ABOUT

I grew up in Brookfield, Wisconsin, the son of immigrants. My first music lessons were on the piano, when I was 4. I switched to cello at age 8. When I was a junior in high school, I managed to squeak my way into the cello section of the Wisconsin Honors Orchestra, when my life changed playing in the last movement of Sibelius' Symphony No. 2.

I went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a cello scholarship. Although I was not a music major (I majored in bacteriology), I started taking music much more seriously during my time in Madison. I studied cello and chamber music with Parry Karp and tried to broaden my knowledge of the orchestral repertoire as much as possible (this was before YouTube and Spotify). During the summers I studied composition privately with Ron Foster (a student of Corigliano) at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music.

After completing my undergrad I moved to Seattle to pursue a PhD in pathobiology. Outside of my studies I composed as much as possible; during this time my Symphony No. 1 was commissioned and premiered by the Puget Sound Symphony Orchestra. I moved to Helsinki, Finland on a Fulbright scholarship in 2007 and have been living in Finland ever since.

I consider myself a traditionalist. In my compositions, I am searching for a balance between consonance and dissonance, tonality and atonality, tension and release, darkness and light, and despair and hope. Perhaps these things are clichés, but perhaps these things are clichés for good reason. I seek to communicate with my own unique voice, but at the same time I have no intention of creating a new language.