I am a Baltimore based beatboxing toy pianist, composer, and performance artist seeking to thrill, yearning to move, and longing to find meaning through the creation of varieties of art throughout my daily life.
Once upon a time, my dear friend, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, wrote that I am the “most quickly enflaming young composer,” but please decide for yourself. While he was a genius and a wonderful human being he was also kinda nuts (in the very absolute best of ways). But YES “most quickly enflaming young composer"! Let's run with that.
Although my musical style is characteristic of one who means well but recently rejoined the Second New School of Next Level Post-Neo-Avant-Garde anti-Futurist Flux-Complexity/Transomni-Modernism my music has still been performed in Sweden by violinist Peter Sheppard Skærved and in Hungary by flutist Gergely Ittzés, as well as in Italy and throughout the Southern and North-Eastern United States.
I teach Music Theory, Basic Musicianship, and Music Composition at the Peabody Preparatory in Baltimore. I endeavor to help each student find how music can fit into their own lives and I do my best to shape my teaching approach to best serve the path that emerges. While teaching, I live to inspire the minds of the talented youth I am honored to work with to consider the largely more relevant issues and personal / philosophical factors surrounding the pursuit of a life in music, including but by no means limited to: the idea of relational aesthetics, the use of music to torture inmates at Guantanamo Bay detention camp, cultures that still publicly destroy musical instruments, and by breaking down the walls built up dividing the music commonly study (of the classical tradition) from the music that much of the western populace long to consume (pop and hip-hop).
My other creative passions include creating electronic dance music, gigging as a professional toy instrumentalist, promoting the values of a compassion-based vegan lifestyle, collaborating with poets, sculptors and experimental artists of most varieties, touring John Cage's 4'33" everywhere I go, and constantly racking my brain to create more ways of promoting peace through my love of music and art in general.
I getted me two Masters of Music degrees from the Peabody Conservatory! One in Music Composition, studying with world-renowned composer Michael Hersch, and one in Music Theory Pedagogy. My past composition study has been with Roger Price at the University of Tulsa where I received a Bachelor's of Music in Piano Performance under the tutelage of Roger Price and Stuart Deaver.
I can be seen performing as a beatboxing toy instrumentalist and performance artist throughout the Baltimore and Washington D.C. areas as well as at St. John's Episcopal Church – Western Run Parish where I serve as organist and music-director.