About my Music

             I attempt to write music that reflects my background in jazz and love of orchestral and choral music and pushes forward towards a point in time when—while I may or may not attain it to my own complete satisfaction—I can express my different musical and personal intentions effectively and with a mix of concision and variety. In addition to my variety of musical influences, in which Duke Ellington, Gil Evans, Ligeti, and Bartok hold prominent positions, I am deeply interested in the psychology of social and cultural changes as they pertain to subsets of a society and to individuals. I think that my music reflects this, with each piece approaching some aspect in its own way.

In addition, I am very much interested in the way time is perceived. Much of my music is written with the intention of causing listeners to question their personal understandings of time. I usually consider this in three parts: time within the piece, time for the performer, and time for the listener. These three perceptive frames allow the piece to be felt as a variety of temporal experiences, subject to each individual and their background. My draw to conducting stems from this as well. I’m perpetually captivated with the way that time moves and ways emotion and meaning become heightened in a performance setting, bringing everyone in the room together in one unified environment of communication and experience.