On my seventh birthday, in inner-suburban New Jersey, I was presented with my aunt’s upright player piano, and was soon provided by a loving parent with weekly lessons. Almost immediately I began filling music notebooks with ideas.

A stroke of fate in the form of conductor Laszlo Halasz saved me from a life in a science laboratory when he awarded me his personal scholarship to attend the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. There my teachers included Konrad Wolff for piano, Maestro Halasz for orchestral conducting, Stefans Grové for theory, Earle Brown for composition and Berl Senofsky for chamber music. At graduation I was awarded the Alice Wentz prize for excellence in piano.

After completing a master’s degree at Peabody I moved to Washington, D.C., where I played auxiliary keyboard parts with the National Symphony Orchestra under Antal Dorati and chamber music with members of the orchestra. Four of my earliest choral works, including two commissions, had their first performances by the Washington National Cathedral Choir. Intense curiosity about England caused me to move there and I stayed for nine years. I sang with the cathedral choirs of Lichfield, Canterbury and St.Paul’s, London, played concertos of Beethoven

and Ravel with the Canterbury Festival Orchestra and recitals hither and yon. I composed twenty works for Canterbury Cathedral, most of them published by Oxford University Press and the Royal School of Church Music. Several of them are now staples of the Anglican choral repertoire, receiving regular broadcast performances on the BBC. I studied collaborative piano performance at the Britten-Pears School at Snape and at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. I was a member of the Academy Chorus of St. Martin-in-the-Fields on several European tours and on the music track of the film Amadeus, and played harpsichord continuo in Handel’s Messiah with that orchestra.

Returning to the states, I accompanied the lessons of storied voice teachers and assistant-conducted with several regional opera companies. This led eventually to engagement with the New York City Opera, where I am an assistant chorus master, a stage orchestra conductor and the director of the children’s chorus. I perform chamber music at every opportunity in New York venues such as Merkin Concert Hall and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall.

While I continue to compose in the choral medium, my attention has turned more to instrumental works. These include commissioned virtuosic essays for cello and for flute, as well as a full-scale symphony with children’s voices, commissioned by the Fairfield Orchestra and premiered in Carnegie Hall.