I'm a composer and director creating work in that wonderful space between music, opera, theater, and performance art. I've collaborated with singers John Duykers, Janice Felty, Herbert Perry, and Thomasa Eckert, theater artists Leonard Pitt and Rinde Eckert, performance artists Lynn Book and Michael K. Meyers, designers John Boesche and Christiaan Pretorius, composers Paul Dresher, Jarrad Powell and Tony Prabowo, puppeteer I Made Sidia, and poet Goenawan Mohamad among others.
Past and current projects include Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, a performance work based upon the writings of the German media sociologist Friedrich Kittler, Kali, an opera based on the Hindu goddess of death, and Visible Religion, a theater piece that blends Javanese shadow-puppetry and Balinese dance to tell the Balinese tale of Bima Suarga and Dante's Inferno.
I originally studied music composition, first privately with Lou Harrison, then later with David Cope and Gordon Mumma at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and with Gil Evans, Art Lande, Janice Giteck and Anthony Braxton at Cornish College of the Arts. I also studied computer music with John Chowning at Stanford University as well as visual art and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
I've been the recipient of grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, Arts International and Meet the Composer. I was also awarded a Fulbright Fellowship that allowed me to spend a year in Indonesia studying Javanese music and shadow puppetry.
I was previously on the faculty of the California Institute of the Arts and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I also worked for the last ten years as a senior executive for media and education concerns including stints as a senior vice president at both Encyclopaedia Britannica and Kaplan, Inc.. Recently, I returned to Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington, where I'm currently a Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department.
