Through music composition and multimedia creation, I embrace the old and the new, traditional and contemporary, as continua existing on lines rather than endpoints encompassing a finite segment. Since my youth, I have studied and performed folkloric music drawn from a distinct musical and historical culture native to New England, the ancient fife and drum corps community. My involvement in this culture has lead me to compose numerous original folk tunes over the past 35 years and publish them within three volumes of books. While some of these tunes host a traditional flare, most embody a fusion of traditional folk forms with chromatic and dissonant melodies and complex rhythms and meters thereby departing from periodic structures and full cadences. Sometimes my inspiration comes from early music and ethno-musicological studies and other times from the influences of aleatoric jazz and atonalism.
As a saxophonist, an early exposure to the downtown New York scene 1960’s jazz artists connected me to explorations of free improvisation and at the interplay between consonance and dissonance. Throughout my life, I have embarked upon pseudo-meditational approaches to spontaneous composition, and thus in turn, employ varieties of theories and techniques to my writing. Not ascribing to any particular method because I believe that all musical sounds are inherently related, my work may not seem to belong to any specific genre or timeframe. At times, the inspiration for new music comes from time traveling back to other conditions and imagining crossroads not taken.
