-up, Autumn) which, largely because of our commitment to play this music rather than the top-40 hits of the day, performed mostly in my parents' garage.

By 1973, I was studying music theory in high school and beginning to compose works for more traditional ensembles. These works were never performed (although a couple received readings by the high school's band and choir) but I felt good enough about what I was doing that I decided to study music in college.

In the fall of 1974, I moved to Philadelphia and began a double major in music and electrical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania (the latter major more to pacify my mother who kept saying things like "If the music doesn't work out, you'll need something practical to fall back on"). By the middle of my third semester, it hit me that I was spending hours and hours on my counterpoint homework, doing not just the assigned work, but the recommended work, the "in-your-spare-time" work and still other exercises that I was making up myself. Meanwhile, I was pushing my physics labs to the bottom of my to-do pile and just barely whipping them off in time to hand them in. At the end of that semester, I switched from my double major to a major in music with minors in acoustics and in psychology. During my first couple of years at college, I was deeply caught up in re-inventing what I wanted to do musically. I pretty much disavowed the very existence of my early days as a rocker (even if some of those pieces did look more like avant-garde jazz than "real" rock-and-roll) and throwing myself into an intense study of the music of dozens of living composers. I was not very productive musically during these years and almost no pieces went beyond the most fragmentary of sketches. In late 1975, however, I formed the Penn Composers Guild along with several graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania. With this new performance resource available, I began writing again. Heavily influenced by faculty members George Crumb and George Rochberg and, to a lesser extent, Bartok, Stravinsky and Ligeti, the music from this period is both highly eclectic and very unusual (at times perversely so) in its scoring. I think back on these works with a certain fondness but not an awful lot of admiration or pride. Nonetheless, my increased activity led to the receipt of two Theodore Presser Foundation Awards for excellence in music and to private studies with Robert Morgan (then a visiting faculty member at Penn).

In spite of this new immersion in composition, it was becoming clear to me that there was a degree of practical experience that I would never receive in an academic environment which did not have an active performance division. This became most painfully apparent when, after spending the first semester of my senior year working on a piano concerto for a scheduled spring performance, the delivered piece turned out to be so impractical (both in terms of performance difficulty and ineffectual scoring), that the performance was cancelled before it even got into rehearsal. Even after two major rewrites years later, this piece (Metamorphosis) remains unperformed although there is finally an orchestra in Poland that is showing some interest in recording it). And so, in the fall of 1978, I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music, studying composition with Donald Martino and (later) Arthur Berger and theory with Robert Cogan. I also attacked the performance angle with a vengeance: taking piano, cello and double bass lessons, performing and recording with three of the Conservatory's choral groups, participating in a number of student composer concerts and, whenever possible, getting student performers to read through parts of my pieces and give me feedback on the feasibility of each bar. As a result of all this, my music, although still highly virtuosic, gradually began to grow more realistic in it's technical demands and, as a result, began to be more widely performed. I also received my first public recognition at this time, via composition awards from the Brookline Music Association and from BMI.

I consider these conservatory years to be the source of my current style which could be described as complex contrapuntal surfaces usually held together by lush, at times almost Mahlerian harmonies. This backdrop is studded with rich, arching melodies whose expressive lyricism owes as much to the nineteenth century vocal repertoire as it does to any more contemporary styles. The vocal influence is perhaps no surprise given that I was, for many years, married to the remarkable modern-music soprano, Michelle Disco, whom I first met when we were students at the Conservatory. It's also no surprise that from the beginning of our relationship in 1980 until her tragically untimely death in 1994, a large percentage of my output was either explicitly vocal or so lyrical that it might be called implicitly vocal. People think I'm being facetious when I say that my primary musical influences have been Bach, Mahler, Puccini and Babbitt but each of these composers, albeit in very different ways, has had a profound impact on me and the sound of their musics is rarely far from mind when I compose.

In the fall of 1980, my then teacher, Donald Martino, took me to a lecture at Brandeis University where he introduced me to his former teacher, Milton Babbitt. The warmth and humanity of this brilliant man was so at odds with what I had, up to that point, seen as the self-indulgent austerity of his music, and I was so intrigued by this apparent contradiction, that I immediately began a re-evaluation both of his writings and of his music. Within a few weeks, I became clear that doctoral studies with Babbitt were in my immediate future. And so, in the fall of 1981, having completed my Master of Music degree at the Conservatory, I moved to Princeton and entered the doctoral program at Princeton University (where Michelle and I were married in the fall of 1983). My studies with Babbitt (and also with Peter Westergaard) resulted in profound shifts in how I thought about my music and, I feel, some of my most interesting music comes from this period. Some may find it ironic, however, that, with the exception of a few very austere studies, the most noticeable impact Babbitt had on the surface qualities of my music was that it became generally more consonant with a much more pronounced use of octaves.

While at Princeton, my music began to be much more widely performed. The awards continued with my receipt of the first Quinto Maganini award from the Norwalk Symphony and with two consecutive student composer awards from the American Society of University Composers. In addition, I began speaking at scholarly conferences around the country and, immediately following receipt of my doctorate in 1985, I published a number of technical articles about the interaction of computers, composition and contemporary music theory. These appeared in scholarly journals both here and abroad.

Unfortunately, after receiving my degree, I was confronted by the harsh economic realities of life. At the age of 29, I was out of school for the first time since infancy. With a wife to support and decent academic positions in laughably short supply (all the more so since I was not particularly interested in embarking upon a series of "one-semester-sabbatical-replacements- at-the-University-of-Western-Nowhere" as many of my friends were doing), I decided to cash in on all the computer skills and analytical abilities I had acquired at Princeton and began a ten-year stint working for a small but rapidly growing consulting firm in northern New Jersey, vowing to do as much music as my spare time would permit. That spare time turned out to be pretty limited. I did manage to spend a significant amount of time revising several works from the early 80's and writing a series of small songs for voice and piano, and some solo wind music. but I was growing quite depressed and felt like my days as a composer were numbered. Another blow came with the discovery, in the fall of 1989, that Michelle was in an advanced state of renal cell cancer. She fought back brilliantly, making a mockery of her doctors' initial prognosis that she had "a month or two, at most" to live and she did go into remission for a couple of years (although she never fully regained her strength). Still, time became a big question in both of our minds and we started to focus more on recording than on performance.  Unrelated to music we also began to travel a fair amount. When she died in April of 1994, it had been nearly a year since she'd been either on stage or in a recording studio and I was finding it hard to do anything musical beyond big bravura openings of pieces that went nowhere or abstract formal outlines of pieces that were more intellectual exercises than actual composition.

 

One of the positive things that came out of her death was my courage to walk out of the consulting job that had been sucking more and more of my time and energy for nearly a decade. With no prospects in front of me, I left one day and, in a matter of weeks, had found a better paying job making far fewer demands on me at a location that was close enough to ride my bicycle to. The new-found time available from this has allowed me to get back to music with some degree of regularity. In December of 1994, I traveled to Katowice, Poland (coincidentally, not far from the birthplace of my grandfather) where the American conductor Joel Suben recorded a newly revised version of my decade-old Double Helix with the Silesian Philharmonic Orchestra. After YEARS of delays caused by the over-bloated posturing of the meglomaniacal producer, this recording is finally available (on MMC 2069).  For a time (even before the actual release of the disk), I viewed the mere existence of this recording as marking a turn-around in my compositional output. Other recording projects got under way, most notably a joint project with Michelle's long-time accompanist, Jeffrey Farrington, in which we plan anywhere from one to four CD's of re-mastered recordings that Michelle left behind.  It was thus quite a surprise to me when I found my life taking more of a turn toward the business world!

About a year after my wife died, I arrived early at a friend's party where the one other early-arriver was a pleasant woman I had taken to dinner a couple of times but  in whom I had long since decided I had no interest.  I found it very difficult to graciously excuse myself from the extended conversation she was having with me when I heard some raucous laughter coming from one of the other rooms.  As she turned to get a drink from the counter, I quickly excused myself and made a bee-line for the other room where I found an old friend of mine talking with a very attractive woman whom I had never met.  They were having a wild time laughing over a book they had found on the host's shelf regarding the sex-lives of insects.  I jumped right in and Lonna and I had a wonderful time the whole night.  I was disappointed when I discovered the next day that she was at the beginning of a divorce (based on past experience, this was NOT the sort of situation I wanted to jump into looking for a relationship).  But when she called me the next night to say what a great time she'd had, we ended up making a date for the following weekend.  We had a very bumpy first year but near the end of year two, she moved in with me, a couple years later we bought a new house together and, in the fall of 2000, we were married.  She is, as she has always been, one of the great sources of joy in my life.  We keep each other sane, we keep each other silly and playful and seem to have a vast capacity to accept whatever habits and quirks we thought we hated about each other! 

Meanwhile, back on the job front:  after spending a dozen or so years working in various capacities in corporate America (well, corporate New Jersey, at any rate), I began to get bored with the level at which I was playing the game.  I actually found myself getting increasingly interested in having a say in how the companies I worked for were run.  I had a pretty cushy job that made few demands on my time and paid rather well but I was starting to ask the question again and again, "What am I doing here?"  In 1998, I moved on to a relatively new software product company where, it appeared, there would not only be more challenging work for me, there would also be ample opportunities to be a key player in designing project management methodologies, streamline the software delivery process and, in general, be a key player in shaping the future direction of the company.  Had I been less naive, I'd have recognized the warning signs of walking into a situation where all the principals were either directly related to the president or were long-time personal friends of his.  I spent a mostly very stormy 16 months there and it was generally not an enjoyable time of my life.  I did, however, learn a lot about finding my way through thick battlefields of nepotism and, in general, grew more adept at producing results in the face of little or no support.  Nonetheless, within a year I began looking around for other opportunities.  As I grew increasingly focused on getting out the door, upper management finally decided to show the door to me.  Although I was shocked to be fired, I was also very relieved because it was the sort of kick-in-the-pants that I needed to seriously look elsewhere (a big lesson:  there's an enormous amount of comfort in familiarity, even when your conscious mind says you hate where you are).

Relieved though I was, the timing of the dismissal left a bit to be desired.  Not only was I in low-gear regarding my job search, I was recovering from a broken ankle and was still on crutches (so I couldn't drive to interviews), we had a pre-arranged vacation to England scheduled for the following week, Lonna had only just gotten back to work a few months earlier after being out of work for almost six months and, having just bought a new house, I had a relatively small reserve of cash to fall back upon.  To make matters worse, we got back from England just days before Thanksgiving and I found it very difficult to even get people on the phone, much less arrange interviews in the holiday season.  Still, based on years of devotion to the idea that all things happen for a reason, I remained calm and, shortly after Christmas, a casual conversation with one of my neighbors led him to give me the name and number of a friend of his who had, a few years before, started what was a rapidly growing and very successful consulting company.  A phone call to the friend quickly led to interviews at the company and a few weeks later I was back at work...this time at a company that actually seems to be everything I was looking for when I left my cushy but bland position at Church & Dwight a year-and-a-half earlier.  I've never worked so hard at a job but neither have I ever had as much fun.  In large part, I think it's simply a case that, for pretty much the first time since I've left school, I've actually taken full responsibility for the position.  I do what it takes to make things a success and, at least so far, this seems to be working quite well.

So as we move in to a new millennium beset with a myriad of world problems, largely caused by meglomaniacal "leaders" who refuse to take responsibility for their repeated cock-ups, I nevertheless find myself very happily remarried, with a job that I very much enjoy, living in a home situated in a beautiful setting that thrills me nearly every day.  I've always been fond of a thought  from Peter McWilliams' Wealth 101 that wealth and happiness come not from having what you want but wanting what you have.  I'm happy to say that that gets easier and easier. 

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