AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

I am told that I was born on July 5th, 1955 in Washington, D.C., but I have no recollection of the event. My father, a lawyer and a native New Yorker, was an advisor to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. My mother was also a New Yorker, and worked as a kindergarten teacher. Growing up in the woods of northern Virginia, and later in the academic groves of Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was a bookish child, but also enjoyed other activities, such as baseball, swimming, and smoking pot.

Although not a musical prodigy, I was, from an early age, an ardent music lover. At the age of eleven I started to play the guitar. My strongest early affinities were with the music of (in alphabetic order): Bach, Beethoven, the blues, Miles Davis, John Dowland, flamenco, folksong, Gershwin, Tom Lehrer, Motown, Ravel, the Rolling Stones, Satie, Sor, and Stravinsky.

At fifteen I moved to New York and attended Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn. There I began lessons in classical guitar, piano and theory, and wrote my first notated compositions. In 1972, I went to Harvard where I majored in music. After finishing my sophomore year, I spent two years in Paris where I studied guitar at the Ecole Normale de Musique, and took private lessons with Nadia Boulanger. She was eighty-six and I was nineteen when we met. Despite the difference in age, we got along fairly well, and I learned the fundamentals of harmony from her.

After finishing my degree in 1977, I took a job teaching music at the American School of Tangier, and remained in Morocco for the next four years, teaching, composing, performing, and hanging out with the expatriate American writer Paul Bowles. He became a mentor to me and encouraged my composing and my interest in Moroccan music. This latter interest would lead to my Ph. D. dissertation, The Music of the Jilala: A Repertoire of Spirits.

Returning to New York, I enrolled in the graduate program in music at City College where I studied composition with David Del Tredici, Lester Trimble, and Ned Rorem. I then went on to the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where I received a doctorate in music in 1991.

In the eighties and nineties I discovered that my musical, political and literary interests could be combined in various ways. Some projects I worked on were: The Constitution: A Secular Oratorio, a setting of large portions of the U.S. Constitution, April 15th Blues, a musical theater piece about taxes, Clarence & Anita, a documentary opera based on the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, and a series of song cycles on poems by American poets. This variety of subject matter suits me; and I continue to explore both familiar and unconventional musical territory.

I am a founding member and director of Friends and Enemies of New Music, an organization that has been presenting concerts of contemporary music in New York since 1989. In 1998 I was appointed professor of music at the Bronx Community College of the City University of New York. I also continue to perform from time to time as a solo guitarist, accompanist, and singer of my own songs. Since the nineties I have worked as a lyricist as well as a composer, and have written many songs and several theater works in that capacity.

Little by little I have amassed a large body of compositions, including operas, musical theater works, film scores, chamber music, and many songs. I am neither a revolutionary nor a reactionary. My style is a personal homage to music I have known and loved—from nursery rhymes to North African rhythms, from rhythm & blues songs to Renaissance & Baroque dances—it is a logical development of my early musical affinities. If my music tends to be, in the words of the New York Times' Alan Kozinn, "wildly eclectic," it is so because of my belief that one should write what one hears, wherever that may lead.