My work as a composer places beauty at the center of what art is all about. Being attractive or well-designed is not enough; beauty is more than this. And while many things down through the ages have been beautiful in one way or another, most of what might be considered beautiful in the future has not been tried yet.
Born in the United States I grew up in a musical family, regularly performing, composing and producing a large variety of musical works for our community. I was exposed to many genres, including classical, popular and jazz at an early age. In grade school, when I came across and later studied the music of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Ives, Bartok, or Cage, I was fascinated. It seemed so open-minded when compared with the strict conventions and genre-laden thinking of more commercial forms of music.
The creative process is always the same. One takes a radical leap into the design space. Nibbling one’s way forward, one bite at a time, is no substitute for a leap of imagination. Equally important is a flexible critical framework. Before the leap, after the leap, or when comparing one new idea to another, the critical sense needs to constantly evolve.
I moved to Bloomington Indiana where I earned a degree in composition from the Indiana University School of Music – now the Jacobs School of Music. While there I studied with John Eaton, and took masterclasses with Milton Babbitt, Lukas Foss and Leonard Bernstein. Frustrated by the dogmatic thinking of the academy, and convinced that the life of a performer would nurture my writing like nothing else could, I embarked on a career as an operatic bass.
For an interpreter, music is deeply personal. You inhabit the piece, and for a while at least, the piece inhabits you. I think that this keeps my compositions from becoming overly abstract.
For more than two decades, I sang much of the great repertoire written for my voice. The Minnesota Orchestra, Bayreuth Festival, Dresden Music Festival, the State Theater in Karlsruhe and German National Theater in Weimar were among the venues at which I had the privilege to work with conductors like Kazushi Ono and Daniel Barenboim as well as directors like Wolfgang Wagner and Michael Hampe. I stood on stage with singers like Ghena Dimitrova, Vivica Genaux and Roberto Frontali. Every rehearsal was an opportunity for me to listen to my colleagues; to watch them play and work. This also taught me to understand audiences on a visceral level.
What people crave today is beauty, depth of meaning, discussions of moral goodness. Today’s audiences are over-saturated with entertainment. What is most often missing from their lives is a sence of the profound.
When I compose today, I can picture what I am currently working on being played, or sung, or directed or conducted by any number of the thousands of colleagues I have worked with over the years. This extensive experience has given me both an instinct for drama, as well as an expressive sense of the lyric line that is grounded in practice. It afforded me the time in which to develop a unique perspective on harmony, and to gain an intimate knowledge of the orchestra.
As a composer, I am looking for something unconventional, but also beautiful in a new and unexpected way. I like the term Radical Beauty.