Artist Statement

Some composers grow up in families immersed in classical music, enjoying a daily diet of the so-called Three B’s: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. I did not. However, I was raised in a home that encouraged individual curiosity so I spent quite a bit of time with the “Three S’s” – Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Stevie Wonder.

My music is dissonant. Funky. Labyrinthine. Sensual. With deep grooves. (Those grooves might be asymmetrical, but that’s also true for Tower of Power, Ligeti, and Snarky Puppy…)

I write twelve-tone rows into a new jack swing jazz chart, organum into improvisational music, fusion chord progressions into a string quartet.

“Style” is simply a collection of habits. Then what might mine be? I tend to regard many of my choices as being Re-Modernist – music firmly of the present day yet influenced by post-1900 classical music edging into the overripe cul-de-sac of High Modernism. It’s just that my brand of Re-Modernism also grew up listening to New Wave, hip hop, Motown, and hard bop.

Berio and Cannonball Adderley. Gubaidulina and Ellington. Miles Davis and Lutosławski. Talking Heads and Maria Schneider. Takemitsu and David Bowie.

For whom do I write music? Any attentive listener. I aim for the middle of the Venn diagram with lay audiences on one side and New Music™ connoisseurs on the other. In this way my models are filmmakers such as Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese, artists who have consistently created for decades in the zone between art house cinema and Hollywood blockbusters.

I do not seek the novel. If it happens, it is welcome but certainly fortuitous. Rather, I seek the perennial.

I regard music as a spiritual art, of bodies and souls in motion made audible. This motion may in fact be most expressive in passages of diminished coherence, through conflict (the overlapping dialogue of Robert Altman’s or Elliott Carter’s dramatis personae) or the surreal (David Lynch’s dream worlds).

I collaborate with performers who are not seeking a dictator/“genius” composer, but a co-architect in constructing thrilling moments for listeners.

I ask audiences to process a considerable amount of information when listening to my music, but I do my best to ensure that the emotional payoff is worth the intellectual effort.