Using inherited aesthetic categories in the attempt to define oneself, and what one “does”, is usually bound to disappoint. I remember early on as an undergraduate (not exactly a fresh memory any more) feeling vexatiously compelled to reconcile the fact that I had experienced, with commensurate rapture (and therefore somewhat guiltily), two seemingly incongruous piano concerts: one that featured the Preludes and Etudes of Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, and the other works of K. Stockhausen (Klavierstuck V-X as I recall) and L. Berio (Sequenza IV). Occurring as they did within a day or two of each other, the two concerts sent my beliefs, imagination and emotions reeling, especially in the way the elements of these sharply contrasting aesthetic worlds intermingled and collided in my mind. The question I ask now, as I contemplate that time in my life, is: what exactly was it that made me feel so intensely obligated to justify and rationalize the immense enjoyment I derived from these disparate and, arguably, divergent compositional languages?

As a composer, song-writer, arranger and orchestrator, I’m interested not so much in obliterating or transgressing boundaries as I am in exploring and activating the creative tension along the demarcation lines of genre, school and style. My desire is for this process to become less and less self-conscious even as I continue to develop and evolve in expressing my “self”, paradoxical as this ambition may be. As I write this it occurs to me that it might not be so important to figure out why I felt so uncomfortable in my dual pleasures in both 20th century Late Romantic and Serial music as a typically self-absorbed eighteen year-old. For while it might be instructive to investigate the possible reasons for my youthful angst (the exhaustively discussed binaries of progress versus tradition, structure versus intuition, pleasing mom and dad versus seeing god), I now realize how these feelings are, mostly, a memory of feelings that I must consciously recreate in order to consider. It could be that simply having to scramble to make a living has had its way of resolving (or rather, dissolving) largely academic arguments. It could also be that the conflicts that seemed so urgently in need of resolving then have simply been replaced by newer, successive ones. But perhaps more truthfully, conflicts (artistic or otherwise) have become something I have gradually learned to accept as part of life; something to learn to live with and learn from as opposed to fix. Composition for me, at its most honest, is the ultimate mode of living with and learning from without fixing; simultaneously humoring and honoring the distinctions and differences that give life its movement and music.