I am a writer, resilience professional, and composer. My creative work explores music, nature, memory, and time.
Early Immersion
My education began in December of 1970, six months before I was born on the Upper West Side of NYC. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Stravinsky were my playmates in the womb. My mother curated an in-utero playlist, sharing her favorite music by placing headphones on her belly.
My mother was my first teacher. We played the recorder together when I was four and went to hundreds of concerts all over Boston, where I grew up. We went to Symphony Hall and Tanglewood to see the Boston Symphony; we heard music at Pickman Hall, Paine Hall, Jordan Hall, and many other small venues. We listened to Morning Pro Musica, the classical show on WGBH radio. When I was five, we visited New York to see Baryshnikov perform Stravinsky’s Petrushka with American Ballet Theatre. That performance left a deep impression on me.
Because I was steeping in it, music came naturally to me as a child. I started violin lessons at eight. At eleven, I attended the New England Conservatory of Music’s extension school for theory, composition, and piano lessons. Extension school was held on Saturday mornings, so I grieved the breakup with Saturday morning cartoons.
I attended the Commonwealth School, a small high school in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood with an exceptional music program. It was there that I discovered that I loved singing, became consumed by jazz and fusion, and first realized that I was a composer. A few of my first compositions were for voice, settings of texts by Ovid and Wordsworth. I was drawn to poetry. Because music brought me so much joy and I had developed a considerable body of work, in my senior year, I was honored to receive the Harvard Musical Association’s Achievement Award.
Music and Poetry
As an undergrad at Brandeis University, my artistic path developed two distinct strands: one of sound, the other of words. I discovered electronic music, working with Eric Chasalow on a 1960s Buchla modular synthesizer, and learned to splice analog tape during an internship at WGBH radio. In 1992, I scored a short film that premiered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the same time, I found a love and affinity for the sounds and rhythms of poetry in the creative writing classes of poet-in-residence Olga Broumas. That deep dive into language led to my first publication in Gordon Lish’s journal, The Quarterly, in 1992.
After graduating from Brandeis in 1993, I moved to England to study with composer Michael Finnissy at the University of Sussex, earning my master’s degree in music composition in 1995. My time in England was focused on learning to trust my musical instincts and creative voice. I was lucky to stay in the home of Jonathan Harvey, on the edge of the Downs; living in that beautiful, verdant landscape was peaceful and inspiring, plus I got to take care of his very sweet Jack Russell named Sappho. I would often take the train from the village of Lewes up to London to drink too much coffee with choreographer Joseph Houseal, who was studying at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire. Joseph later introduced me to Francis Mason, a dance critic and close friend of Balanchine and Martha Graham, who became my mentor in NYC.
Waist Deep
In 1996, I returned to New York City to make my way as a composer. I took up residence near Ozzie’s Coffee on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, where I spent too much money on caffe mochas so that I could meet my wife, who worked behind the counter.
Fueled by caffeine and inspired by the dancers and actors who lived on the stage, I spent the next few years immersed in the dirty underbelly of the downtown avant-garde dance and theater worlds. I scored fifteen productions from 1997 to 2000, including two Richard Foreman plays at the Foreman Fest at Todo Con Nada, a production of Euripides’ The Trojan Women at the Westside Rep, and collaborations with choreographers like Doug Elkins, Ben Munisteri, and Tanya Kane-Parry. These collaborations were performed all over NYC, from the Ohio Theater to The Joyce, to the American Living Room Festival, across the pond to Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, and back to Dance Theater Workshop, PS 122, and Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church.
Space for Art, Time for Family
In 2001, I stepped away from the intense pace of the New York scene to build something different. I founded and ran Evos Arts in Lowell, Massachusetts—a multimedia arts center, gallery, live music venue, and bar designed to give local and regional artists a sanctuary to experiment and connect. For four years, we hosted everything from sound installations and independent films to live music and giant art parties hosting the artwork of dozens of artists and attended by hundreds of guests over the course of a day.
Running a busy community art space didn’t mean pausing my own creative output. I scored an award-winning television commercial for Ogilvy/TIAA-CREF in 2002 which featured Kurt Vonnegut. In 2003, I collaborated with Guggenheim recipient Leigh Witchel on my first ballet score written for string quartet. The New Rome premiered at the Theater of the Riverside Church, blocks from the hospital where I was born.
The summer of 2005 marked a transition for me. My collaboration with Ben Munisteri received a New England Foundation for the Arts/National Dance Project production grant. This honor came with a residency at Jacob’s Pillow in the Berkshires. My wife was pregnant with our first child when I performed the score live on the stage of the original Doris Duke Studio Theatre.
In 2007, with a two-year-old sitting in my lap, I scored a documentary film that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. That same year, my mentor Francis Mason, the editor of Ballet Review, published my essay “The Collaborative Spiral,” about my process of working with choreographers.
My deepest and longest collaboration was with choreographer Murray Spalding. I served as her composer-in-residence from 1998 until her death in 2010 from ovarian cancer. In May of 2011, we presented Movement Mandala XIII in her honor at St. Mark’s Church, and Murray’s papers, along with my music, were archived in the permanent collection of the New York Public Library, Jerome Robbins Dance Division. With Murray’s passing, and a second child in my lap, my musical life came to a natural rest.
Transition to Words
I shifted my professional focus to a more traditional career to support my family. I began working for Harvard University in building operations, first as a support to the people I knew best, the music department community, and then slowly grew to manage most of the Arts & Humanities buildings around Harvard Yard. My love for words and learning had me taking classes at Harvard’s Extension School. I took a poetry class with Stephanie Burt and eventually enrolled in the master’s program in creative writing and literature. I earned my degree in May 2025.
My thesis was my completed debut manuscript, New Age, a memoir exploring my 1980s childhood shaped by my late mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis, and how her will to live transformed our lives into a traumatic and magical adventure where every moment was sacred.
I currently live in Cambridge with my wife, children, two cats, and a very good dog. I manage mission continuity for Harvard University and am actively preparing my memoir for publication.