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I have an enormous number of hobbies, passions and what-have-you's
and would probably pursue even more if the days were longer (not that I manage
to pursue all the ones listed here with the regularity I would like). I've
sometimes thought that the fact that I love so many things is as much a great weakness as a great
strength but, as they say, there's no cheese down that
tunnel so...
You can jump directly to
All
my education is in music and I'm pretty much always making music in one fashion or another (even if it's just playing hand-drums in
drumming circles). My first wife, Michelle, was
a professional singer who was one of the biggest proponents of my music.
After she died of cancer, I stopped composing and had a rather passive
relationship to music for many years. Thanks to both the
inspiration and support of my dear friends in the band, Groovelily,
I've finally crawled out of my compositional cave and have started actively
making music again. You can
read more about that elsewhere
at this site.
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One of the ongoing sources of my passion for life stems from a personal
development workshop I did several years ago called The
Landmark Forum. In addition to taking several other courses offered by
that organization, I've been doing volunteer
work off and on for them ever since. That, also, is documented
elsewhere on this site.
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I'm a great lover of the outdoors and am a strong supporter of the Sierra
Club and the National Resource Defense
Council. Although I tend to stay inside when the weather's cold, the
warmer months frequently find me on my bicycle or hiking in the woods. Lonna and I spent our honeymoon in Arizona where I fell
in love with the magical Red Rock formations all around Sedona. Despite my occasionally serious fear of heights, we still did a
significant amount of scaling up treacherously narrow paths and clambering over boulders to check out the spectacular vistas. Other
visits out west have also had me doing lots of hiking, climbing and rafting,
especially in the Grand Canyon and in Yosemite Valley. Interestingly, with
only a small degree of conscious deliberation, a great part of my vacation
planning over the last few years has had an underlying theme of "do what
scares you the most." Perverse though that may sound, it's provided
some of the most spectacularly memorable moments of recent years.
The cold weather usually has me staying indoors more (or outside in my hot-tub!). I do quite like to go for
walks on those brilliantly crisp and sunny winter days as long as the wind's not too bad. I keep saying I'm going to take up cross-country skiing
but we've been having mostly rather mild winters of late so I haven't had the
opportunity.
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I read vociferously in a number of areas, both fictional and factual. My
tastes include science fiction, novels which deal more with human emotion and
character development than plot (although I'm not above the occasional
fast-paced adventure), history of science and technology, psychology, spiritual
development and well-written erotica. If you browsed my bookcases, you'd find
large doses of Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Crighton,
Robertson Davies, Herman Hesse, John Irving (my hands-down favorite author these days), Gary Larson,
Robert Rimmer, Kurt
Vonnegut and John Updike (to name a few). I also go on poetry kicks from time to
time with Gerard Manley Hopkins towering above all others for me. In more
sentimental moments, I also get quite fond of the free-verse style of Peter
McWilliams.
Given my penchant for reading, it's probably no surprise that I'm also a
fairly regular theater-goer (especially during my rather regular trips to
London). I must confess, however, that I don't pursue that with the same
kind of rigor which I give to music, reading or even my outdoor activities
(in other words, I love the theater but I can't claim to be terribly
knowledgeable about it). I tend to lean towards a mix of sophisticated comedies, British farce and
mysteries. I'm also drawn to almost anything that deals intelligently
(either seriously or humorously) with sex and sexual situations. I do have
some favorite stage actors which, because I mostly go the theater in London,
tend to be British. The list includes Derek Jacobi, Louise Jameson and
John Gielgud (alas, departed from us now) but I'm frequently (pleasantly) surprised by new British actors
I've never heard of...most recently the delightfully funny and warm Janie Dee who is finally coming to these shores in the New York
production of Alan Ayckbourne's Comic Potential.
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| After Michelle
died, I stopped making music for quite a while, but even during those "passive" years, I never
stopped listening to music.
My favorite composers (in roughly chronological order) include Ockeghem,
Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Puccini, Mahler, Schoenberg, Carter,
Henze, Martino, Babbitt and Anderson (Allen, not Leroy!). When I listen to jazz,
it's generally Dave Brubeck, The Manhattan Transfer (but only their vocalise- style stuff...their top-40 stuff doesn't do much for me) or big-band music.
Buddy Rich (both as a drummer and as a bandleader) has been a great
favorite of mine ever since I was a small child and, after all these
years, I almost always return to his recordings thinking "Wow!
He's even better than I remember."
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Click for more on
who I like to listen to.
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| I also listen to a fair amount of pop music (more so when I'm
driving). This is mostly old progressive rock groups. I prefer
keyboard-dominated over guitar-dominated groups and like a fair amount of
acoustic instruments included (I don't mind loud guitar-oriented stuff if it's
well-structured but I have little patience for ego-centric guitar solos). I grew
up on the big progressive-rock groups like Emerson, Lake & Palmer ("...but
what about ego-centric keyboard solos?" I hear you ask...yes,
I agree, Emerson does go there sometimes but when he's just playing
(rather than showing off), I think this is wonderful stuff), Yes, Jethro Tull, PFM, Renaissance
and Focus. I then had many years of rigorous classical training so I’m fond of heavily
classically-influenced stuff...all the more so if it’s highly contrapuntal and
rhythmically very irregular. Throw some very intricate vocal arrangements into the
mix and I like it even more. It's unfortunate that I only discovered
Gentle Giant many years after their demise but they've become
regular fixtures on my MP3 player these days as well.
The more jazz-derived "Canterbury" school (Egg, Hatfield & The
North, National
Health, Bill Bruford) holds a certain interest for me as well but more so when it leans toward a heavy dose of
"modern-classical" (I actually hate that nomenclature but I guess it's meaningful to some folks). I've
discovered these latter groups fairly recently and am continuing to find new
ones that I like. I also listen to various groups that have descended from
either the "classical rock" or the Canterbury schools of
progressive rock (Kansas, Starcastle, Dave Stewart
& Barbara Gaskin).
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click for my list of the top 25 progressive rock records
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| Since the turn of
the millenium, my primary musical focus has actually been the ever-growing
vibrant world of independant rock and folk artists. Groovelily,
Grey Eye Glances, Sam Shaber, Susan Werner, Kyler England and Willy
Porter are among my favorites. You can click on the button on
the right to read more about them.
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click for my list of favorite independent bands
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| I'm a great art lover, being drawn, in general, to anything
that is rich in details, regardless of style. I lean towards abstract work
(or work which, through its intense focus on background elements turns a
nominally representative style into a near-abstract discourse (I'd place a great
deal of medieval manuscript illumination and a fair amount of religious
Rennaisance art in this latter category). I'd be hard-pressed to list my
favorite artists although the list would have to include Leonardo da Vinci,
Vermeer, Raphael, Bosch, Monet, Renoir, VanGogh, Piccasso, Chagall and Miro.
To the extent that I can afford to collect artwork, I favor medieval
manuscripts and some of the lesser-known contemporary artists and Lebedong,
LeKinff and Boulanger all hang on the walls of my home. |
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click
here to see some of the original artwork I've acquired
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I travel fairly regularly (I'm not very fond of it for work but love it for
pleasure). Over the years, I've been in about half of the United States and most
of Western Europe. Some of the places I've been to are:
- Europe (England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Austria,
Greece and Italy) (three months in 1978)
- South-eastern United States (two weeks in Spring, 1980)
- Vermont (Various Composers Conferences, summers of 1979, 1980 and 1981
and a bicycle trip in 1996)
- Baton Rouge, LA for an American Society of University Composers conference
(Spring, 1983)
- Columbus, OH for an American Society of University Composers conference
(Spring, 1984)
- Ann Arbor, MI for a music theory conference (Spring, 1985)
- Southern England (three weeks in fall of 1990)
- Southern and Central England (three weeks in Fall of 1991 and another two
in the Spring of 1998)
- London-Vienna-Katowice-Krakow-Vienna-London (ten days in winter of 1994)
- California (two weeks in fall of 1994 and two more weeks in summer of
1995)
- Chicago (numerous trips since meeting Lonna in 1995 since her sister lives there)
- London (have been spending a week or so there every six to twelve months since 1995)
- Arizona (my honeymoon in September, 2000 (I LOVE Sedona!) and a return
visit in September, 2001)
- Bermuda (Thanksgiving, 2000 and a return to higher temperatures over July
4 weekend, 2001)
- Cancun (Thanksgiving, 2001)
- California (once or twice a year since 2001. Most of the trips
include a visit to the Sonoma and Napa valleys and/or the Carmel area but
they pretty much ALL include a substantial chunk in Yosemite...I just can't
get enough of this place!)
- Puerto Rico (Thanksgiving, 2003)
- San Diego to see this year's performance of Groovelily's Striking 12
(December, 2003)
- Santa Fe (Thanksgiving, 2004)
- Panama (Thanksgiving, 2005)
As of this writing, there's still a lot to do on it but soon you
should be able to go to the Travels section of
this site to see a lot of pictures from these trips.
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 I love dance although it's been a while since I've
been to a dance concert. It's another one of those areas in which I'm
not terribly knowledgeable. My preferences are for a mix of very
graceful (and occasionally athletic) modern styles. Ballet does
not, as a rule, call very powerfully to me but I can have fun with tap
from time to time. I'm always up for anything that is playfully
nventive (like Stomp or Pilobolus). I can't
really claim enough knowledge of the field to list favorite
choreographers except for Alvin Ailey and Paul Taylor.
I also love to dance and one of my great
passions is my twice-monthly visit to Dance Improv where an
enormously varied group of people interact in a rather
loosely-structured free-for-all that at it's best approaches reasonably
good modern dance (I'm not sure I'd want to watch it, but it certainly feels
like reasonably good modern dance!) I've taken a few modern dance
classes and, several years ago, I had the occasional flights of fancy wherein I
saw myself
dancing on stage. Having dated a professional dancer for almost a
year (once upon a time), however, I've got some idea of the degree of
commitment it takes to make this happen and I'm very clear that I don't
have it! (oh yeah...that talent thing...that was the other part I was
missing).
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| I go in and out of indulging my love for the movies.
As with my reading and theater-going, I'm more drawn to movies about
people than about situations (although, again, I'm not above the
occasional fast-paced thriller). I love intelligent comedies and am
also something of a sucker for love stories (the joke in our house is that
Lonna likes the big noisy shoot-em-ups and I like the sentimental
chick-flicks). Well-made historical costume dramas are another big
draw for me and I'm happy to say that there have been a number of fairly
impressive entries in each of these categories over the last few years.
Bigbudgethowmanythingscanweblowupwhilewerun-awayfromexplodingfireballs
spectaculars almost always bore me. If the special effects are truly
special, that might hold my interest but films in that category don't come
along more than once a year at best (once every three to five years is
probably more like it). Even with these, the special effects had
better be in aid of something (beyond getting people to the box office!)
I hate films that disregard the intelligence of the audience
(whether through belaboring obvious plot connection, leaving huge holes in
the plot, subjecting us to unconvincing anomalies in a character's
behavior or relying on clichés to forward the motion). For the most
part, I abhor gratuitous violence in films (gratuitous sex and nudity
rarely bothers me unless it actually gets in the way of things) and don't
feel really good about it even when it's in aid of the plot (I'm not a
strong believer in re-incarnation but if I did live before, I'm pretty
certain I died a pretty gruesome death in World War II). Pulp Fiction
and Fargo (two of the most grisly films I've seen) were notable
exceptions but it was in spite of the violence, not because of it, that I
liked them. I've got a lot to say about sex and violence in general
and there's another page on this site which
goes into that in more detail.
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click
for my list of 50 favorite movies
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As in so many areas of my life, I'm very attuned to details
in films. I love, for example, the incredible wealth of nominally
throw-away stuff with which Peter Jackson and his crew built other worlds in the
Lord of the Rings films. The detail has to be accurate (or at
least plausible) however, and because of this, I have a lot of trouble with
films that deal with music, computers or science in general. Almost
everyone in the movie industry seems to be so incredibly unaware of what really
goes on in these fields that we are routinely subjected to images of composers
tapping out tunes on a piano and then dutifully scribbling them onto paper a
phrase at a time before they forget them (I've been a composer nearly all my
life and have yet to meet a classical composer (and very
few pop composers) who work that way), talking computers whose sole display is
a light that flashes in sync with the computer's "voice" (HAL in 2001
was a wonderfully refreshing exception to this) or the shear absurdity of
almost anything to do with either viruses or computer-to-computer communication
(I once saw a scene in a film in which a computer "dialed into" a
laptop which was not hooked up to a phone line, turned on the power to the
laptop and then infected it with a virus...GET REAL!). Before you
go thinking that I'm a completely hopeless pedant, know that I am
capable of suspending my disbelief in the interest of a good film (I quite
enjoyed the 1995 film, The Net, in spite of the fact that a good deal of
its plot revolves around things that were outright impossible with anything
resembling the technology of the period). Still, I sometimes do find
myself thinking that ignorance does indeed bring a certain degree of bliss.
Except for some of the really great classics (and almost
anything by Hitchcock), I'm not a really big fan of old films but one thing's
for sure (are you listening, Ted Turner? (I thought not)): I HATE
COLORIZATION!
Finally, I do watch TV regularly (if not very frequently).
I go on kicks from time to time, usually involving long-running British
science fiction, comedies or historical dramas. When I bought my first VCR
many years ago, I got a bit obsessive about this and spent a few years
assembling complete recordings of Dr.
Who, Blake's 7, Upstairs, Downstairs,
I, Claudius and a handful of my favorite comedy series (Butterflies,
Solo, The Good Neighbors, Fawlty
Towers and Monty
Python's Flying Circus). I kind of gave up that endeavor when I
realized that I almost never actually watched the tapes! Perhaps
perversely, however, they still take up several feet of shelf-space in my
entertainment room. In recent years, the only things I've
watched with any regularity have been Friends
and some British programs which make their way over here (especially Coupling,
Monarch of the Glen and a soap opera called The Eastenders). I'm also a big fan of various documentary-type shows
(especially of a science or biographical nature) so my channel-surfing is
usually limited to The
Learning Channel, A&E
Biography, Discovery, Animal Planet, The History Channel
and PBS. I don't watch anything regularly on any of these stations
but I do sample them with some frequency. I'll also tune into MTV or VH1 from
time-to-time. I rarely like what I hear there but I do have a certain
fascination with music videos as mini-movies and, equally so, with the various Behind The Music
biographical type of shows they run. The forgoing, however, probably
implies that I spend far more time in front of the tube than I actually do so
I'll just stop it here!
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OK, I've already said "finally" but there
really is one over-riding passion/hobby in my life which I must mention:
FUN! I'll try just about anything that seems like it will
be fun. I won't try to list the various things I've done in that
area except to say they've involved jumping out of airplanes, frequent
nudity, singing and dancing in public places, lots of parties and, in
general letting go of any notions of what's embarrassing. USE
YOUR IMAGINATION!
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