I'm originally from Columbus Ohio is where I grew up and lived there through
high school and then moved to Cleveland for undergraduate and then in New York
for grad school kind of lived all over the place New York Los Angeles Austin
Texas and now I live in Cambridge Massachusetts my first memory of music
education I was really entirely self-taught until
I got to undergrad where I did major in composition but I never played in band
or I was never in you know I never played an instrument at all I never
studied an instrument so I was never in the music programs at my schools
unfortunately so yeah I never really had much exposure to well I had none to
instruments and then everything was just self-taught people always wonder how did
it work out that I never played an instrument that kind of makes no sense
to be a composer and not play an instrument at all the way the story
basically goes is that I have an older sister Lisa who's lovely and she's eight
years older than I am and when she was young my parents did try to encourage
her to play an instrument and we had a piano in the house and they would put
her at the piano and you try to get her to play but she would hate it and cry
and run away from the piano and so when I came along you know several years
later I would choose to go to the piano and I would try to play it but it didn't
sound like the records we had of like Chopin etudes or whatever so I would cry
and I would run away from the piano and they thought oh no we're gonna ruin him
too and so they would you know keep me away from the instrument we were very
poor and lived in areas that didn't have good music programs honestly so there
wasn't really exposure to music in the schools where I went but what did happen
as a result of our economic status which was poor my mother was a flutist and
played in community orchestras and sang in church choirs and every week she
would go to rehearsal with the community orchestra in town and she couldn't
afford a babysitter so I would go with her and I would sit in the back of the
High School Auditorium and I would hear all these rehearsals of
you know whatever the community orchestra was playing that week and I
would go to the concert with her because she couldn't afford a babysitter and
same with the church choirs that she was in and she tried all kinds of different
religions so she sang and all kinds of different church choirs
I was exposed to a lot of different kind of church music that way also when I was
11 my grandfather who owned a music store actually so I you know know about
can you know music stores like pepper going way way back as a you know tiny
child he played oboe and clarinet and flute and he was really into technology
before a lot of people much younger than he was so he got a computer before any
of the rest of us did and he had a music program on his computer called music
instruction set and one day when we were visiting him at his house he said you
want me to show you how to write music and I said sure that sounds really fun
and I was 11 he showed me like alright if you're right gonna write music you
need to know what your time signature is and then you just have to put the right
number of beats in the measure and that's the only rule in music as long as
you put the right number of beats in the measure you did it right and as an 11
year old I could figure out how to make a 4/4 measure or a 3/4 measure 6 8 or
whatever and I thought that was just the coolest thing I'd ever seen and so
finally I had an outlet for like being around music all the time with my mother
and her playing at home all the time and things but now I had some outlet to just
as most as I was surrounded by music but never had anything I could do with it
because I didn't have an instrument to do it with but now I had a computer
which became my instrument I was what at least in the 80s would we
refer to as like a latchkey kid so I would get done with school at you know
2:30 or whatever and I would go home by myself and I would be home alone for
hours every day the rule was I had to go home and stay inside the house and you
know no going out and you know playing or whatever until she was home and knew
that I was okay and what that meant is I spent a lot of time listening to the
radio so I listened to a lot of pop radio in the early early 80s like you
know 1980 1981 82 83 I didn't know it at the time but that music really had a big
impact on the music that I still write today the name of my publishing company
is Asti music which is short for ostinato an ostinato is like a repeated
you know bass line essentially so you know if you listen to you know early
Mike Michael Jackson songs from you know the Thriller album you know didn't
didn't didn't didn't didn't didn't didn't didn't that's an ostinato and
that became a thing that was a part of my style without knowing it it was just
oh and learned to write music because I had listened to so much of that kind of
music that pop influenced when I was really really young and I just got in my
head and then when I started writing you know concert music although to me it
wasn't concert news when I was 11 writing it but that was the music I was
listening to on the radio and mixing that with the music that my mother was
playing a community orchestras and you ended up with this weird hybrid I still
write today you know I didn't ever study an instrument but I did have a
composition teacher kind of it was a friend of my mother's that she had been
friends with since high school who lived in Columbus where we lived and he had
gotten his PhD in music theory from Ohio State University and his job was he was
a cab driver so I don't maybe I should have taken that as like a sign maybe
don't try to be a composer because actually he was a cab driver but so was
Philip Glass at one point so it's you know that's it's not a bad thing at all
so he wasn't really writing much but he had studied composition in theory and so
as a teenager he did give me a few composition lessons and I would play him
what I was writing on the computer and he could give me feedback in things he
never did teach me theory or anything it was really just
when you think about music you know think about how dissonance works and
where you might want to this is awfully you know diatonic or staying in the same
key for a long time you might think about like some ugly notes to just give
it some kind of contrast so that when we stop doing that it becomes a different
thing so just thinking about music that way he helped a lot and we only had
maybe a dozen lessons over the course of my whole you know middle school in high
school but it was still also just cool to hang out with someone who knew how to
write music and knew how fun that could be when I was I guess I would've been 10
or 11 the movie Amadeus came out and so that coincided with me learning how to
write music using music software and I saw that movie in the theater and I
thought it was so cool I thought Mozart seemed really really cool and really fun
at parties and I thought I want to be that guy and so my first piece that I
ever wrote was called lacrimosa
and if you know the story of Mozart especially as told in the movie Amadeus
which is pretty fictionalized but you know he did in fact die writing the
lacrimosa from his Requiem he wrote the first 12 bars and then he died too smart
came along and finish it but some reason I thought that was that seemed really
cool as an 11 year old and so I just thought I'll write one too I don't know
why I was already so morbid as an 11 year old that I thought that's normal
for kids to write a lacrimosa so I did and it was for clarinet violin viola and
double bass clarinet because my grandfather who taught me how to read
music played clarinet and I don't know why the other instruments I don't know
why double bass I didn't know how clarinet worked so I
wrote it on the computer and then I hand copied out the parts onto paper so it
looked like real music and I knew that clarinet was in b-flat but I didn't know
what that meant I just knew that that meant it was off by a step so I wrote
the part out for clarinet off by a step but I accidentally wrote it for clarinet
in D so that's not probably the best instrument that anybody wants to hear
and if that I guess that's probably a real clarinet but so that was my first
piece it was never performed it has still
never been performed all that music I wrote through most of high school was
just for my own learning process on the computer and I wrote a piece for choir
that my high school show choir recorded for me not what like you know we show
choir but they were the best because a a Chamber Singers group really
so they recorded that for me not became one of my audition pieces for for
undergraduate and I also had a piece for violin and piano and a friend of mine
who played piano and also played violin multi-tracked herself recording that for
me so I had that as my other piece for auditions I believe that piece for
violin and piano one movement of it did get played at an Art Museum when I was a
junior or senior in high school and that was the only performance I ever had
anything