I like to imagine that there's a parallel universe, not far from this one, in which I made the other decision in college — to major in music, study conducting and composition, and make a career of it. In that universe, I — or rather, the parallel me — has a proper musical bio that lists my influential teachers and important commissions, and an oeuvre of twenty-one major works and seventy-three others.
But that's not this universe.
The actual me majored in physics and astronomy and has made a career of that. In my spare time I listened to a lot of music, studied a lot of scores, read a few theory books, and gradually figured things out on my own. I'd grown up playing clarinet, learned a little about conducting, and wrote some passable pieces that my high school classmates and I performed. In college and graduate school I played in university ensembles as time and auditions permitted, and slowly taught myself to compose.
In the mid 1980s I had the good luck to fall in with a bunch of struggling young musicians in Berkeley, CA. Together we founded The Composers' Cafeteria, a cooperative/collective where composers doubled as performers to play each other's music. Several former Cafeterians have gone on to greater acclaim, particularly saxophonist, composer, and original Cafeteria guiding force Dan Plonsey. Seven of my small pieces were performed by the Cafeteria: the two miniatures At the End of Spring and A Moment to Myself, the Chamber Concerto for Violin and Winds, and the eclectic-ensemble pieces Twelve Days in Five Minutes, Canonical Transformations, Turtles All the Way Down, and Amorphous Carbon; plus a collaboration with guitarist Randy Porter called Stuffed Carrot or Random Fractures.
Other later performances include The Prince of Venosa Expands to Fill the Observable Universe (Denver, CO, 1990), Twelve Days in Five Minutes and Meditations on the Dusty Archive (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994), and Three-Minute Quartet #1 (Boulder, CO, 2003). In 2010 I was pleased to re-discover my clarinet chops and play in Marin Alsop's first "Rusty Musicians" sessions with the Baltimore Symphony. More recently, I was able to combine some of my love for music and creativity with my day job, conceiving the Lucy Soundscape project.
My wife and I are happy to support the future of symphonic music through the National Orchestral Institute and Festival and its Composition Academy. We've been privileged to become acquainted with a number of accomplished early-career composers, whose energy and originality continue to re-invigorate my own love for composing.