Welcome to my website, where you can read about me and listen to my music. As an antidote to my formal bio, I'd like to offer a more personal introduction (also view photos of my fair city).

As I see it, art has immense, unique healing power. I feel that my life, and the lives of everyone around me, are continually devolving into some kind of chaos, of greater or lesser severity. Creating art, thinking about things carefully, contemplating simple, experienced beauty — those are the activities that have enough force to fight the chaos — not only to keep things from slipping backward, but even to advance a step or two forward now and then. Of course, without activists fighting continually for a better society, coupled with immense luck, I would not be able to do what I do. But having found myself in a position to do it, I feel little compunction to continue that larger fight (which of course needs much more fighting). Now that I have managed to carve out a small corner of peace, I crave what is to me the "real" work, the joyful, spiritual work: to create the best art that I can.

So where does my music fall within the vast universe of the music being played, recorded, and heard in the whole world today? To get things in perspective, let's start with this handy and amazing map (make sure to zoom in) of what people all over the world are listening to right now (according to the internet radio station last.fm, admittedly a limited sample). See that hint of light blue along the upper right of the tangle? That fringe is called "classical music" — something which, like pornography, can't be defined, yet you know it when you hear it (though that's not as true as it used to be). That fringe is, more or less, where you'll find my music (in fact my music is on last.fm), though there are strong hints of the brown (world music) mixed in as well.

None of my views on art are particularly original, and in my business originality is a prime currency. So within that light blue fringe of classical music, where does my music fall? What makes me me? Since other people often have a clearer perspective on us than we do on ourselves, I had to get some help with this. I asked Carson Cooman, a friend and fellow composer, to describe what makes my work distinctive among other composers working today. Here is what he said:

"Nearly all of your work explores the fundamental and primal impulses that draw people to make music — folk music, tradition, legend, history, memory, and the performance process itself.

These preoccupations have found expression in a widely-ranging output: from orchestral works, to music for highland bagpipes, to congregational songs intended to be taught by ear. But it's the same thing that draws connections to early music (in something like your Nunc Dimittis) or to pibroch in the pieces with those obvious connections [for example, Organ Mass], or to the El Salto music / Music by Heart hymnal /your memory piece, which all deal with memory and how we perform music in a very basic/fundamental manner.

And it's this same curiosity which is leading you to feel a connection to the Byzantine project (something that many composers wouldn't really find of interest) or the create the kind of Passion setting you did.

It would be an inaccurate oversimplification to say that your music is Western concert music all inspired by pibroch. There are composers who one could say things like that about — like Osvaldo Golijov, whose music really connects with a single kind of folk tradition (a Latin-Jewish folk music) or somebody like Dinos Constantinides, whose work is a Western concert music working out of Greek folk music.

But, although many of your works have pibroch connections, not all have that as their most obvious influence — like say the Passion According to Mark, which is connected to early American music, or the Nunc Dimittis or St. Nicholas music with Renaissance/Medieval European connections. So, that is why I see a broader thread running through it all — and I think it's the same sort of things that have driven you towards El Salto and folk traditions, exploring a very fundamental kind of musical making experience — which is something that used to be much more a part of music than it tends to be today in the concert music world."

Anyway you, the reader, will be the best judge of all this. Please go and listen!