Brief Music Biography
I think I decided to become a musician the day, when I was four, that my much older brother came home with a black and gold Harmony archtop electric guitar and a small tube amp and proceeded to play "House of the Rising Sun" on it in what I remember as warm and sensuous tones. I didn't know it at the time, but that's all it took to plant the seed. I remember asking him if he'd still be using it by the year 2000 (this was 1966) and my disappointment when he said "probably". After he died in Vietnam in 1972 my sister-in-law Donna gave me the guitar and amp. Somehow, music and the melancholy I carried for years after his death have been bound together ever since.
Around that time, I moved to Montgomery, Alabama, next door to a fantastic young drummer only a year older than I (eleven at the time). I started playing in a rock band with him almost immediately, playing regularly for pay at fourteen, and have been in countless bands of one kind or another, anything from roots rock to metal, ever since. In most of these bands I've played bass and sung, since that seemed to be an easy way to both get a gig and to tighten the band sound, especially in the presence of a decent drummer. I was particularly a fan of progressive music of the 1970's, Deep Purple, Yes, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Mahavishnu Orchestra and, of course, The Beatles in their more adventurous, later efforts. Paul McCartney and Chris Squire were especially important influences since their bass lines were melodic and interestingly contrapuntal, and their styles and tastes brought me in touch with classical music, which, growing up as I did in the hinterlands of Alabama, I didn't know about until quite late (I didn't hear a live orchestra until age eighteen).
At fifteen, I discovered Igor Stravinsky's Petrushka in my grandmother's record collection, the CBS Symphony recording conducted by the composer. The exotic sounds of that work and many others in her possession, plus my discovery that it was possible, in theory anyway, to make one's living as a composer steered me gradually into classical music, an area where I've spent most of my adult life working and studying. I started listening, studying scores and luckily found one Harald Rohlig, a renowned organist who had settled in Montgomery after World War Two. He mentored me in piano, theory, composition and life in general. He was at one time the apprentice to the organist of the Bremen Cathedral, a post he would have inherited. But he was recruited to the Nazi Youth, became a soldier, spent time in a French POW camp and, once discovering what the Nazis had been up to, swore to leave Europe, taking the first organ job he could get. It was in Linden, Alabama (he'd never seen nor heard of a Hammond organ or a Southern Baptist at the time) but before long he got the post as cathedral organist at St. John's in Montgomery, where he was when I found him. I started composing pieces for piano and sketching things that I imagined would be great orchestra works almost immediately.
I left high school a year early, majoring in music composition in college, eventually earning degrees in it from The University of Arizona (BM) and The Eastman School of Music (MM and PhD). That helped land me a job at Penn State University, where I've been since 1994 and am an Associate Professor, teaching composition, electronic music and theory. I was clear to me early on (by 1980) that making a living and raising a family as a rock musician would be a risky and painful path for me and the attraction of both the intellectual ideals and potential security of academia kept me from pursuing a career as a songwriter seriously for a long time. Meanwhile, the desire to write and perform my own music as a singer and guitarist never left, and as soon as I earned tenure, I took a sabbatical leave to compose the songs I'm performing and recording now. While I'll go back to writing concert music for classical media before too long, I'm planning on spending the present making, performing and composing songs.
