About
Welcome! I'm a composer, pianist, and music teacher. My first love of music was through pro wrestling entrance music. Seeing my favorite wrestlers make grand entrances accompanied to sounds of an orchestra, I was convinced they composed the music. I began recording myself playing piano pieces, giving mock interviews and short analyses to the camera, mimicking wrestlers I'd heard. Here's me when I was 9:
"...but I'll be doing the whole symphony by myself..."
I started writing music about my favorite animals. I also made arrangements of music I liked but didn't have the sheet music: classical, movie scores, TV shows, gangsta rap songs, video game soundtracks, etc. I often asked teachers if I could write songs for projects/assignments and perform in class. My favorite composers to play were Prokofiev and late Beethoven. I lost some use of my hands as an adult and had to relearn piano with limited fingers. I've been told my playing sounds odd and identifiable.
I studied music at North Carolina School of the Arts (high school), UNC-Chapel Hill (BM), Duke (PhD). I have fellowships at Bang on a Can and Yale's Norfolk Festival. I've been fortunate along the way to win some awards, including 2 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards. My doctoral dissertation was a pro wrestling ballet/piano concerto filmed with action figures, an attempt to form a soundtrack for the entire spectacle that made me love music in the first place.
Press play to hear "Hulking up, chair shot," an excerpt from Barbeque Man Unleashed
I developed schizoaffective disorder, a combination of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, when I was 19 and speak publicly about it, using music and humor to try to decrease the stigma of mental illness. My one man band was The Shitty Titanic, but now I put my name on it. I write music for The Me2/ Orchestra, the world's first orchestra for people with mental illness.
Recent projects include multimedia stuff featuring musicians with severe mental illness, Etudes for piano/vocalist/rapper (me) in stacked time signatures, songs about Saturday morning impromptu trips to bird fairs, mental illness and caretaking, Jurassic Park alternate histories, scores for microscopic science footage, podcasts, films, music to be performed by people with developmental disabilities, orchestral, music for children, etc.
Years ago I began digitally altering original isolated vocals of popular songs and remixing them into other genres. I made an album of orchestral remixes, American Nachos. Here are a few: One is Journey's Any Way You Want It with a variation from Bach's Goldberg Variations /additional orchestration. Another is a major key orchestral version of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit
Wie du Willst (Journey's Any Way You Want It/ and Bach's Goldberg Variations:1st var.) In 3/4
Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit
(Remix for Orchestra) - Paul Swartzel