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I'm not very involved in academic circles these days but academia did represent a significant part of my early life. On this page, you can find information about my academic training, my academic awards and my publications in various journals and the like.
EducationUniversity of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA). 1974 to 1978. Earned a Bachelor of Arts with a major in music and minors in psychology and physics. Graduated summa cum laude and was consistently on the Dean's List with Distinction. During my senior year, I took private composition lessons with Robert P.Morgan. My thesis involved a study of a relatively unknown piano piece of Charles Ives called "The Celestial Railroad" and was called (appropriately enough) A Critical Performing Edition of Charles Ives's "The Celestial Railroad." This thesis was never published but interested parties can contact me directly about it. New England Conservatory of Music (Boston, MA). 1978 to 1981. Earned a Master of Music with a major in composition. In addition to classroom work, I studied privately with Donald Martino and Arthur Berger. Although I was not required to complete a thesis in this program, I did produce three fairly lengthy monographs: Large Scale Harmonic Motion in Schoenberg's Fourth Quartet, Some Thoughts on Pitch Choice Criteria (later subsumed into my doctoral dissertation) and Towards a Realization of Ives's "Universe Symphony." All are unpublished. Princeton University (Princeton, NJ). 1981 to 1985. Earned a Master of Fine Arts in 1983 and a Ph.D. in 1985. Both degrees were in composition. My principal composition studies were with Milton Babbitt although I also did some work with Peter Westergaard and Joseph Dubiel. My M.F.A. thesis was an unpublished paper called Harmonic Structure in Schoenberg's String Quartet #4 (an expansion of a similar work written during my MM studies) and my dissertation was a lengthy discussion of some rather esoteric aspects of twelve-tone music called The Array as a Compositional Unit (published by University Microfilms). The Bennington Composers Conference (Bennington, VT). July, 1980. A month-long workshop where I composed and prepared performances of Quintetino and the now withdrawn Tri-tetra-hexa. The Composers Conference (Johnson, VT). August, 1981 and August 1982. An intensive two-week workshop run by Mario Davidovsky with Efrain Guigui preparing performances of the participants works with some of the best performers from the New York new music scene. Also occasional meetings with visiting composers Ross Lee Finney (1981) and George Pearle (1982). I received performances of Concertino and Tri-tetra-hexa in 1981 and of Chamber Concerto and Come Sopra in 1982. The Charles Ives Center for American Music (August, 1983). A one week session of readings featuring David Stock and the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. Received a reading of Clarinet Quartet.
Academic AwardsAlthough I don't particularly travel in academic circles anymore and thus don't often become elegible for such awards, my college days were fairly well-distinguished in terms of awards. In addition to academic honors and full (or near-full) scholarships for each of my eleven years in college, I've received:
Principal Writings and PublicationsA Critical Performing Edition of Charles Ives's "The Celestial Railroad" (1978 B.A. Thesis, University of Pennsylvania). "The Celestial Railroad" is a large yet rarely performed work for solo piano. The lack of performances was, for a long time, attributable to the lack of a critical performing edition which, in turn, was hindered by the plethora (even by Ivesian standards) of ambiguity in the manuscripts. This thesis examined the available sources for the work and included a heavily annotated performing edition of the work. Because some of the sketches indicate the need for additional instruments, the thesis includes a second edition for two pianos with occasional extra percussion. Large Scale Harmonic Motion in Schoenberg's Fourth Quartet (1979). Studies some of the techniques for broad harmonic evolution in the first movement of this very important work in Schoenberg's ouevre. This paper was later expanded into a somewhat more detailed work. Some Thoughts on Pitch Choice Criteria (1980). A short paper, written primarily for my own edification, examining what sort of criteria might be invoked in the name of creating goal-directed motion in atonal (primarily twelve-tone) music. Some of the core ideas in this paper were greatly expanded upon in my Ph.D. dissertation. Towards a Realization of Ives's "Universe Symphony." (1981). Ives's "Universe Symphony" was conceived on such a monumental scale that there are indications, even in his own writings, that it was never really intended to be completed (it seems, in some respects, to be a kind of conceptual or meta-composition). Nonetheless, he left many pages of intriguing (if often-times vague) sketches for the work. This paper examines the available sources for the work and discusses in detail the problems that one would encounter in attempting to compose a realization of the work. Harmonic Structure in Schoenberg's String Quartet #4 (1982). An expansion of the similarly named paper from my days at the New England Conservatory (q.v., above), this paper maps out the middle and high-level harmonic structure of the first movement of this piece (as defined in terms of transpositions of combinatorial hexachord areas) and also discusses several examples of the ways in which these moves are reflected in the surface details of the work. This paper was never published but was delivered at the Michigan Music Theory Conference at the University of Michigan on March 29, 1985. The Array as a Compositional Unit: A Study of Derivational Counterpoint as a Means of Creating Hierarchical Structures in Twelve-Tone Music (1985 Doctoral Dissertation, Princeton University. Published by University Microfilms: Ann Arbor, MI). A lengthy investigation of how to derive coherent, large-scale structures from the principles of aggregate-based music. The dissertation has a number of distinct sections. It begins with an historical overview of approaches some well-known twelve-tone composers have taken to this problem (Schoenberg, Webern, Babbitt and Martino). It then evolves a number of criteria that would be relevant to the problem and posits that the notion of a self-deriving array (an aggregate forming array of transformations of a twelve-tone row such that both the rows and the "columns" of the array can be ordered as transformations of the same twelve-tone row) as a viable construct on which to build such structures. A lengthy section follows discussing the technical requirements and characteristics of such constructs. An appendix includes a computer program designed to create all such possible self-deriving arrays and another appendix provides several hundred pages of output from that program. The dissertation is completed by a composition (Clarinet Quartet, discussed in more detail in the music area of this site) which illustrates many of the principles discussed in the dissertation. An Annotated Bibliography of Array Studies (Indiana Theory Review, May, 1986). This is basically the bibliography from my dissertation. An Historical Approach to Large-Scale Form in Twelve-Tone Music (Journal of the Science and Practice of Music, III:1 (1986). An expansion of the first portion of my dissertation. An Algorithm and a Computer Program for the Calculation of Self-Deriving Arrays (In Theory Only, IX:5/6 (1987). This is a discussion of how I came up with the computer program included in my dissertation (this article does not include the rather lengthy source-code for the program). One reader took personal offense at one of my assertions in the published article and wrote a rather angry response to the editor. That letter (along with my response to it) appear in the subsequent issue of the same journal. The Construction and Use of Self-Deriving Arrays (Perspectives of New Music, XXV:1/2 (1987). This is a greatly expanded version of the highly-technical middle portion of my dissertation. |
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