I am an independent music teacher as well as an active concert pianist, composer, and conductor. In my over twenty years of experience as a music educator, I have taught private piano lessons, composition lessons, and classes in piano, composition, music theory, aural skills, music history, conducting, and music appreciation. My mission in life is to share what I know about music through teaching, performing, and composing. Originally from the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, I have been based in Portland, Oregon, since 2017, and have also lived in Ohio, Austria, Georgia, Wisconsin, and California.

Growing up in the Berkshires, my first job as a musician was being the pianist for my local town church when I was seventeen. Later, during summer vacations home from college, I worked at the Tanglewood Music Festival music store as a sales clerk, selling CDs and music scores, which gave me free lawn passes to the festival’s amazing concerts. I also worked two summers at the Shaker Mountain Performing Arts Festival, an opera festival where I served as music director for the children’s operas and rehearsal pianist for the other productions. These early experiences gave me a taste of the musician’s life. I had been playing the piano since I was four and composing since I was eleven, and there was no question in my mind that I wanted to be a concert pianist and composer. Inspired by my mother, who sang in choirs, and by a local family of New York-based concert pianists who held concerts in the Berkshires every summer, I had realized by the time I was ten that music was my calling in life. My devotion to the piano and composing marked me from a young age as “the music guy”—the student who got up at high school talent shows to play Beethoven (in between the ubiquitous ska cover bands of the late 90s), the person who would skip time with friends and family to practice and compose more—one of the people in my community whose role it was to be a musician.

Now, several university degrees later and making my home in Portland, Oregon, I am embracing my life’s purpose: creating new music, performing existing works, and heeding my wise childhood mentor Yoda’s dying words to “pass on what you have learned.”

Artist

I am an active concert pianist, self-producing solo recitals with innovative and inclusive programming. I created the Modernist Piano Series to bring difficult and neglected avant-garde music from the 20th and 21st centuries to audiences in an open, inviting manner (see Oregon ArtsWatch reviews here and here). I also perform the Music and Meaning Piano Series, where I combine standard classical music in unusual ways to explore how and why this music still means something to us in the 21st century. As an ensemble pianist, I perform with the Oregon Symphony, 45th Parallel, ChatterPDX, Fear No Music’s Young Composers Project, and other regional musical organizations. I am also a music director and pianist for New Wave Opera.

As a composer, my music has been performed by Fear No Music; the Oregon-based Delgani String Quartet; Cascadia Composers; Lewis and Clark College’s Friends of Rain ensemble; the percussion ensemble red fish blue fish; duo Aurora Borealis; Diagenesis Duo; Palimpsest; and individual performers Lisa Neher, Monica Ohuchi, Nancy Ives, Lucia Atkinson, Kyle Adam Blair, Chris Clarino, Justin Murphy-Mancini, Takae Ohnishi, and others. My works include an opera, orchestral works, chamber music, vocal music, and solo works. My belief that human beings are but a small part of the vastness of the cosmos, and that humanity will act with more kindness and wisdom when we step outside of our own anxiety-driven lives to experience other ways of existing, is what drives my composing. As such, my pieces especially explore the power of music to shape our experiences of time, with a particular interest in evoking the many temporalities of the natural world—subatomic, geologic, animalistic, and astronomical.

Service

I am the President-Elect of the East Portland district of the Oregon Music Teachers Association (OMTA). I am a board member of Portland’s New Wave Opera, where I am also a resident composer, conductor, and pianist. I frequently give lectures to OMTA districts around Oregon on piano technique, pedagogy, musical meaning and narrative theory, and music history. I am a member of Cascadia Composers, where my music is regularly performed on their concerts; I also serve as an adjudicator for Cascadia Composers’ calls for scores.

I hold a Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) in Piano Performance from UC San Diego, a PhD in Music Composition from UC San Diego, and a B.Mus. from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where I double-majored in Piano and Composition with minors in Music Theory and Music History.

I share my home in southeast Portland, nestled up to Powell Butte Nature Park, with my wife and three pet rats—Violet, Theodora, and Petra. When I’m not playing the piano or composing, you can find me cooking, baking bread and pastries, hiking, reading modernist and postmodernist novels and poetry, watching movies, camping, going wine tasting with my wife, or painting my house in bold, beautiful colors.

To see my résumé, click here.