About Me
I am a percussionist and composer based in NYC. My music-making is inspired by many sources, beginning with a simple fascination for acoustic phenomena and embracing American experimentalism, Balinese Gamelan, and Karnatic music.I began my musical life at age 5 as a violinist, but I was already playing pots and pans in the kitchen. When I joined the school band a few years later I decided to play drums, thinking it would be easy and that I would only have to carry around drumsticks - a serendipitous choice based on erroneous logic. Soon I quit the violin and began playing and moving large instruments all the time. I found various ways to combine my interests during my studies at Rice, Yale, and Rotterdam, learning cornerstones of the repertoire while finding my voice as a composer and performer. Since then I have focused on playing my music and works by people with whom I feel a strong musical kinship, while drifting through Vermont, Boston, and Amsterdam (where I also studied Karnatic rhythm and microtonality), before settling in Brooklyn.With cellist Ha-Yang Kim I co-founded Odd Appetite , an electroacoustic duo performing our own works and select commissions across North America, Europe, and Asia. I am also a founder of Non Sequitur, a mixed sextet presenting classics of the avant-garde alongside theatric and non-Western music. While in Boston I began playing new and traditional Balinese music with Gamelan Galak-Tika, making my solo debut at Carnegie Hall with the gamelan and Odd Appetite and having the incredible experience of touring Bali the following summer. I am also a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), performing regularly with them and also writing pieces for their phenomenal musicians. Through these activities and other projects I have also been fortunate to work, play, and record with many wonderful musicians and composers including Evan Ziporyn, Christian Wolff, Larry Polansky, Lee Hyla, and others.In playing and composing I am drawn to make music that revels in sound and that has a narrative and visceral trajectory. In 2002 I wrote a series of pieces using microphones and simple computer processing to magnify the subtle complexities of sounds and to reveal the inherent characters of ordinary objects and instruments. Three of these pieces (including Diving Bell, a winner of the ISCM Composers Competition) are on my new cd, Memory Spaces. The disc has a gorgeous cover drawn by my father, an architect and a profound influence on how I see and hear nature.I can also be heard on releases from Tzadik, New Albion, Cold Blue, Centaur, Bridge, and Karnatic Lab Records, and online at NPR's Art of the States . My acoustic music is published by Frog Peak Music .As a teacher I also seek to combine the technical and creative aspects of being a musician, encouraging my students to both write and play music. While on the faculty of Dartmouth and Franklin Pierce Colleges I led ensembles in which students performed their own pieces. I have also worked with young composers as an artist in residence at Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Brandeis, Longy, UMass, and at the Walden School, an inspiring summer program in New Hampshire for composers age 12-18.
